Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

news.ycombinator.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 31 posts

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#11

Post by jf22 »

codingdave wrote: post #8

> Is “you don’t really understand the code, so it’ll hurt you later” still a meaningful criticism? That is one of the strongest valid criticisms. Even if we ignore the possibility that the code that is vibed will be buggy and insecure, the real long-term problem is not having someone who understands the system. Almost every well maintained app has one or more people who grok the whole thing, who can hear a problem de…

The current AI tools extremely good at telling you about how an existing system works. You don't need that one super knowledgeable person anymore.

With the right MCPs or additional context you can have the tools go read PRs or the last 10 tickets that impacted the system and even go out and read cloud configuration or log files to tell you about problems.

The concept of a "bus factor" is a relic of the past.

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#12

Post by jf22 »

verdverm wrote: post #7

The people launching a SaaS in 40 hours are not concerned with the state of vibe coding, the quality of code, or the testing. They care about the business. If you want to be like them, start by caring far less about the actual code or how it gets made. They will bring in people later who do, who will clean up the vibed mess *I'm generally not a fan of this, but you asked

You can tell LLMs to conform to certain quality standards and code in a way you think is best.

Gold plating code with the best quality standards takes LLMs seconds whereas it would take you days doing it by hand.

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#13

Post by [deleted] »

jf22 wrote: post #12
verdverm wrote: post #7

The people launching a SaaS in 40 hours are not concerned with the state of vibe coding, the quality of code, or the testing. They care about the business. If you want to be like them, start by caring far less about the actual code or how it gets made. They will bring in people later who do, who will clean up the vibed mess *I'm generally not a fan of this, but you asked

You can tell LLMs to conform to certain quality standards and code in a way you think is best. Gold plating code with the best quality standards takes LLMs seconds whereas it would take you days doing it by hand.

[deleted]

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#14

Post by sejje »

AnimalMuppet wrote: post #10

What's your moat? What's your barrier to entry? What's your competitive advantage? If you can vibe code it in a weekend, someone else can vibe code a competing thing the next weekend. You're not going to build something that becomes a long-term business that way, because anybody else can take your business. For a larger, more complex system, the real barrier is understanding what needs done well enough that you can b…

Why do you think you need exclusivity?

The moat is most people aren't using LLMS, most people aren't building products, most people who might built it will never hear of your product, people will have other ideas competing for their attention, people are incompetent, and all the work that happens after the coding.

How many people do you think are out there vibe coding things?

Aren't companies built on execution? Or do we now build companies on tech stacks alone?

Before LLMS, how could a solo dev get a moat? Any company could hire a team to replicate your product. They might not care how much it costs them. "Hours spent coding" isn't the moat.

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#15

Post by verdverm »

jf22 wrote: post #12
verdverm wrote: post #7

The people launching a SaaS in 40 hours are not concerned with the state of vibe coding, the quality of code, or the testing. They care about the business. If you want to be like them, start by caring far less about the actual code or how it gets made. They will bring in people later who do, who will clean up the vibed mess *I'm generally not a fan of this, but you asked

You can tell LLMs to conform to certain quality standards and code in a way you think is best. Gold plating code with the best quality standards takes LLMs seconds whereas it would take you days doing it by hand.

> You can tell LLMs to...

and they may or may not "listen", they are non-deterministic and have no formal means or requirements to adhere to anything you write. You know this because they violate your rules all the time in your own experience

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#16

Post by wmeredith »

absynth wrote: post #9

All these stories about people using llms and hitting it big almost overnight make me feel dumb. I'm sure others feel the same. Probably FOMO. My sense of using LLMs for coding is me feeling like a maintenance programmer even though the code is brand new and I'm debugging a LLM misunderstanding. Weird to be working on a 10k codebase that didn't exist a few hours ago and I'm now debugging it over the next 4 hours. Hav…

> Weird to be working on a 10k codebase that didn't exist a few hours ago

This is the issue. A firehose of code production is not useful for a long time. But it's very useful in short bursts. Total volume of code was never the bottle neck or the goal.

Working with LLMs has all the same pitfalls of working with people. Programming effectively for the long term requires all the same rules whether you're using LLM's or not: build incrementally, test and refactor as you go (not at the "end"), keep scopes small, ship frequently, etc.

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#17

Post by _vlie »

jf22 wrote: post #11
codingdave wrote: post #8

> Is “you don’t really understand the code, so it’ll hurt you later” still a meaningful criticism? That is one of the strongest valid criticisms. Even if we ignore the possibility that the code that is vibed will be buggy and insecure, the real long-term problem is not having someone who understands the system. Almost every well maintained app has one or more people who grok the whole thing, who can hear a problem de…

The current AI tools extremely good at telling you about how an existing system works. You don't need that one super knowledgeable person anymore. With the right MCPs or additional context you can have the tools go read PRs or the last 10 tickets that impacted the system and even go out and read cloud configuration or log files to tell you about problems. The concept of a "bus factor" is a relic of the past.

I feel the same way. AI coding skills seem to sit somewhere between intermediate and advanced. Unless you’re working in a space where you’ve thought very deeply and developed your own solutions—those “gotcha, you didn’t know this” kinds of problems—it doesn’t really feel like AI falls short.

So far, I’ve been reading through almost 100% of the code AI writes because of the traps and edge cases it can introduce. But now, it feels less like “AI code is full of pitfalls” and more like we need to focus on how to use AI properly.

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#18

Post by jf22 »

verdverm wrote: post #15
jf22 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can tell LLMs to conform to certain quality standards and code in a way you think is best. Gold plating code with the best quality standards takes LLMs seconds whereas it would take you days doing it by hand.

> You can tell LLMs to... and they may or may not "listen", they are non-deterministic and have no formal means or requirements to adhere to anything you write. You know this because they violate your rules all the time in your own experience

Sure but in my experience LLMs behave much more consistently than humans with regards to quality. LLMs don't skip tests because they have to make a deadline for example.

And now we have LLMs that review LLM generated code so it's easy to verify quality standards.

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#19

Post by anditherobot »

Vibe coding sits on an axis from smart autocomplete to one-shotting a $1B SaaS. Traditional software engineering was about holding the system in your head and translating it into syntax, fighting tooling and architecture decisions along the way. I think done properly it removes many of these friction points along the way to validating / implementing the idea.

Now it's easier to traverse a live plan and to quickly make micro pivots as you go.

I also think that architecture needs to change. Design patterns that will help to provide as much context to the LLM as possible to increase understanding.

Re: Ask HN: How far has "vibe coding" come?

#20

Post by ex-aws-dude »

The problem with these discussions is no matter your specific experience with these tools someone will just say "you're holding it wrong"

"If it worked for my use case and didn't work for yours, you're obviously just doing something wrong. That's the only explanation."

Post reply on HN