Live data from Hacker News

Vibe coding is mad depressing

law.gmnz.xyz

51–60 of 168 posts

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#51

This article is not about vibe coding per se, it's about not having strong boundaries between you as the developer, and your client. You should not be allowing the client to dictate how you work, much less them having the permissions to merge in code. This was true before AI too, where clients might say, do X this way, and you should simply say no, because they are paying for your expertise*. It's like hiring a plumb…

> It's like hiring a plumber then trying to tell them how to fix the toilet.

I never faced or witnessed that in software dev.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#52

> Okay, so this non-technical person is sending me codes now. I started wondering if this person was actually a developer here. Maybe just a typo, or maybe a dialect thing, but does anyone actually use "codes" as a plural?

In other disciplines, yes. Very common to hear it in mechanical or aerospace engineering, for example. They'll say "codes" to refer to multiple programs or "a code" to refer to a single program. It's amusing, when I was in the field I just went with it.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#53

For me vibecoding has a similar feeling to a big bag of Doritos. It's really fun at first to slap down 10k lines of code in an afternoon knowing this is just an indulgence. I think AI is actually really useful for getting a quick view of some library or feature. Also, you can learn a lot if you approach it the right way. However, every time I do any amount of vibecoding eventually it just transitions into pure lethar…

Great analogy. Instead of eating the whole bag of doritos in one sitting, do it in phases. So instead of being just a QA tester, you get to pause, reflect and try to make sure you and the AI are on the same page.

> try to make sure you and the AI are on the same page.

What good is AI as a tool if it can get not on the same page as you

Imagine negotiating with a hammer to get it to drive nails properly

These things suck as tools

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#54
post #33

For me vibecoding has a similar feeling to a big bag of Doritos. It's really fun at first to slap down 10k lines of code in an afternoon knowing this is just an indulgence. I think AI is actually really useful for getting a quick view of some library or feature. Also, you can learn a lot if you approach it the right way. However, every time I do any amount of vibecoding eventually it just transitions into pure lethar…

I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API. Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested! Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile. Me: it does not compile. AI: Yes, but the code…

Holy shit, I feel the same. I was arguing with an LLM one day about how to do Kerberos auth on incoming HTTP requests. It kept giving me bogus advice that I could disprove with a tiny snip of code. I would explain. It would react just like yours. After a few rounds, it would give the first answer again. Awful. So infuriating.

I had a similar issue with GNU plot. The LLM-suggested scripts frequently had syntax errors. I say: LLMs are awesome when they work, else they are a time suck / net negative.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#55
post #37
post #8

All the consulting practice arguments aside, this is fundamentally a gatekeeping argument about clients staying in their lane. I'm sure doctors feel the same way about patients with weirdly specific questions about HFpEF diagnoses. Doctors have always hated "Doctor Google", and now they have to contend with "Doctor GPT". It's up to you how much sympathy to have for them.

I think you hit the nail on the head with the analogy to Doctor GPT, but I think you missed it with gatekeeping. I don't think it's about gatekeeping at all. A freelance developer (or a doctor) is familiar with working within a particular framework and process flow. For any new feature, you start by generating user stories, work out a high level architecure, think about about how to integrate that into your existing…

> This is stressful and frustrating for the developer.

Charge more and/or set expectations up front.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#56
Yeah, its bad out there. At my company, we have a team of security professionals that focus on keeping our systems (and others') secure. AI for them has gone from "using it for scripting together nmap" to "we really need the platform your team is working on to do X, Y, and Z, so we vibed up this PR". On the engineering side, I don't have the political power to tell them no, because we don't really have senior leadership and we're behind schedule on everything. Why? Well, I spent two hours today resolving dozens of vulnerabilities our code scanners found in some vibed security team PR. The scanners that they set up, and demanded we use. Half the stuff they vibe we literally have to feature flag off immediately after release, because they didn't QA it, but they rarely revisit the feature because to them its always either "on to the next big idea" or, more often, "we're just security, platform isn't our responsibility".

The thing is: I know you might read that and think I'm anti-AI. In this specific situation, at my company: We gave nuclear technology to a bunch of teenagers, then act surprised when they blow up the garage. This is a political/leadership problem; because everything, nine times out of ten, is a political/leadership problem. But the incentives just aren't there yet for generalized understanding of the responsibility it requires to leverage these tools in a product environment that's expected to last years-to-decades. I think it will get there, but along that road will be gallons of blood from products killed, ironically, by their inability to be dynamic and reliable under the weight of the additive-biased purple-tailwind-drenched world of LLM vibeput. But, there's probably an end to that road, and I hope when we get there I can still have an LLM, because its pretty nice to be able to be like "heyo, i copy pasted this JSON but it has javascript single quotes instead of double quotes so its not technically JSON, can you fix that thanks"

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#57

This article is not about vibe coding per se, it's about not having strong boundaries between you as the developer, and your client. You should not be allowing the client to dictate how you work, much less them having the permissions to merge in code. This was true before AI too, where clients might say, do X this way, and you should simply say no, because they are paying for your expertise*. It's like hiring a plumb…

[deleted]

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#58
post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Some remember the Geocities era as one of the best phases of the internet. Its hard to know what things will look like in 20 years but people may miss the time when AI cost nothing, or very little, and was less fettered. I think probably not- it would be like being nostalgic for really low-res, low frame youtube videos, but nostalgia is pretty unpredictable and some people love those old FMV games.

"but people may miss the time when AI cost nothing" - That's been on my mind a lot... it's like I feel like I have to use it more or I'll regret it! I am not looking forward to the AI talking about NordVPN injected into the session.

Just use another AI to remove it!

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#60
post #8

All the consulting practice arguments aside, this is fundamentally a gatekeeping argument about clients staying in their lane. I'm sure doctors feel the same way about patients with weirdly specific questions about HFpEF diagnoses. Doctors have always hated "Doctor Google", and now they have to contend with "Doctor GPT". It's up to you how much sympathy to have for them.

I don't think the analogy holds up at all. A doctor usually has a very small time window to deal with your problem and then switches to the next patient.

If I'm working on your project I'm usually dedicated to it 8 hours a day for months.

I do agree this is not new, I had clients with some development experience come up with off the cuff suggestions that just waste everyone's time and are really disrespectful (like how bad at my job do you think I am if you think I didn't try the obvious approach you came up with while listening to the problem). But AI is going to make this much worse.

Post reply on HN