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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?

#321

Post by tptacek »

nicoburns wrote: post #95
sneak wrote: post #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…

> It creates robust, complex systems that work Do you have any examples of these? All the vibe coded systems I've seen so far were very far from robust.

2025 called and wants your argument back.†

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45549434

† this is a joke; i feel it works on multiple levels

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

#323

Post by moron4hire »

omnicognate wrote: post #118
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…

> Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive. As a Professor of English who teaches programming to humanities students, the writer has had an extremely interesting and unusual academic career [1]. He sounds awesome, but I think it's fair to suggest he may not have much experience of large scale commercial software devel…

That was such a strange aspect. If you will excuse my use of the tortured analogy of comparing programming to wood working, there are is a lot of talk about hand tools versus power tools, but for people who aren't in a production capacity--not making cabinets for a living, not making furniture for a living--you see people choosing to exclusively use hand tools because they just enjoy it more. There isn't pressure about "you most use power tools or else you're in self-denial about their superiority." Well , at least for people who actually practice the hobby. You'll find plenty of armchair woodworkers in the comments section on YouTube. But I digress. For someone who claims to enjoy programming for the sake of programming, it was a very strange statement to make about coding.

I very much enjoy the act of programming, but I'm also a professional software developer. Incidentally, I've almost always worked in fields where subtly wrong answers could get someone hurt or killed. I just can't imagine either giving up my joy in the former case or abdicating my responsibility to understand my code in the latter.

And this is why the wood working analogy falls down. The scale at which damage can occur due to the decision to use power tools over hand tools is, for most practical purposes, limited to just myself. With computers, we can share our fuck ups with the whole world.

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

#324

Post by karpour »

It's so refreshing to see a proper website these days, no js, no cookie banners, just hypertext. Your part about still enjoying programming really resonated with me. I still get so much joy out of programming after 20 years of doing it, it's still just as exciting to learn new things, and I am definitely not running out of new things to learn.

I would absolutely love to teach programming to non-programmers. I have also been offered a job at the technical school where I graduated. But remembering how uninterested the vast majority of my classmates were back then discouraged me from even trying. I guess what I'd want is a teach a room full of people excited to learn about programming.

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

#325

Post by douglasisshiny »

epolanski wrote: post #128
mdavidn wrote: post #111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're the one in denial? AI makes some things faster, like working in a language I don't know very well. It makes other things slower, like working in a language I already know very well. In both cases, writing code is a small percentage of the total development effort.

No I'm not, I'm just sick of these edgy takes where AI does not improve productivity when it obviously does. Even if you limit your AI experience to finding information online through deep research it's such a time saver and productivity booster that makes a lot of difference. The list of things it can do for you is massive, even if you don't have it write a single line of code. Yet the counter argument is like "bu..…

>No I'm not, I'm just sick of these edgy takes where AI does not improve productivity when it obviously does.

Feel free to cite said data you've seen supporting this argument.

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

#327

Post by agentultra »

The vast majority of software models are trained on have little to no standards and contains all kinds of errors and omissions.

And these are systems that require a human in the loop to verify the output because you are ultimately responsible for it when it makes a mistake. And it will.

It’s not fun because it’s not fun being an appendage to a machine that doesn’t know or care that you exist. It will generate 1200 lines of code. You have to try and make sure it doesn’t contain the subtle kinds of errors that could cost you your job.

At least if you made those errors you could own them and learn from it. Instead you gain nothing when the machine makes an error except the ability to detect them over time.

I think if you don’t know C extremely well then there’s no point vibe coding it. If you don’t know anything about operating systems you’re not going to find the security bugs or know if the scheduler you chose does the the right thing. You won’t be able to tell the difference between good code and bad.

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

#328

Post by lmm »

> But if you look carefully, you will notice that it doesn’t struggle with undefined behavior in C. Or with making sure that all memory is properly freed. Or with off-by-one errors.

Doubt. These things have been trained to emulate humans, why wouldn't they make the same mistakes that humans do? (Yes, they don't make spelling errors, but most published essays etc. don't have spelling errors, whereas most published C codebases do have undefined behaviour).

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

#329

Post by lmm »

jmull wrote: post #49
stared wrote: post #5

There was a recent discussion, “Why AI Needs Hard Rules, Not Vibe Checks” ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46152838 ). We need as many checks as possible - and ideally ones that come for free (e.g., guaranteed by types, lifetimes, etc.) - which is why Rust might be the language for vibe coding. Without checks and feedback, LLMs can easily generate unsafe code. So even if they can generate C or Assembly that wor…

Rust doesn't prevent programs from having logic errors. If LLMs produce code riddled with bugs in one language it will do in other languages as well. Rust isn't going to save you.

Idiomatic Rust prevents many classes of logic errors. Just having proper sum types eliminates many (perhaps most) common logic errors.

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

#330

Post by pron »

whimsicalism wrote: post #243
pron wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that some imagined AI that can reliably produce reliable software will also likely be able to be smart enough to come up with the requirements on its own. If vibe coding is that capable, then even vibe coding itself is redundant. In other words, vibe coding cannot possibly be "the future", because the moment vibe coding can do all that, vibe coding doesn't need to exist. The converse is that if vibe codi…

I agree with the first part which is basically 'being able to do a software engineers full job' is basically ASI/AGI complete. But I think it is certainly possible that we reach a point/plateau where everything is just 'english -> code' compilation but that 'vibe coding' compilation step is really really good.

It's possible, but I don't see any reason to assume that it's more likely that machines will be able to code as well as working programmers yet not be able to come up with requirements or even ideas as well as working PMs. In fact, why not the opposite? I think that currently LLMs are better at writing general prose, offering advice etc.., than they are at writing code. They are better at knowing what people generally want than they are at solving complex logic puzzle that require many deduction steps. Once we're reduced to imagining what AI can and cannot do, we can imagine pretty much any capability or restriction we like. We can imagine something is possible, and we can just as well choose to imagine it's not possible. We're now in the realm of, literally, science fiction.
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