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Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

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Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#31

Post by Flavius »

wobfan wrote: post #26
injidup wrote: post #21

I knocked up a VSCode plugin in a few hours that extracted a JSON file from a zip file generated by the clang C++ static analyzer, parsed it into the VSCode problems and diagnostic view and provided quick fixes for simple things. All of this without hardly knowing or caring about java script or how the NPM tool chains work. Just kept taking screen shots of VSCode and saying what I wanted to go where and what the beha…

I feel like no one has read the article, instead anyone jumps on the defense and says "but my AI code is good!!!!". It's not even about the quality, and no one said that AI just produces garbage, especially with newer models.

I feel like I don't need to read articles with inflammatory headlines.

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#32

Post by tgv »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #2

Why do you think AI is producing low quality code? Before I started using AI, my code was often rejected as "didn't use thing X" or "didn't follow best practice Y" but ever since I started coding with AI, that was gone. Works especially well when the code is being reviewed by a person who is clueless about AI.

My experience is that it does produce low quality code. Perhaps I tried some unusual stuff, but the other day, I had a simple problem in JavaScript: you have an image, add a gray border around it, and keep it within given width/height limits. I figured that should be common enough for whatever OpenAI model I was using to generate useable code. It started with doing something straightforward with a good-looking Math.min operation, and return a promise to a canvas. I asked "why is this returning a promise?", and of course it answered that I was right and removed the promise. Then it turned out that if the image was larger than limits, it would simply draw over the borders. Now I had to add that it should scale the image. It made an error in the scaling. IIRC, I had to tell it that both dimensions should be scaled identically, which led a few more trials before it looked like decent code. It's a clueless junior that has been kicked out of boot camp.

What it does do perfectly: convert code from one language to another. It was a fairly complex bit, and the result was flawless.

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#33

Post by danielbln »

wobfan wrote: post #26
injidup wrote: post #21

I knocked up a VSCode plugin in a few hours that extracted a JSON file from a zip file generated by the clang C++ static analyzer, parsed it into the VSCode problems and diagnostic view and provided quick fixes for simple things. All of this without hardly knowing or caring about java script or how the NPM tool chains work. Just kept taking screen shots of VSCode and saying what I wanted to go where and what the beha…

I feel like no one has read the article, instead anyone jumps on the defense and says "but my AI code is good!!!!". It's not even about the quality, and no one said that AI just produces garbage, especially with newer models.

From the top of the article:

> My take on AI for programming and "vibe coding" is that it will do to software engineering what fast fashion did to the clothing industry: flood the market with cheap, low-quality products and excessive waste.

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#34

Post by mettamage »

yoaviram wrote: post #27

It seems to me that the ongoing “vibe coding” debate on HN, about whether AI coding agents are helpful or harmful, often overlooks one key point: the better you are as a coder, the less useful these agents tend to be. Years ago, I was an amazing C++ dev. Later, I became a solid Python dev. These days, I run a small nonprofit in the digital rights space, where our stack is mostly JavaScript. I don’t code much anymore,…

> That said, the main lesson I learned about vibe coding, or using AI for research and any other significant task, is that you must understand the domain better than the AI. If you don’t, you’re setting yourself up for failure.

Only if you fully trust it works. You can also first take time to learn about the domain and use AI to assist you in learning it.

This whole thing is really about assistance. I think in that sense, OpenAI's marketing was spot on. LLMs are good at assisting. Don't expect more of them.

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#35

Post by wobfan »

smartmic wrote: post #28
koakuma-chan wrote: post #2

Why do you think AI is producing low quality code? Before I started using AI, my code was often rejected as "didn't use thing X" or "didn't follow best practice Y" but ever since I started coding with AI, that was gone. Works especially well when the code is being reviewed by a person who is clueless about AI.

This is because AI-generated code will always be mediocre. There is so much poor-quality code in the training base that it will dilute the high-quality sources. AI is not a craftsman who builds on his own high standards, but rather a token grinder tool calibrated to your prompts. Even if you describe your problem (prompt) to a high standard, there is no way it can deliver a solution of the same standard. This will be…

100%. Generative AI is and will always be trained on more or less all open source code that is out there, and by definition, from the training data, it will create a mix of this, which will statistically be mediocre.

Which is fine, as long as people are aware of it.

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#36

Post by mettamage »

tgv wrote: post #32
koakuma-chan wrote: post #2

Why do you think AI is producing low quality code? Before I started using AI, my code was often rejected as "didn't use thing X" or "didn't follow best practice Y" but ever since I started coding with AI, that was gone. Works especially well when the code is being reviewed by a person who is clueless about AI.

My experience is that it does produce low quality code. Perhaps I tried some unusual stuff, but the other day, I had a simple problem in JavaScript: you have an image, add a gray border around it, and keep it within given width/height limits. I figured that should be common enough for whatever OpenAI model I was using to generate useable code. It started with doing something straightforward with a good-looking Math.m…

> My experience is that it does produce low quality code. Perhaps I tried some unusual stuff, but the other day

I've seen both happen. Sometimes it produced fairly good quality code on small problem domains. Sometimes it produced bad code on small problem domains.

The code is always not that great to bad at big problem domains.

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#37

Post by naiv »

yoaviram wrote: post #27

It seems to me that the ongoing “vibe coding” debate on HN, about whether AI coding agents are helpful or harmful, often overlooks one key point: the better you are as a coder, the less useful these agents tend to be. Years ago, I was an amazing C++ dev. Later, I became a solid Python dev. These days, I run a small nonprofit in the digital rights space, where our stack is mostly JavaScript. I don’t code much anymore,…

I think it's the opposite , the better you are as a coder and know your domain, the better you can use ai tools. someone with no expertise is set up for failure

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#38

Post by wobfan »

danielbln wrote: post #33
wobfan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like no one has read the article, instead anyone jumps on the defense and says "but my AI code is good!!!!". It's not even about the quality, and no one said that AI just produces garbage, especially with newer models.

From the top of the article: > My take on AI for programming and "vibe coding" is that it will do to software engineering what fast fashion did to the clothing industry: flood the market with cheap, low-quality products and excessive waste.

Where is this saying that LLMs code quality is bad?

> cheap, low-quality products

Product quality != code quality.

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#39

Post by danielbln »

wobfan wrote: post #38
danielbln wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the top of the article: > My take on AI for programming and "vibe coding" is that it will do to software engineering what fast fashion did to the clothing industry: flood the market with cheap, low-quality products and excessive waste.

Where is this saying that LLMs code quality is bad? > cheap, low-quality products Product quality != code quality.

"Product" is referring to the fast fashion analogy. The author is clearly saying that AI for programming and "vibe coding" will lead to bad code. Otherwise the analogy doesn't make sense. Why would AI programming lead to bad products but not also bad code?

Re: Vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering

#40

Post by wobfan »

Flavius wrote: post #31
wobfan wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like no one has read the article, instead anyone jumps on the defense and says "but my AI code is good!!!!". It's not even about the quality, and no one said that AI just produces garbage, especially with newer models.

I feel like I don't need to read articles with inflammatory headlines.

That's your choice, but then you also shouldn't take part in the comments, IMO.
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