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A year of vibes

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Re: A year of vibes

#31

Post by CuriouslyC »

simonw wrote: post #4

I really feel this bit: > With agentic coding, part of what makes the models work today is knowing the mistakes. If you steer it back to an earlier state, you want the tool to remember what went wrong. There is, for lack of a better word, value in failures. As humans we might also benefit from knowing the paths that did not lead us anywhere, but for machines this is critical information. You notice this when you are…

You can export all agent traces to otel, either directly or via output logging. Then just dump it in clickhouse with metadata such as repo, git user, cwd, etc.

You can do evals and give agents long term memory with the exact same infrastructure a lot of people already have to manage ops. No need to retool, just use what's available properly.

Re: A year of vibes

#32

Post by the_mitsuhiko »

kashyapc wrote: post #17

"Because LLMs now not only help me program, I'm starting to rethink my relationship to those machines. I increasingly find it harder not to create parasocial bonds with some of the tools I use. I find this odd and discomforting [...] I have tried to train myself for two years, to think of these models as mere token tumblers, but that reductive view does not work for me any longer. " It's wild to read this bit. Of cou…

> Maybe the balance of spending time with machines vs. fellow primates is out of whack.

It's not that simple. Proportionally I spend more time with humans, but if the machine behaves like a human and has the ability to recall, it becomes a human like interaction. From my experience what makes the system "scary" is the ability to recall. I have an agent that recalls conversations that you had with it before, and as a result it changes how you interact with it, and I can see that triggering behaviors in humans that are unhealthy.

But our inability to name these things properly don't help. I think pretending it to be a machine, on the same level as a coffee maker does help setting the right boundaries.

Re: A year of vibes

#33

Post by rootnod3 »

wiseowise wrote: post #26
rootnod3 wrote: post #24

"I have seen some people be quite successful with this." Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds. EDIT: typo, and yes I see the irony :D

> Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds. You've just described typical run of the mill company that has software. LLMs will make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but let's not rewrite history as if stackoverflow coders are not a thing.

Difference: companies are not pushing their employees to use stack overflow. Stack overflow doesn't waste massive amounts of water and energy. Stack overflow does not easily abuse millions of copyrights in a second by scraping without permission.

Re: A year of vibes

#34

Post by skydhash »

mjr00 wrote: post #29
kashyapc wrote: post #17

"Because LLMs now not only help me program, I'm starting to rethink my relationship to those machines. I increasingly find it harder not to create parasocial bonds with some of the tools I use. I find this odd and discomforting [...] I have tried to train myself for two years, to think of these models as mere token tumblers, but that reductive view does not work for me any longer. " It's wild to read this bit. Of cou…

It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human. It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. I've never had issues getting results I've wanted with much simpler prompts like (looking at my own history here) "python grpc oneof pick field", "mysql group by mmyy of datetime", "python isinstance literal…

Very much this. My guess is that common words like article have very impact as they just occurs too frequently. If the LLM can generate a book, then your prompt should be like the index of that book instead of the abstract.

Re: A year of vibes

#35

Post by 9rx »

JimDabell wrote: post #10
bgwalter wrote: post #2

It is nice that he speaks about some of the downsides as well. In many respects 2025 was a lost year for programming. People speak about tools, setups and prompts instead of algorithms, applications and architecture. People who are not convinced are forced to speak against the new bureaucratic madness in the same way that they are forced to speak against EU ChatControl. I think 2025 was less productive, certainly for…

> In many respects 2025 was a lost year for programming. People speak about tools, setups and prompts instead of algorithms, applications and architecture. I think the opposite. Natural language is the most significant new programming language in years, and this year has had a tremendous amount of progress in collectively figuring out how to use this new programming language effectively.

> and this year has had a tremendous amount of progress in collectively figuring out how to use this new programming language effectively.

Hence the lost year. Instead of productively building things, we spent a lot of resources on trying to figure out how to build things.

Re: A year of vibes

#36

Post by CuriouslyC »

I understand the parasocial bit. I actively dislike the idea of gooning, ERP and AI therapists/companions, but I still notice I'm lonelier and more distant on the days when I'm mostly writing/editing content rather than chatting with my agents to build something. It feels enough like interacting with a human to keep me grounded in a strange way.

Re: A year of vibes

#37

Post by rootnod3 »

rootnod3 wrote: post #33
wiseowise wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds. You've just described typical run of the mill company that has software. LLMs will make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but let's not rewrite history as if stackoverflow coders are not a thing.

Difference: companies are not pushing their employees to use stack overflow. Stack overflow doesn't waste massive amounts of water and energy. Stack overflow does not easily abuse millions of copyrights in a second by scraping without permission.

Another difference: stack overflow tells you you are wrong or tells you and do your own research or to read the manual (which in a high percentage of cases is the right answer). It doesn't tell you that you are right and proceeds to hallucinate some non-existent flags for some command invocation.

Re: A year of vibes

#38

Post by anshulbhide »

> The pull request model on GitHub doesn’t carry enough information to review AI generated code properly — I wish I could see the prompts that led to changes. It’s not just GitHub, it’s also git that is lacking.

Yes! Who is building this?

Re: A year of vibes

#39

Post by vunderba »

simonw wrote: post #4

I really feel this bit: > With agentic coding, part of what makes the models work today is knowing the mistakes. If you steer it back to an earlier state, you want the tool to remember what went wrong. There is, for lack of a better word, value in failures. As humans we might also benefit from knowing the paths that did not lead us anywhere, but for machines this is critical information. You notice this when you are…

When I find myself in a situation where I’ve been hammering an LLM and it keeps veering down unproductive paths - trying poor solutions or applying fixes that make no difference but eventually we do arrive at the correct answer, the result is often a massive 100+ KB running context.

To help mitigate this in the future I'll often prompt:

  “Why did it take so long to arrive at the solution? What did you do wrong?”
Then I follow up with:

  “In a single paragraph, describe the category of problem and a recommended approach for diagnosing and solving it in the future.”
I then add this summary to either the relevant MD file (CHANGING_CSS_LAYOUTS.md, DATA_PERSISTENCE.md, etc) or more generally to the DISCOVERIES.md file, which is linked from my CLAUDE.md under:

  - When resolving challenging directives, refresh yourself with: docs/DISCOVERIES.md - it contains useful lessons learned and discoveries made during development.
I don't think linking to an entire commit full of errors/failures is necessarily a good idea - feels like it would quickly lead to the proverbial poisoning of the well.

Re: A year of vibes

#40

Post by rootnod3 »

wiseowise wrote: post #26
rootnod3 wrote: post #24

"I have seen some people be quite successful with this." Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds. EDIT: typo, and yes I see the irony :D

> Wait until those people hit a snafu and have to debug something in prod after they mindlessly handed their brains and critical thinking to a water-wasting behemoth and atrophied their minds. You've just described typical run of the mill company that has software. LLMs will make it easier to shoot yourself in the foot, but let's not rewrite history as if stackoverflow coders are not a thing.

I am not contesting that stackoverflow isn't bad in many regards, but to equate that to massive PRs or code changes done via AI slop is a different level. At worst, you might get a page or two out of stack overflow but still need to stitch it together yourself.

With LLMs you can literally ask it to generate entire libraries without activating a single neuron in your nogging. Those two do NOT compare in the slightest.

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