> did we miss an opportunity here as programmers to provide simpler tools for people to build simple applications for themselves?
Not really? To someone who doesn't care about software, software is a means to an end of actually doing something, and everything between idea <> execution of value is basically overhead. This has always been true and the overhead is getting carved further and further down over time.
> Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small businesses and neighbors and stuff?
You don't need all of this. You can basically just download Cursor, the Claude app, Claude code, opencode, whatever today and run something locally. I do think "deployment and productionization" is a bit of a gap but stuff like Replit or even Vercel + Supabase is pretty far along towards agents just being able to do most of infra for you for anything small scale, or at least tell you the buttons to press to hook things up.
> Did spreadsheets, embedded databases, and visual form builders stop working or are lacking in some way?
Pretty much all the LLM/agent products are obviously way ahead of form builders at this point. Take Retool for example, you could spend minutes to hours plugging together "programming-lite" concepts. A single prompt and a few minutes, and maybe 1-2 back and forths can basically get you to the same place with probably less overall jank in a lot of situations. Form-builder stuff is totally dead outside of maybe being an escape-hatch for some LLM situations, or letting users do higher-level scaffolding, but even then I think stuff like Cursor's "select the part of the app you want to change and prompt" is going to be a better UX.
> maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack
I think you are viewing this from the "tech" angle rather than the deliver value to the end user angle. The tech stack can be arbitrarily complex as long as it works to reduce end user friction and provide value with as much ease as possible. This might as well be the core idea of all consumer tech.
I think your core theses are basically "people care about the underlying tech" and "people want to learn programming or programming-adjacent" and those are both wrong for the vast vast majority of people.
I think if you believe this I'd recommend trying it yourself.
I've done this blinded with colas, and it's pretty easy to tell the difference between Coke, Diet Coke, Coke Zero, Pepsi, and Diet Pepsi. You might not know which is which without some history drinking them, but they all taste very distinct by themselves.
Really disagree that these are indistinguishable parity products, or that most people would not be obviously able to tell the difference between them.
I'll say that the 'Zero' products have gotten quite good. Not indistinguishable, but closer than I expected. On a couple of occasions I've inadvertently purchased real Dr Pepper instead of Dr Pepper Zero and not realized I was drinking the real thing. That's high praise for the Zero version (notably, the Diet version of Dr Pepper, while it has a following of its own, is extremely unlike real Dr Pepper).
I don't know but I recently drank coca cola which my brother ordered and then after a few days, I decided to drink diet coca cola because I was discussing it with my brother and he mentioned that diet and normal coke are the same price and I started wondering if there are negative effects to normal coke and not much for diet coke and they both are same price and I am drinking it for the taste, then diet coke makes the most sense so I decided to order it
Not sure if its just me though but after drinking both diet coke and normal coke the taste gap between diet coke and normal coke felt really huge to me.
You mention about Dr pepper and how strikingly similar Dr Pepper zero is, what are some other drinks which have a genuinely similar.
But now realizing this, I think that there is a difference between diet, zero and normal variants, this is the first time I am discovering this. Time to drink coke zero and coke but the winters are really cold so I might have to wait this winter season
Can confirm, could never stand the taste of Diet Coke, but Coke Zero tastes pretty close to the original to me! To the point that I pretty much never drink regular Coke anymore, if Coke Zero is available. There's basically no downside to going with Zero, imo. And the upside of no calories is pretty great.
That’s because Diet Coke is not based on classic Coke. It’s based on new coke, it should really be called diet new coke. Coke Zero is based on Coca Cola classic.
If Diet Coke has a bitter taste to you (like it does to me) you may have a genetic mutation that allows aspartame to bind to both sweet and bitter taste receptors (as I understand it). For most people it only binds to sweet receptors.
Although to be fair, the last time I had a diet coke, I was, dunno, maybe 10? So like 20 years ago at this point. So maybe if I had some now, I'd have a different opinion. But I don't think diet coke is even sold here in Brazil anymore, It's been years since I last saw one. I was actually not aware that it was still sold in the US!
> You mention about Dr pepper and how strikingly similar Dr Pepper zero is, what are some other drinks which have a genuinely similar.
Any of the Zero variants are worth a try, in my experience. Historically I choose Coke, and for quite a while I drank Coke Zero, which is pretty good. More recently in the last year or so I've fixated on Pepsi Zero, even though I've never really been a Pepsi fan otherwise. I also like Dr Pepper Zero, as I mentioned in my first post. I've never really liked any of the diet versions of soda, they just tasted too different to me.
That's interesting. I'll need to find some Dr Pepper Zero and try it. My history of Dr Pepper and of diet sodas goes like this.
1. I only drank non-diet sodas. Pepsi was my favorite, Dr Pepper or root beer was the runner up at restaurants the had Coke (which I hate) rather than Pepsi.
2. At some point I started trying to reduce the percent of my calories that came from carbs. I was able to continue drinking non-diet soda and meet my goal but only because (1) I usually only drank a small glass with each meal, and (2) I was able to reduce carbs from other things enough to leave room for the soda.
3. That reducing from other things enough to leave room for the soda got annoying, so I made myself drink diet sodas for a few days. I quickly got used to Diet Dr Pepper and started to enjoy it. Diet Pepsi became OK, but Diet Dr Pepper was better. Once this switch was made and I didn't need to make room for soda carbs I could stick to my carb goal pretty easily.
4. After a few years of that, I had oral surgery. They advised me to not drink carbonated beverages for a week or so afterwards, so I drank water. I was actually fine with that so after two weeks I finished off the 2L bottles of Diet Dr Pepper in my fridge and then just drank water at home for the next few years. I would still have a Diet Dr Pepper or a Diet Pepsi or Pepsi Zero or Diet root beer on the few occasions I ate out.
If I ate out at a place that did not those I would sometimes get a non-diet Dr Pepper or Pepsi and it was terrible. It seemed too sweet. It tasted like someone had mixed some thick sweetener into it so not only was the flavor off the feel of the drink was wrong.
It was bad enough that I would no longer eat out at those places. I'd only get food to go from there.
So now I'm really curious if Dr Pepper Zero will taste good to me or not. If my problem with regular Dr Pepper is just due to the sugar I should probably be OK with Dr Pepper Zero. But if what I really now dislike is non-diet Dr Pepper's flavor it sounds like I'll also dislike Dr Pepper Zero.
I can't drink normal coke, it disgusts me, leaves an unpleasant sensation on my teeth, probably the sugar, but love the zero. It's also zero cal, which is a huge bonus.
Could be wrong but I heard phosphoric acid is in similar amounts in all of them for the unusual reason that this inorganic acid actually enhances (brings out) the cola flavor. Seems this doesn't happen with normal carboxylic food acids, malic, citric, tartaric, etc.
It's an odd combination, I think colas are the only instance where a mineral acid is used synergistically with another ingredient to enhance flavor.
Someone with greater knowledge may wish to expand on this.
Neopets was also my first introduction to any sort of programming. Customizing your shop and guild pages with basic HTML and CSS was the first programming I ever did. I remember fondly adding MIDI music snippets as well that you could copy-paste in, all to increase the curb-appeal of your shop so you could sell your omelettes.
It was and is a life saver. Our django app suffered from runaway memory leaks (quite a story). We were not able to track down the root cause exactly. There are numerous, similar issues with uvicorn or other webservers. Granian contained these problems. Multi process management is also reliable.
memray and later a custom request wrapper that output python gc statistics.
Our main candidates for the leak are: grpc, asgi server itself, psycopg, django channels. All leaked to some degree. Alas, it did not became clear what caused the runaway leak at 30 MB/s. Capturing flamegraphs just before OOM kills would require some more engineering.
Granian contained these situations until upgradings later that year made the system more stable to begin with.
We've seen a lot of people have success with the mypy plugin + django-stubs.
Full out-of-the-box support is being actively worked on in Pyrefly: we will have specialized django enum support in the next release and we expect real experimental support by the end of the year. At that time we'll likely post a blog post to announce it [here](https://pyrefly.org/blog/).
Just started trying ty with django-types. I got the models typed in a day or so. Still wading through the other 200+ errors in my codebase. But it's fast at least.
Yeah the Django typing situation is a bit sad. It's obvious that if Django wants to scale to larger teams types would help a lot, especially around getting things like string-field-named annotated query fields onto objects typechecking.
Well, they added an experimental JIT so that is one step closer to PyPy? Though would assume the trajectory is build a new JIT vs. merge in PyPy, but hopefully people learned a lot from PyPy.
Hey, Suno SWE here — I realize this wording might be slightly ambiguous, but you do not need to maintain a perpetual license to have commercial rights. That blurb is saying that songs created while you are subscribed are granted commercial use rights.
> If you made your songs while subscribed to a Pro or Premier plan, those songs are covered by a commercial use license.
Not really? To someone who doesn't care about software, software is a means to an end of actually doing something, and everything between idea <> execution of value is basically overhead. This has always been true and the overhead is getting carved further and further down over time.
> Since when did "average" people have time to set up a CI pipeline, agents, MCPs, and all the rest needed to get vibe coded apps to work become the "simple" way for non-programmers to use computers to mush some data together for their small businesses and neighbors and stuff?
You don't need all of this. You can basically just download Cursor, the Claude app, Claude code, opencode, whatever today and run something locally. I do think "deployment and productionization" is a bit of a gap but stuff like Replit or even Vercel + Supabase is pretty far along towards agents just being able to do most of infra for you for anything small scale, or at least tell you the buttons to press to hook things up.
> Did spreadsheets, embedded databases, and visual form builders stop working or are lacking in some way?
Pretty much all the LLM/agent products are obviously way ahead of form builders at this point. Take Retool for example, you could spend minutes to hours plugging together "programming-lite" concepts. A single prompt and a few minutes, and maybe 1-2 back and forths can basically get you to the same place with probably less overall jank in a lot of situations. Form-builder stuff is totally dead outside of maybe being an escape-hatch for some LLM situations, or letting users do higher-level scaffolding, but even then I think stuff like Cursor's "select the part of the app you want to change and prompt" is going to be a better UX.
> maybe there's an opportunity for better, local, lower-tech tooling that doesn't require such a huge tech stack
I think you are viewing this from the "tech" angle rather than the deliver value to the end user angle. The tech stack can be arbitrarily complex as long as it works to reduce end user friction and provide value with as much ease as possible. This might as well be the core idea of all consumer tech.
I think your core theses are basically "people care about the underlying tech" and "people want to learn programming or programming-adjacent" and those are both wrong for the vast vast majority of people.
reply