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Programming Advertising It's funny.  Laugh. IT

Fiverr Ad Mocks Vibe Coding - with a Singing Overripe Avocado (creativebloq.com) 59

It's a cultural milestone. Fiverr just released an ad mocking vibe coding.

The video features what its description calls a "clueless entrepreneur" building an app to tell if an avocado is ripe — who soon ends up blissfully singing with an avocado to the tune of the cheesy 1987 song "Nothing's Gonna Stop Us Now." The avocado sings joyously of "a new app on the rise in a no-code world that's too good to be true" (rhyming that with "So close. Just not tested through...")

"Let them say we're crazy. I don't care about bugs!" the entrepreneur sings back. "Built you in a minute, now I'm so high off this buzz..."

But despite her singing to the overripe avocado that "I don't need a backend if I've got the spark!" and that they can "build this app together, vibe-coding forever. Nothing's going to stop us now!" — the build suddenly fails. (And it turns out that avocado really was overripe...) Fiverr then suggests viewers instead hire one of their experts for building their apps...

The art/design site Creative Bloq acknowledges Fiverr "flip-flopping between scepticism and pro-AI marketing." (They point out a Fiverr ad last November had ended with the tagline "Nobody cares that you use AI! They care about the results — for the best ones higher Fiverr experts who've mastered every digital skill including AI.") But the site calls this new ad "a step in the right direction towards mindful AI usage." Just like an avocado that looks perfect on the outside, once you inspect the insides, AI-generated code can be deceptively unripe.
Fiverr might be feeling the impact of vibecoding themselves. The freelancing web site saw the company's share price fall over 14% this week, with one Yahoo! Finance site saying this week's quarterly results revealed Fiverr's active buyers dropped 10.9% compared to last year — a decrease of 3.4 million buyers which "overshadowed a 9.8% increase in spending per buyer."

Even when issuing a buy recommendation, Seeking Alpha called it "a short-term rebound play, as the company faces longer-term risks from AI and active buyer churn."

Fiverr Ad Mocks Vibe Coding - with a Singing Overripe Avocado

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  • by rsilvergun ( 571051 ) on Saturday August 02, 2025 @09:49PM (#65563212)
    It's obviously something that the AI companies came up with to sell their product and here we are just using it like fucking sheep.

    It's that complete lack of critical thinking that is why you could replace somebody within AI. Or a handful of trained pigeons....
    • It's that complete lack of critical thinking that is why you could replace somebody within AI.

      I'm sure the buggy whip makers were telling themselves the same thing back when hand cranking a car could leave you with a broken wrist (or worse). Yeah, today you can laugh at the slop that AI churns out, but technology doesn't sit still.

      • Of course not AI is more capable than that...

        Buggy whip manufacturers could just go into making other leather goods. AI exists to just eliminate jobs.

        There's no new production being made it's just a whole bunch of work being automated. So the two aren't even remotely equivalent.

        But I suppose it comforts you to pretend nothing is ever going to change from the time you were 12 years old. And maybe your stank ass is already retired so you don't give a shit. If it's one thing I've learned about the
        • by Powercntrl ( 458442 ) on Saturday August 02, 2025 @11:59PM (#65563312) Homepage

          #1 I'm not a boomer, I'm a Xennial. I realize shit's gonna get bad before I'm taking a dirt nap, but I nor anyone else can fight the tide.

          #2 The Amish are really the only subculture that has managed to artificially hold back technological progress to maintain their way of life, and it's debatable whether they'd have been able to pull that off without resources they acquire from outside their communities. Their lifestyle really only makes sense when you look at it through the lens of arbitrary religious doctrine, rather than logically analyzing things such as why they're allowed to be reliant upon fully modern supply chains for the kerosene they burn. The point I'm attempting to make here is that even if you try to ignore technological progress, the rest of the world will move on without you and you're still not entirely insulated from the effects.

          Buggy whip manufacturers could just go into making other leather goods. AI exists to just eliminate jobs.

          Perhaps I should've given an example of an industry that was ultimately more thoroughly doomed by the march of progress. How about Blockbuster seeing postage-stamp sized RealPlayer clips and going "Man, no one is ever going to want to watch that crap instead of a full-feature length film they can rent from one of our stores!"?

          Singing avocado or no, the genie isn't going back in the bottle. I'm not even going to pretend I have the solution for what we're supposed to do when AI does become good enough to put most people out of work, and anyone who just comes up with some quick hand-wavy proposal (such as "let's just implement UBI, problem solved!) clearly hasn't considered the full complexity of the issue. Maybe we get that Star Trek Deep Space Nine episode with the sanctuary zones, maybe we get Hunger Games, maybe we get Futurama's suicide booths, or maybe we get something so much more horrible than even sci-fi writers could've imagined. For context, we didn't even collectively consider environmental pollution to be a significant problem until a river caught on fire at least a dozen times. [smithsonianmag.com] Our society's track record for proactively addressing problems before they literally burst into flames, kind of sucks.

          • by jythie ( 914043 )
            Keep in mind, Blockbuster did not die because it failed to have vision or wasn't willing to update. It failed because a leveraged buyout saddled them with so much debt that they could not update.

            WHich is actually relevant here. AI isn't really the direct cause of losses, VC and other shady financial dealings are.. The technology is a pretext, but its actual merits are almost irrelevant to the shift we are seeing.
          • #2 The Amish are really the only subculture that has managed to artificially hold back technological progress to maintain their way of life, and it's debatable whether they'd have been able to pull that off without resources they acquire from outside their communities.

            There are now Amish who use motorized farm equipment with a diesel engine with an electric starter, but pull it around the field with animals. Those have not maintained their way of life, they just have some typically quaint excuses about why and when they are allowed to go around their stated belief system and still claim to believe it at the same time.

      • There's a big difference. Better comparison would be buggy whip makers vs learning to sing so that your horse listens to you without a whip.

        80% of the latest tech is only focused on how humans can waste more time in non-productive stuff or entertainment (social media, news are all entertainment btw) while 20% focuses on how to automate selling something to those using social media

        It's like running a course to teach people to train others on how to make shovels for a non-existent gold rush which is imminent

      • by Anonymous Coward

        You seem to be assuming that LLMs can actually be fixed. They can't.

        They're going to turn out slop. They're going to make shit up. It's fundamental to their design. There is no way to fix it.

        Actual AI is going to have to be a fundamentally different model than a LLM.

        • by jythie ( 914043 )
          As soon as I started hearing LLM experts describe computational linguistics as a 'hack', it highlighted how nervous and insecure they were. They don't understand their own models, they don't understand their own domains, take that lack of understanding as a necessity, and just hope that with enough VC the computers will figure it out for them so they don't have to do any of that stoggy 'research'.
      • by jythie ( 914043 )
        On the other hand, the field of AI has pretty much given up on AI. Sure it is being insanely lucrative, but the research has hit a wall and they have pushed all the actual AI people out of the field, leaving only the ML crowd who have no idea how to solve problems.

        Thinking back to the 'AI, like fusion, has been 10 years away for 30 years' now saying, AI is going to have to wait another generation to even get back to that point. Not sitting still does not necessarily mean moving forward.
      • by Rujiel ( 1632063 )

        "I'm sure the buggy whip makers were telling themselves the same "

        How is it that AI's sycophants manage to dredge up this same tired fucking example against every single article or comment critical of AI?

    • It's obviously something that the AI companies came up with to sell their product and here we are just using it like fucking sheep.

      Really? AFAIK it was a joke phrase some individual came up with to gently mock the idea of "coding" without actually knowing what you're doing... and then (some) people somehow went ahead and adopted it as a serious idea anyway. (I wish those people luck, they are going to need it)

      • AFAIK it was a joke phrase some individual came up with to gently mock the idea of "coding" without actually knowing what you're doing... and then (some) people somehow went ahead and adopted it as a serious idea anyway. (I wish those people luck, they are going to need it)

        No problem, they will just pull themselves up by their respective bootstraps.

    • by Visarga ( 1071662 ) on Sunday August 03, 2025 @12:56AM (#65563344)
      > How did we all decide to use the phrase vibe code?

      Andrej Karpathy came up with it : https://x.com/karpathy/status/... [x.com]
    • by allo ( 1728082 )

      I see the phrase more like being snarky not professional and am more surprised companies use it for marketing.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      I wonder if, in a few years, 'vibe' will go the same way as 'cyber' did, and end up being used exclusively by some industry that is only tech adjacent... since at this point 'cyber' seems to have mostly been relegated to a bunch of non-technical 'security' people who seem to write documents about what everyone should be doing and, well, not actually doing much.
    • It's that complete lack of critical thinking that is why you could replace somebody within AI. Or a handful of trained pigeons....

      Or even a handful of trained avocados...

  • Fiverr also has a category for hiring vibe coders, so...free publicity I guess?
  • Vibe coding is to actual building of software as putting something in the microwave is to actual cooking. Only that the microwave results are orders of magnitude better.

    Face it, coding is hard. Have the talent, invest the time or you will never be good at it and no tool can fix that.

    • Indeed. The ad is very on target.

    • AI is actually pretty good at making simple apps like this. Certainly better than the average Fiverr dev (who isn't using AI)
      • by jythie ( 914043 )
        On the other hand, any app AI is actually good at making likely represents a segment that is so oversatured that it isn't actually worth writing.
        • by allo ( 1728082 )

          On the foot (you can write what's on the other foot) much of coding is not coming up with new algorithms, but putting parts together to give something the user wants. Sadly you're not paid for your great code, but for anything that solves the problem. That's why we have so many electron apps and similar things using waaay too large frameworks. There it's quite refreshing when the AI at least can write javascript code without using any npm modules.

        • by gweihir ( 88907 )

          Yes. And with "AI" the pay will get even lower in the "trash" segment than it already is.

  • by NewtonsLaw ( 409638 ) on Saturday August 02, 2025 @11:21PM (#65563292)

    I suspect the two biggest earners for Fiver were app coding and voice actors. Sadly, these are also the two categories on which AI is having the biggest impact.

    Why would you hire a voice actor from Fiver when you can use AI to give you an adequately good result for much less?

    Likewise app coding.

    I suspect that we'll see far more "prompt engineers" offering their vibe-coding and AI-voiceover expertise on Fiver but the prices will have to fall.

    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      Gotta love 'prompt engineering'.. all they have done is take well defined formal languages, and replaced them with undocumented quasi-natural languages. I can not imagine it scaling well, and by the time you develop anything of even moderate complexity, you are probably dreaming of having something as reliable and precise as a formal language again.
    • by godrik ( 1287354 )

      I haven't had great success using AI for voice acting. The core problem is that it is difficult to force a particular diction, emphasis, or emotion. We'll get there I imagine. But right now we are not.

      Now, depending what you need it for, you may not care that much. If you are making an animated movie, you probably care. If you are making a NPC-3045 in an RPG with 2 lines of dialog, you probably don't care.

  • by NewID_of_Ami.One ( 9578152 ) on Saturday August 02, 2025 @11:23PM (#65563296)

    Great Ad, funny and quite accurate.
    Vibe coding or no-code AI are all fine if you are moderately knowledgeable about coding or IT in general
    But for the layman they are like vibe-diagnosing your serious medical ailments. In the end you will have to go to a doctor and this would not have helped much.
    But yeah you get some idea of the issues & problems involved if you devote enough time, so you are better prepared to talk to a real doctor or developer.
    Pretty much like serious googling i guess but this also helps you see the half baked app and its half baked features so a small step up

  • This guy was earning his employees a year ago about how AI was coming for their jobs.

    I guess it's better messaging to hype up AI when you're looking to scare employees into better performance.

  • OK, here's the thing. Andrej Karpathy, a founder of OpenAI who invented/promoted vibe coding, was hired to develop Tesla's autopilot. Which doesn't work. What does that tell you about a) Karpathy and b) vibe coding?

  • As if this is going to save them. I could clone fivrr over the weekend but why would I they are toast.

  • could work. But the source code shall be the promt and the LLM 100% deterministic and of course versioned. But using it to generate a lot of code for manual editing will create a lot of bloated code hard to maintain. There has always been a temptation to autogenerate the trivial boiler plate code. But people forget, that even though it is auto generated it is still lines of code to be maintained. You should instead fix the framework or specialise a layer for your repeated needs, than autogenerating a lot of
    • by jythie ( 914043 )
      Which sounds terrible. Replacing a predictable formal language with a deterministic complier that you can validate the results with something that has a quasi conversational english interface and unpredictable results? I imagine after the hype wears off, we will see a wave of locked down versions with documented language specs, people realizing how horrifically complicated it is to use, and rediscovering formal languages. Kinda like every other 4th generation language that promised to make coding 'easy'
  • Western programmers/designers were disrupted by Elance.com - Western programmers/designers committed the 'sin' of being expensive to hire, throw them to the curb
    Elance was disrupted by Fiverr - Even accounting for network effects the incompetence of Elance allowed an upstart to take the lead, throw it to the curb
    Fiverr is being disrupted by AI - It is cheap and better than the hassle of finding a provider, haggling with them, the miscommunications, throw it to the curb
    Ooops AI will throw everyone to th
  • A counter to the buggy and hard to maintain problems with AI code is that it allows entrepreneurs to quickly bootstrap their business with a good-enough solution, then use the revenue or investment that it attracts to hire humans to redo the code properly. So freelancer sites can profit from this second wave. But they do lose all the business writing software that commercially fails.

    Are humans going to fight back by reducing their source-available code, putting it behind bot-proof walls, or poisoning the

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