Peteranother successful guy in his 50s has been one-shotted by Claude. F in the chat for Mike Masnick, may his brain RIP. https://www.techdirt.com/2026/03/25/ai-might-be-our-best-shot-at-taking-back-the-open-web/
i guess it's pretty exciting to build your first piece of software, but i wish these people would write a follow-up on what it's like to maintain a piece of software that you don't know how it works.
tons of "men playing with model trains" energy. like, good for you dude, i hope this is still fun when Claude costs $2k/mo.
**you** don't own any of this software that you "built", Anthropic does, and once you're hooked, they can charge you whatever they want. have fun!!
i think these guys in their 50s want to get the satisfaction of self-sufficiency without the hard work that produces actual self-sufficiency. like, the Type of Guy who gets to that age and buys a cabin in the woods, but with a hydraulic log-splitter and thousands of dollars worth of solar panels and a grocery delivery service. and then they walk around in flannel and boots bragging about going off grid. sure dude.
again: it's **always** men doing this shit. i can't think of a single example of a prominent woman in her 50s who has suddenly started vibe-coding her own apps and telling everyone about how it's a game-changer. the male brain must be studied!
i am sure there are some examples of Women of a Certain Age who have been one-shotted, and i would certainly like to hear about them! for science!! personally, i've only seen men, and almost always men in their 50s
i can think of counter-examples!! @Mer__edith, for example, is like "fuck this shit, absolutely not." queen.
jonathankoren™@peter yes. Do not democratize.
KEEP THE GATE STRONG!!!
— signed a guy five months away from being in his 50s and has programmed for over 40 years.
Jeff Benzos@jonathankoren @peter shut the fuck up. "Democratize" by burning the world down so people can custom order unmaintainable garbage, you people should be kicked in the fucking face until candy comes out
Misuse Case@peter If I, a Woman of a Certain Age, were vibe-coding some apps for my own personal use I would certainly not be hyping about it in public. It’s not some great accomplishment and I’m not a free advertising service.
@MisuseCase yes!! i am sure there are women who do this, but the men seem to think they deserve credit for it or something. imagine, men taking credit for a thing someone else did!!
Taylor - Romanceable NPC@peter As a woman, the only vibe coding I'll ever do is coding while, well, using a vibe.
@dyke_du_jour lol 😂 believe in you
mx alex tax1a - 2020 (6)@peter it's almost always white men in their 50s, appropriating others' work as their own. thinking emoji
Hank G ☑️@peter "I decided to see if I could effectively rebuild the tool myself, fully controolled by me, without having to rely on a company that might change or enshittify the app." I mean the whole tech stack he's writing with is now reliant on the one company not enshittifying everything or charging much higher rates once there is vendor lock. He's not a stupid person. He must see that right? Unlike FOSS, which has a similar abandonware problem, when it is integrated into your entire *thought* process you are stuck and fucked. There are some cool things you can do with Claude and other agents. Until there is a truly open model that you can self host and that wasn't trained by boiling rivers processing stolen data I'm just not interested in playing with them.
tinyboop
Albert InkmanThis hits hard. The real tragedy isnt the tech - its that we glorify burning people alive in service of "disruption" and pretend its progress.
Infoseepage@peter I have a client that age who is in corporate finance, who just loves playing around with AI. Two days ago, someone sent him an email with document "Your 2025 Social Security Data for Taxes.exe" attached to it. He downloaded it five times and clicked on it at least once. Remote access trojan that spent the last two days exflitrating his PC and its activities.
@peter These are guys who at one point DID KNOW BETTER and some combination of AI and Covid has just completely eroded their critical thinking and impulse control and now they are doing some of the stupidest shit I can imagine. They kick themselves after when you talk to them about it, but it doesn't save them in the moment.
Wally@peter
Ah bummer, Masnick.
I'm not exactly surprised especially with how he also fell hard for Bluesky's empty promises of an open decentralized social media that just looks like they completely control.
Still bummed though.
@Wally haha i mean, it's not like he's dead. still an important voice. just, you know, less important now.
@peter
Much less important now IMO
Started with him falling for BS BS and progressed to whatever this is
Wonder how long until he gets AI psychosis and starts ranting about how 2+2=5 because Claude told him so
Jon Renaut@Wally I met him at a conference in maybe 2009, right after he had written up my blog post on Techdirt. He's always seemed like a good dude except for how often he starts a sentence with "Hell, ..."
Darby M. Dixon III@peter I just read the headline and noped so hard back out
rakoo@peter
> Today’s equivalent of right-clicking on Derek’s site is describing what you want to a coding agent, watching it build, telling it what’s wrong, and iterating until it works for you. Different mechanics, same magic.
There's a sad nugget in there: the original open web was not interesting because it was magic but because they could understand it and make it their own. With AI it's ok if the thing remains magical as long as they can wield it.
> Today’s equivalent of right-clicking on Derek’s site is describing what you want to a coding agent, watching it build, telling it what’s wrong, and iterating until it works for you. Different mechanics, same magic.
There's a sad nugget in there: the original open web was not interesting because it was magic but because they could understand it and make it their own. With AI it's ok if the thing remains magical as long as they can wield it.
joe@peter I feel like one of the best use cases I've come across for LLM coding is for like, having it write a script for a semi-tech-literate person to accomplish a task that then can fade into the ether. E.g., develop a script to extract this data from this set of PDFs I have.
As you said, maintaining and distributing software is not easy and it's not something LLMs are equipped to handle from what I can see.
kajer :notverified:@peter Right, great, you deployed a Jitsi server? Who is hosting it? what are the bandwidth costs? APPs don't just run in the ether.... unless you're talking about "smart contracts"
Mx. Chara Aznable (they/them) of Pnictogen@peter uuuugh this is so infuriating. I can really believe that there's some sort of servility flag in the heads of whitebread techie professionals who don't want to ask WHY the machine is able to do the things it purports to do—because they're simply bowled over by the servility. Gosh the LLM trash machine just... output something! because I asked it to!!! Wow!!!!