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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?

#471

Post by groovy2shoes »

anthk wrote: post #451
godelski wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to say but to back his claim that he was programming since the 90's his CV shows he was working on stuff that's clearly more than your basic undergraduate skill level since the early 2000's. I'd be willing to bet he has more years under his belt than most HN users. I mean I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's, and this guy has been programming most my life. Though that doesn't explicitly imply experience, or m…

38 there. If you didn't suffer Win9x's 'stability', then editing X11 config files by hand, getting mad with ALSA/Dmix, writing new ad-hoc drivers for weird BTTV tuners reusing old known ones for $WEIRDBRAND, you didn't live.

the anxiety that i might fry my monitor by setting the wrong scan rate haunts me to this day

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

#472

Post by Kostchei »

moron4hire wrote: post #323
omnicognate wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 abo…

so what you are saying is that for production we should use AI, and hand code for hobby, got it. Lemme log back into the vpn and set the agents on the Enterprise monorepo /jk

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

#473

Post by ykonstant »

jaimie wrote: post #357
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a Professor of English who teaches programming to humanities students That is the strangest thing I've heard today.

The world of the Digital Humanities is a lot of fun (and one I've been a part of, teaching programming to Historians and Philosophers of Science!) It uses computation to provide new types of evidence for historical or rhetorical arguments and data-driven critiques. There's an art to it as well, showing evidence for things like multiple interpretations of a text through the stochasticity of various text extraction mod…

This is fascinating.

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

#474

Post by pron »

goatlover wrote: post #455
jimbokun wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason to imagine that plateau is because it’s painful to imagine a near future where humans have zero economic value.

It's not the only reason, technologies do plateau. We're not living in orbiting cities flying fusion powered vehicles around, even though we built rockets and nuclear power more than half a century ago.

Yes, but perhaps technology can't plateau beyond vibe coding but below "the machine does everything", not because technology doesn't plateau but because that point doesn't exist. Technology could plateau before both or after both.

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

#475

Post by 72deluxe »

groovy2shoes wrote: post #471
anthk wrote: post #451

Earlier quoted context omitted.

38 there. If you didn't suffer Win9x's 'stability', then editing X11 config files by hand, getting mad with ALSA/Dmix, writing new ad-hoc drivers for weird BTTV tuners reusing old known ones for $WEIRDBRAND, you didn't live.

the anxiety that i might fry my monitor by setting the wrong scan rate haunts me to this day

The squealing noise of a monitor in the wrong rate is a memorable noise etched in my brain.

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

#476

Post by interleave »

Anecdote: I vibe-coded a thing in C using Claude Code + Opus 4.5 and, wow, the process and the result worked _shockingly_ well.

For reference, here are the two heavy-lifting workers:

- https://github.com/akaalias/bipscan/blob/main/src/c/find_seq...

- https://github.com/akaalias/bipscan/blob/main/src/c/check_se...

and here's a screenshot of the thing running:

- https://x.com/SpringStreetNYC/status/1996951130526425449/pho...

and here's the full story:

LOL, I got 100% nerd-sniped by my friend Sönke this week and wound up building a small spaceship.

On Monday he's like "Hey, what if you found obscure seed phrases embedded in public texts? You'd only need to remember the name of the book and the paragraph and go from there."

I honestly could care less about crypto(currencies) and I'm 100% sure this is like cryptanalysis 101. But, yeah, it seemed like an interesting problem anyways.

First, I downloaded a few hundred books from Gutenberg, wrote a ruby script and found BIP39 word sequences with a tolerable buffer for filler-words.

Then, I was like, okay, gotta now check them against actual addresses. Downloaded a list of funded ETH addresses. Wrote the checker in ruby. Ran it. No hits but this was now definitely weirdly interesting.

Because: And what if I downloaded the whole pg19 text corpus to scan! And what if I'd add BTC addresses! And what if I checked every permutation of the seed phrase!

Everything got really slow once I got to processing 12G of raw text for finding sequences and then checking a few million candidates with 44.000+ variations per candidate.

So, let's rewrite this into C! And since I've got 16 cores, let's parallelize this puppy! And since it's a MacBook, let's use GCD! Optimize all the things!

Lol, so NOW this thing is so fucking FAST. Takes four minutes to go through the full pg19 corpus and generates 64,205,390 "interesting" seed phrases. The fully parallelized checker (see Terminal screenshot) processes 460 derived addresses per second.

I really don't care if I get a match or not. I feel like I started with building a canoo and wound up with a spaceship is in itself just the best thing in the world.

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

#477

Post by sebstefan »

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…

>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.

Checking preconditions and postconditions is much easier to do for a human than checking an implementation

The thing that would really make sense is a proved language like Coq or Promela

You can then really just leave the implementation to the AI.

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

#478

Post by psychoslave »

bojo wrote: post #281
AceJohnny2 wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I mean I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's sigh

I feel like a grandpa after reading that comment now.

This year my in-your-face-old-fart-moment was realising I was contributing to Wikimedia projects for longer than some fellow wikimedians existed. XD

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

#479

Post by dns_snek »

keeda wrote: post #286
lunar_mycroft wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some ( partial ) counter points: - I think given public available metrics, it's clear that this isn't translating into more products/apps getting shipped. That could be because devs are now running into other bottlenecks, but it could also indicate that there's something wrong with these studies. - Most devs who say AI speeds them up assert numbers much higher than what those studies have shown. Much of the hype arou…

> - Most devs who say AI speeds them up assert numbers much higher than what those studies have shown. I am not sure how much is just programmers saying "10x" because that is the meme, but if at all realistic numbers are mentioned, I see people claiming 20 - 50%, which lines up with the studies above. E.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45800710 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46197037 > - Prior to LLM…

> I see people claiming 20 - 50%, which lines up with the studies above

Most of those studies either measure productivity using useless metrics like lines of code, number of PRs, or whose participants are working for organizations that are heavily invested in future success of AI.

One of my older comments addressing a similar list of studies: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45324157

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