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If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

stephenramsay.net

21–30 of 626 posts

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#21
Vibe coding produces great one shot proofs of concept that fit inside its context window.

It produces hot garbage when it needs to bring together two tokens from the far ends of a large code base together.

This comes as no surprise to anyone who understands what the attention mechanism actually is, and as a great surprise to everyone who thinks transformers are AI magic.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#22
I wish everyone would read this paragraph:

> But this leads me to my second point, which I must make as clearly and forcefully as I can. Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that. Because when you start giving it little programming problems that you can’t be arsed to work out yourself (as I did), you discover (as I did) that it’s awfully good at those. And then one day you muse out loud (as I did) to an AI model something like, “I have an idea for a program…” And you are astounded. If you aren’t astounded, you either haven’t actually done it or you are at some stage of grief prior to acceptance. Perfect? Hardly. But then neither are human coders. The future? I think the questions answers itself.

This cannot be repeated enough. For all the AI hype, if you think AI isn't the most useful programming tool invented in the last 20 years, you're ignorant of the SOTA or deeply in denial.

As @tptacek recently wrote:

> All progress on LLMs could halt today, and LLMs would remain the 2nd most important thing to happen over the course of my career.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#23
I have been coding as an autodidact for 20 years now. In the past months, I have been vibe coding a lot, with multiple AIs at the same time. I have achieved to code a full webapp (React and Next.js for the front, RestJS for the back) in five days. Refactoring, adding features and writing the right tests for everything to work has been procuring me with the same problem solving and endorphin kicks as usual programming. Just don't vibe code something which you could do yourself, maybe that is the issue of the author.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#24
Alright, the whole article stands on the lifting done by the concept of "vibe coding", which is not just asking an LLM to write some code, scan it quickly to check if it at least makes somewhat sense and then accept it. It is based on pure vibe coding, where the user literally has no idea what's being produced.

After having understood the context, I still believe that a strongly typed language would be a much better choice of a language, for exactly the same reason why I wouldn't recommend starting a project in C unless there is a strong preference (and even then Rust would probably be better still).

LLMs are not perfect, just like humans, so I would never vibe code in any other environment than one in which many/most logical errors are by definition impossible to compile.

Not sure if C is worse than python/js in that respect (I'd argue it is better for some and worse for other, regarding safety) but Java, Swift, C#, Go, Rust, etc. are great languages for vibe coding since you have the compiler giving you almost instant feedback on how well your vibe coding is going.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#30
I came to this article expecting an investigation on how C or assembly performs with an LLM, but it is just musings. The article claims the LLM is better at memory management than a human, which I find dubious, but even then it would not be a good argument in favor of C.

My experience with LLMs is that they are not good at tracking resources and perform much better with languages that reduce cognitive load for humans.

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