Anyone else noticed the increase of Vibe coded plugins flooding the market?

[theviirus]

Name some names. What are some examples of vibe coded plugins? Genuinely curious.

this

"Show HN: I used AI to recreate a $4000 piece of audio hardware as a plugin"
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46471648

product: Temecula DSP SST-206 Plugin
https://www.temeculadsp.com/

"recreate"

It's not clear to me this was vibe-coded per se: he claims he was going off the ROMs but there's little evidence he matched this to more than his memory of it.

But, as for vibe coding, a bit further down, obviously not the one who is selling the reverb:

For context, I'm working on a proper SPICE component-level Diode Ladder.
I tried this for laughs with Gemini 3 Pro. It spit out the same ZDF implementation that is on countless GitHub repos, originating from the 2nd Pirkle FX book (2019).

maybe i'm somehow confused as to when it seems they're pretty off the bat open about using AI code tool stuff to "vibe code" something they don't know how to program using technical specifications and ROMS they don't completely understand or know how to verify the accuracy of... to develop a plugin they're selling.

seems especially applicable to consider all of that vibe code when the tools they use can't hear, aren't specialized, and are prone to hallucination.

[lobanov]

maybe i'm somehow confused as to when it seems they're pretty off the bat open about using AI code tool stuff to "vibe code" something they don't know how to program using technical specifications and ROMS they don't completely understand or know how to verify the accuracy of... to develop a plugin they're selling.

seems especially applicable to consider all of that vibe code when the tools they use can't hear, aren't specialized, and are prone to hallucination.

Blind coding, yes.

[Grizzellda]

Pretty soon AI bots will be coding AI plugins to make AI music to stream on Spotify so that cryptocurrency can change hands so that ...lol

Don't worry this Universe is just a hologram

Luv it...good one!

[Grizzellda]

This is exactly why so-called "vibe coding" is nonsense. If you can't code, you can't vibe code, either. The truth is every software developer from guys doing indie freeware up to multinational corporations are "vibe coding". It is simply the automation of the software industry, just as every industry has seen automation. You can't walk into Toyota and start building a car with no knowledge of how cars are built, just because they have assembly line automation. Same for software.

That said, AI makes it a lot easier to be a one-man operation. AI is built into every IDE now. Software can be anywhere from thousands of lines of code to millions of lines of code. The good news is you don't have to write them all yourself anymore. Testing and bug-tracing and bug fixing are a major part of development. A lot of development time is taken up by discovering bugs, chasing them down, figuring out how to fix them, and then figuring out what that fix broke, and then fixing that. Again, AI speeds that up immensely. It can analyze pages of code, see how it interacts, and pinpoint the error in minutes, if not seconds, rather than you losing hours if not days on it.

But as I said, you have to actually know how to develop software. You don't have to be a walking encyclopedia of library functions to be a programmer anymore. AI can tell you the best library to use and the functions to call. But you need to know how to use an IDE, and you need to know software design patterns and good coding hygiene. You have to understand C++ classes and inheritance and all that goes with it.

But the good news here is AI can teach you that as well.

If you want to start "vibe coding" you need to first learn the fundamentals of C++ and JUCE. Even with AI assistance (which EVERYONE uses), you still will want to use a framework like JUCE, which has lowered the barrier to entry recently by removing the need for an account to start using it, and building Steinberg's VST3 SDK in, as well.

Nicely said, makes some real good sense here.

Betcha the guys from MuTools and u-he don't vibe code...but I cannot be sure.

They just seem a little more serious and committed.

I think that maybe a good use for AI is intensive computational stuff...sounds obvious, but like analyzing huge amounts of info, like in astronomy or chemistry. Like, how many molecules are in a mole of said substance? And it is a big number, lotsa math!

Also, it looks like AI could help with some of the more tedious jobs in writing software, giving the real, creative developers more resources to be creative.

That is why I mentioned those dudes.

[Gamma-UT]

maybe i'm somehow confused as to when it seems they're pretty off the bat open about using AI code tool stuff to "vibe code" something they don't know how to program using technical specifications and ROMS they don't completely understand or know how to verify the accuracy of... to develop a plugin they're selling.

seems especially applicable to consider all of that vibe code when the tools they use can't hear, aren't specialized, and are prone to hallucination.

Did you even bother to read the HN thread or did you just vibe post it?

I've been doing this for 25 years and I can tell you that the AI is a better coder than me, but I know how to use it. I reviewed the code that it puts out and it's better. I'm assuming the developers that are having a hard time with it are just not as experienced with it.

He also mentions he knows the core reverb algorithm the box uses. He might be lying and I think the approach he used is not likely to deliver a 1:1 emulation. But I find it hard to see this as vibe coding.

There’s only one mention of vibe coding in the entire thread, and that’s from someone else about something unrelated.

[pekbro]

There's likely something more going on with the audioloom thing, the copy protection it uses seems to be the same as the moonbase copy protection system. A system that is also used by some well known developers who are definitely not using audioloom.

Audioloom may be acting like an umbrella, selling their authoring system while the actual distribution is handled through moonbase.

Anyway, many of those audioloom plugins are pretty good, despite their origin, imo.

[Ah_Dziz]

There doesn't seem to be a huge amount of interesting code examples in the area of oscillators and filters and especially voice/ modulation management structures for AI to scrape off the Internet. This makes it unlikely that someone would be able to "slap together" a synth that's in any way a stand out by just prompting a model. Really seems that anyone who has an interesting enough idea but no requisite knowledge, would do better using something like max/MSP or reaktor.

[pekbro]

Amorph seems interesting:

[El°HYM]

Well this Topic didnt age 'too well' as it seems.






At least all the nay-sayers should have been able to 'spot' some of those by now.

[concealed identity]

I can't really tell how they were coded (or not coded), but it does feel like I've seen exponentially more plugins from new developers in the past year. Most of them are free, some aren't. I generally have all of my bases covered as far as effect plugins go, so I usually just ignore them or delete them after trying them once. But for all I know, maybe other advancements in plugin development have come about and plugins have just become easier to code.

[jules99]

Reddit's music production subreddits have been overrun with these. Every other day, it's "i was frustrated with XYZ, so I made [insert slop]" or "the plugins for [style], so I made my own". Not a single one has the depth, the design, the workflow, the concept an actual seasoned developer with a vision can offer. Yet.

And I'm not convinced that prompting your plugin (I'm beta testing two products) has mass appeal, especially when generative AI is essentially turning music production on its head for a new audience.

There is going to be a huge pile of trashy, crashy plugins in the coming years, which will probably solidify the position of bigger devs as the more reliable ones.

[Gamma-UT]

Reddit's music production subreddits have been overrun with these. Every other day, it's "i was frustrated with XYZ, so I made [insert slop]" or "the plugins for [style], so I made my own". Not a single one has the depth, the design, the workflow, the concept an actual seasoned developer with a vision can offer. Yet.

And I'm not convinced that prompting your plugin (I'm beta testing two products) has mass appeal, especially when generative AI is essentially turning music production on its head for a new audience.

There is going to be a huge pile of trashy, crashy plugins in the coming years, which will probably solidify the position of bigger devs as the more reliable ones.

Examples? Unless they're getting deleted I'm not seeing any in /r/musicproduction, for example. So I'm curious where they are and how they're overrunning Reddit.

[noahrbc]

Does this look like vibe coding?

[polb2002]

Do you also get vibe maintenance and vibe support, or is that too boring?

[Zeisner]

Do you also get vibe maintenance and vibe support, or is that too boring?

It started with vibe maintenance/support!