Plenty of AI hype, but not much useful software?

Re:Plenty of AI hype, but not much useful software? by nachocoll on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @05:33AM (#47320933)

The bottleneck isn't ideas or the AI tools — it's judgment. Knowing which problem is worth solving, for whom, and whether what you've built actually solves it. That judgment can't be generated; it has to be earned.

Vibe coding lowered the barrier to shipping code, but it didn't lower the barrier to shipping value. The result is a lot of technically impressive things that nobody needed. The first comment here (lots of tiny personal tools that never get released) is actually the realistic picture: most of what gets built with AI tools is either too narrow to scale or not quite right for anyone but the builder.

The missing discipline is customer value validation — which is why it's the first principle of the Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto (https://agilevibecoding.org): "Acceleration in development must translate into validated customer value. Speed without value is waste." That sounds obvious but it gets skipped constantly when AI makes spinning up new projects so effortless.

The real unlock will be when people pair AI-generation speed with the harder work of understanding user problems before building.

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Re:Plenty of AI hype, but not much useful software? by hkonte on Tuesday March 10, 2026 @12:02PM (#47325084)

Agreed on the judgment point. One place where structure helps: decomposing the prompt before you run it. Writing out role, objective, constraints, output format as separate fields forces you to answer "what do I actually want?" before the model does anything. You catch vague goals at prompt-writing time, not after you get a useless output.

That's the core idea behind flompt (https://github.com/Nyrok/flompt), a canvas where you build prompts from typed blocks and compile to XML. The act of filling in each block is itself a judgment exercise. Open-source if anyone wants to try it.

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