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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?

#331

Post by jimmaswell »

lmm wrote: post #328

> 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 c…

I'm not very experienced with C++ at all but Sonnet in Copilot/Copilot Chat was able to create entire files with no memory errors on the first try for me, and it was very adept at hunting down memory errors (they were always my own fault) from even just vague descriptions of crashes.

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

#332

Post by lmm »

jimmaswell wrote: post #331
lmm wrote: post #328

> 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 c…

I'm not very experienced with C++ at all but Sonnet in Copilot/Copilot Chat was able to create entire files with no memory errors on the first try for me, and it was very adept at hunting down memory errors (they were always my own fault) from even just vague descriptions of crashes.

> entire files with no memory errors

How do you know? I can believe that they didn't show memory errors in a quick test run on a common architecture with a common compiler, much like most human-written code in the training corpus.

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

#334

Post by N_Lens »

lmm wrote: post #328

> 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 c…

Exactly why Rust is a better candidate for LLM generated code than C IMO

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

#335

Post by throwaway613745 »

If you’re going to vibe code, why not do it in Brainfuck?

Claude hilariously refused to rewrite my rails codebase in Brainfuck…not that I really expected it to. But it went on a hilarious tirade about how doing so was a horrible idea and I would probably fired if I did.

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

#336

Post by DetroitThrow »

lmm wrote: post #328

> 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 c…

I've had issues with Claude and memory related bugs in C. Maybe small programs or prototypes it's fine if you can verify the output or all the expected inputs, but the moment the context is >50k lines or even doing something with pthreads, you run into the exact same problems as humans.

I think Claude would do much better with tools provided by modern C++ or Zig than C, frankly, anyways. Or even better, like the Rust people have helpfully mentioned, Rust.

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

#338

Post by michaelpalmeter »

"If you ask PMs about backend requirements, they will dodge you, and if you ask front-end or web developers, they are waiting for you to provide them the API. The hardest part is understanding the requirements. It's not because of illiteracy. It's because software development is a lot more than coding and requires critical thinking to discover the requirements."

IF this is true, you have bad PMs.

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

#339

Post by sh4rks »

Scarblac wrote: post #130
legitster wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Convince your PMs to use an LLM to help "breadboard" their requirements. It's a really good use case. They can ask their dumb questions they are afraid to and an LLM will do a decent job of parsing their ideas, asking questions, and putting together a halfway decent set of requirements.

How does the LLM get all the required knowledge about the domain and the product to ask relevant questions?

Give it access to the codebase and a text file with all relevant business knowledge.

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

#340

Post by auntienomen »

J_Shelby_J wrote: post #233
ActorNightly wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I use rust. The compiler is my agent. Or to quote Rick and Morty, “that’s just rust with extra steps!”

On a related note, I've always regarded Python as the best IDE for writing C. :)
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