Ask HN: Are vibe-coded self-contained HTML apps the future of personal tools?

3 meistertigran 3 8/18/2025, 2:46:46 PM

I came across this post today - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44937991 and also myself created https://htmlsync.io and wonder if there are other people who now choose to use vibe-coded self-contained HTML apps to replace other personal tools they were using.

Do you think these self-contained HTML apps in one form or another are going to replace most personal tools?

If not, what do you think is the big limiter?

Comments (3)

rickcarlino · 1h ago

I want this to be true, but I think a big limiter is patchy support for things like a file system API as well as some special rules that place extra restrictions on HTML files versus webpages served over HTTPS. I have not tried it in a long time but I remember not being able to access things like the location API or the microphone via local file. This puts local files at a disadvantage over web applications. If anyone knows of a definitive list of these restrictions, I would love to see it.

codingdave · 1h ago

No, because vibe coded apps break. And if you are not someone who can write your own tools without vibe coding, you'll hit a wall and stop doing it when they break on you. FWIW, even the link you got your inspiration from is not actually a single HTML page, it is a full node server with a front-end framework... that happens to only output a single HTML page.

I will grant that it is possible that AI-assisted coding will make people who are already software devs create their own tools more often. But not the vibe coding thing, no.

meistertigran · 1h ago

I share your opinion about the quality of vibe coded apps. It's definitely not something you can pull off with 0 programming knowledge at this moment. I don't know how the quality of LLM written code will change in the future, but I do believe a lot of custom apps that basically just store and display data can already be easily one-shotted.

The more complex the app becomes, the harder it will be to maintain it with vibe coding. Personally I have chosen to just create specialed apps, that do one thing well, to avoid that complexity.

What are unrelated cost of switching to Linux you know?