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

stephenramsay.net

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

#151

Post by colechristensen »

SoftTalker wrote: post #137
colechristensen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant part of my LLM workflow involves having the LLM write and update tickets for me. It can make a vague ticket precise and that can be an easy platform to have discussions with stakeholders.

Wait until you learn that the people on the other side of your ticket updates are also using LLMs to respond. It's LLMs talking to LLMs now.

The desired result is coming to a documented agreement on an interaction, not some exercise in argument that has to happen between humans.

I find having an LLM create tickets for itself to implement to be an effective tool that I rarely have to provide feedback for at all.

This seems like greybeards complaining that people who don't write assembly by hand.

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

#153

Post by 9rx »

skydhash wrote: post #107
pmarreck wrote: post #100

At that point, why not develop a custom language or IL that is specifically designed for LLM use and which compiles to good native code? I propose WASM, or an updated version of it

Because LLMs will have no concept of that IL. It only have a model for what it has seen.

Oh? I've had great luck with LLMs and homemade ILs. It has become my favourite trick to get LLMs to do complex things without overly complicating my side of the equation (i.e. parsing, sandboxing, etc. that is much harder to deal with if you have it hand you the code of a general purpose language meant for humans to read).

There is probably some point where you can go so wild and crazy with ideas never seen before that it starts to break down, but if it remains within the realm of what the LLM can deal with in most common languages, my experience says it is able to pick up and apply the same ideas in the IL quite well.

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

#154

Post by INTPenis »

Because I don't know C well enough.

My philosophy regarding AI is that you should never have it do something you couldn't do yourself.

Of course people break this rule, or the concept of vibe coding wouldn't exist. But some of us actually get a lot of value from AI without succumbing to it. It just doesn't make sense to me to trust a machine's hallucinations for something like programming code. It fabricates things with such confidence that I can't even imagine how it would go if I didn't already know the topic I had it work on.

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

#155

Post by deepsun »

tshaddox wrote: post #98
gitremote wrote: post #33

Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive. In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, th…

I like my requirements articulated so clearly and unambiguously that an extremely dumb electronic logic machine can follow every aspect of the requirements and implement them "perfectly" (limited only by the physical reliability of the machine).

Aka "coding". I see what you mean ;)

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

#156

Post by didibus »

This is treating the LLM like it is the computer or has some kind of way of thinking. But LLM is a "language" model, I'm pretty sure the easier for human to read, the easier for LLM to learn and generate. Abstractions also benefit the model, it does not need to generate a working 2s complement, just a working call to addition of abstracted types.

And just in my experience, I feel everyone is slowly learning, all models are better at the common thing, they are better at bash, they are better at Python and JS, and so on. Everyone trying to invent at that layer has failed to beat that truth. That bootstrapping challenge is dismissed much too easily in the article in my opinion.

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

#157

Post by threethirtytwo »

gitremote wrote: post #33

Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive. In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, th…

You can vibe ask the requirements. Not even kidding.

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

#158

Post by didibus »

zelphirkalt wrote: post #92

I very much doubt the ability of LLMs to provide leak-free, faulty memory management free, C code, because they are trained on loads of bad code in that regard. They will not output code of the quality that maybe 1% of C developers could, if even that many. Fact is, that even well paid and professional C/C++ developers introduce memory management issues in such code bases (see Chromium project statistics about this).…

Well, most LLM are fine tuned over higher quality data, this is kind of how they've kept improving them amongst other things.

The first pass is to learn the fundamentals of language, and then it is refined on curated datasets, so you could refine them on high quality curated C code.

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

#159

Post by eternityforest »

ActorNightly wrote: post #109
markstos wrote: post #105

I have successfully vibe-coded features in C. I still don't like C. The agent forgets to free memory latter just like a human would and has to go back and fix it later. On the other hand, I've enjoyed vibe coding Rust more, because I'm interested in Rust and felt like my understanding approved along they way as I saw what code was produced. A lot of coding "talent" isn't skill with the language, it's learning all the…

> The agent forgets to free memory latter just like a human would and has to go back and fix it later. I highly recommend people learn how to write their own agents. Its really not that hard. You can do it with any llm model, even ones that run locally. I.e you can automate things like checking for memory freeing.

Why would I want to have an extra thing to maintain, on top of having to manually review, debug, and write tests for a language I don't like that much?

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

#160

Post by dbfclark »

I did a goodly chunk of vibe coding over the summer and I found that the best language for me was Rust implementations with Python bindings for interface. A few reasons:

- Everything about rust enforcing correctness catches lots of bugs

- Using a high-level API means I can easily hand-check things in a repl

- In addition to tests, I required a full “demo notebook” with any PR — I should be able to read through it and confirm that all the functionality I wanted has actually been implemented

If the philosophy is (and it should be) “loc is free”, it’s worth thinking about how we can make LLMs produce more loc to give us additional comfort with correctness. Language choice is very much a way.

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