Item — HN Reader

Interesting!

Yes, there's probably a market for vibe-coded software, but if there is, then there's also a market for fixing other companies' vibe-coded mistakes...

Phrased another way, you pay company A to vibe-code some software or extra software features for you, then you subsequently pay company B -- to fix company A's vibe-coded mistakes!

(Hey, look on the bright side! It's more money for taxes, GDP, employment ("jobs jobs jobs!"), and the circular Internet economy! :-) )

2 comments

I'm sometimes puzzled by the way people use "circular" to describe an economic system pejoratively. (Not to suggest you are.) Seems like any worthwhile economic system is ultimately cyclical. Pulling resources into the loop is just a bonus....

Related "income tax when I earn the money, sales tax when I spend the money, taxes on my investment returns, it never ends!"

Yes indeed, because macroeconomics is ultimately a giant circle!

The problem with real economics is that it isn't, but since economists told themselves that it is, they have no interest in making it so.

Some of this is also going to die out, if the prediction of price increases for LLM tools and tokens holds true. In that case a lot of this software essentially becomes abandonware overnight because the actual maintainer was Claude or Codex.

If you're a reasonably talented developers, I think there will be money to be made picking up projects left behind by coding agents. Maybe you'll use AI tools to do this, maybe you charge to migrate to other platforms and maybe you are paid to simply do bugfixes.