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Comment by sieve | Hacker News Reader

Software has rarely been the moat. Or file formats. You have always been able to reverse engineer them. The problem, always, has been network effects.

I can build an entire, fairly useful, spreadsheet app over a weekend. But can I send my "expenses.cells" files to my accountant? Will it work with the Excel/Google docs he uses?

AI can build or reverse engineer anything as long as you are motivated enough to do it.

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One example is Affinity 3 released for free. But it's a huge pain in the ass because all the guides for how to do things are for Photoshop or Affinity 2.

Your vibecoded app won't have years of reddit posts showing how to do things. This also seems to be where LLMs are the weakest at giving advice, they hallucinate 80% of the time I ask them how to do something in Affinity, giving buttons and menus that simply don't exist.

This is a knowledge problem. You can fix it by pointing the model to documentation (if it exists). Otherwise the model will give you the next best guess

This is where some of the readers start thinking about putting some agents to work on making Photoslop.

Vibecoded apps will have to include MCP servers so the LLM agents can interact with them directly.

Huh? Both Anthropic and OpenAI have computer use tools. I frequently just tell the models to test their own work. I'm a little paranoid so I only grant access to one window and make that window VMware Workstation.

You combine it with /goal. I usually set a goal like "Complete the application defined in goal.md as written. Then test it end to end autonomously using Compter Use. Record all issues discovered during testing in a to-do. Then fix the issues in the to-do. Repeat testing until no more issues are discovered."

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