Single file including all html/js/css, Vanilla JS, no backend, scores persisted with localStorage.
Deployed using ubuntu/apache2/python/flask on a £5 Digital Ocean server (but could have been hosted on a static hosting provider as it's just a single page with no backend).
Images / metadata stored in an AWS S3 bucket.
A dermatologist a short while ago with this idea would have to find a willing and able partner to do a bunch of work -- meaning that most likely it would just remain an idea.
This isn't just for non-tech people either -- I have a decades long list of ideas I'd like to work on but simply do not have time for. So now I'm cranking up the ol' AI agents an seeing what I can do about it.
I've been coding professionally for ~20 years now, so it's not that I don't know what to do, it's just a time sink
Now I'm blasting through them with AI and getting them out there just in case
They're a bit crap, but better than not existing at all, you never know
You just need one program that can read the training data, train a model, and then do the classification based on input images from the user.
This works for basically any kind of image, whether it's dogs/cats or skin cancer.
> You can take the code from
More seriously, for most non-programmers, even typing into a console is "coding."
Lots of people like computers but earn a living doing something else
And, more importantly, I don't think you'll see good results either from a vibe-coded solution.
So I don't think your comment makes sense here.
Unfortunately, I do advanced knowledge work, and the tools I need technically often exist...if you're a coder.
Coding is not that accessible. The intermediary mental models and path to experience required to understand a coding task are not available to the average person.
I don't agree. I think because of llm/vibe coding my random ideas I've actually wasted more time then if I did them manually. The vibe code as you said is often crap and often after I spend a lot of time on it. Realize that there are countless subtle errors that mean its not actually doing what I was intending at all. I've learned nothing and made a pointless app that does not even do anything but looks like it does.
Thats the big allure that has been keeping "AI" hype floating. It always seems so dang close to being a magic wand. Then upon time spent reviewing and a critical eye you realize it has been tricking you like a janitor that is just sweeping dirt under the rug.
At this point I've relegated LLM to advanced find replace and Formatted data structuring(Take this list make it into JSON) and that's about it. There are basically tools that do everything else llms do that already exist and do it better.
I can't count at this point how many times "AI" has taken some sort of logic I want then makes a bunch of complex looking stuff that takes forever to review and I find out it fudged the logic to simply always be true/false when its not even a boolean problem.
Indeed. It is first and foremost a statistics and net patient outcomes problem.
The image classification bit - to the best of the current algorithms abilities - is essentially a solved problem (even if it isn't quite that simple), and when better models become available you plug those in instead. There is no innovation there.
The hard part is the rest of it. And without a good grounding in medical ethics and statistics that's going to be very difficult to get right.
I'm not going to argue with the idea that a pre-made classifier can be improved upon by experts.
But pre-made classifiers exist and are useful for a very large variety of tasks. This was the original point.
Most such prototypes get tossed because of a flaw in the idea, not because they lacked professional software help. If something clicks the prototype can get rebuilt properly. Raising the barriers to entry means significantly fewer things get tried. My 2c.
Not in an industry where prototypes very often get thrown into production because decision makers don't know anything about the value of good tech, security, etc
In a similar way, VBA was amazing in MS Office back in the day. If you ever saw someone who was good at Visual Basic in Excel, it’s impressive the amount of work that could get done in Excel by a motivated user who would have been hesitant to call themselves a programmer.
The only kind of productivity is progress toward somebody's arbitrary goals. There's nothing "true" about it.
It would be nice if we could have the cake and eat it here. With LLM:s there's certainly opportunities if we can find ways to allow both custom scripting and large scale domain constrained logic.
It’s hard to take the name “vibe coding” seriously, and maybe that was the whole point, but I feel like AI coding is a bit more serious than the name “vibe coding” implies.
Anyone that disagrees that it should be taken more seriously can surely at least agree that it’s likely it will cross that threshold in the not too distant future, yet we’re still going to be stuck with the silly name.
Focusing on "but security lol" is a bad take, IMO. Every early attempt is bad at something. Be it security, or scale, or any number of problems. Validating early is good. Giving non-tech people a chance is good. If an idea is worth pursuing, you can always redo it with "experts". But you can't afford experts (hell, you can't even afford amateurs) for every idea you want put into an MVP.
Even worse is the tendency for scripting languages tend to try to be robust against errors, so you end up with programs that are filled with extremely subtle nuance in things like their syntax parsing which, in many ways, makes them substantially more complex than languages with extremely strict syntactic enforcement.
Lose the tunnel vision.
MVP means just enough engineered code to solve a problem, rough around the edges and lacking features sure, but not built by someone who has literally no idea what they were doing.
Prototypes of physical products are never put into production and sold to consumers. Unfortunately software prototypes "run", and are sold at that point. Then they begin to scale, and the inherent flaws in their design are amplified. The same thing used to happen with MS Access apps; the same thing still happens with "low code" solutions.
The engineers cost just as much after the prototype phase, but if you don't hire them to build your MVP then you never have one.
Everyone wants to pretend that the software used to be better, but the reality is that MVPs and sometimes even public launches were always a house of cards.
And I say that knowing it will absolutely rule everything in the future - I'd bet at last half of all Show HNs are vibe coded apps now. Not long ago tech was seriously talking about monkey JPEGS being the future of global commerce and finance. We've been living in unserious times for a while.
I'd feel better about vibe coding and AI in general if I thought it would lead to more people learning how to do what it enables for themselves, and actually exercise control over their devices and creativity. But as useful as it can be - and I have to concede that much at this point - it requires depending on centralized AI services and isn't much better than proprietary code in terms of defending end user rights. I fear AI driven everything will lead to more closed systems and more corporate commoditization of our data and our lives. Unfortunately from what I've seen not only do many vibe coders not care, they don't want to care and they think anyone who does care is a slope-headed neanderthal.
So yeah, call it what it is. OP's app would have just been a simple web app ten years ago, it's just a quiz, doesn't require any deep coding magic. But no one cares about anything but the vibe anymore.
user: anthonypasq96 created: 22 days ago karma: 2 about: submissions comments favorites
Should decision makers be more informed? Yes, of course, but that's not an argument for gatekeeping. We shouldn't be gatekeeping software or the web. Not through licensure or some arbitrary meaning of "effort". That will do nothing but stifle job growth and I'd very much like to keep developers employed.