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A year of vibes

lucumr.pocoo.org

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Re: A year of vibes

#41

Post by amarant »

anshulbhide wrote: post #38

> 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?

Create a folder called "prompts". Create a new file for each prompt you make, name the time after timestamp. Or just append to prompts.txt

Either way, git will make it trivial to see which prompt belongs with which commit: it'll be in the same diff! You can write a pre-commit hook to always include the prompts in every commit, but I have a feeling most Vibe coders always commit with -a anyway

Re: A year of vibes

#42

Post by ojr »

In the next year developers need to realize normal people do not care about the tech stack or the tools used, there are far too many written thoughts and opinions and not enough polished deployed projects. From an industry standpoint it’s business as usual, acquihires from products that LLMs apparently couldn’t save.

Re: A year of vibes

#43

Post by simonw »

kgwxd wrote: post #14
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…

> There is, for lack of a better word, value in failures Learning? Isn't that what these things are supposedly doing?

LLMs notoriously don't learn anything - they reset to a blank slate every time you start a new conversation.

If you want them to learn you have to actively set them up to do that. The simplest mechanism is to use a coding agent tool like Claude Code and frequently remind it to make notes for itself, or to look at its own commit history, or to search for examples in the codebase that is available to it.

Re: A year of vibes

#44

Post by summarity »

Here’s something else that just started to rally work this year with Opus 4.5: interacting with Ghidra. Nearly every binary is now suddenly transparent, in many cases it can navigate binaries better than source code itself.

There’s even a research team that has bee using this approach to generate compilable C++ from binaries and run static analysis on it, to find more vulnerabilities than source analysis without involving dynamic tracing.

Re: A year of vibes

#45

Post by btown »

CuriouslyC wrote: post #31
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.

With great love to your comment, this has the same vibes as the infamous 2007 Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

I'd also argue that the context for an agent message is not the commit/release for the codebase on which it was run, but often a commit/release that is yet to be set up. So there's a bit of apples-to-oranges in terms of release tagging for the log/trace.

It's a really interesting problem to solve, because you could in theory try to retroactively find which LLM session, potentially from days prior, matches a commit that just hit a central repository. You could automatically connect the LLM session to the PR that incorporated the resulting code.

Though, might this discourage developers from openly iterating with their LLM agent, if there's a panopticon around their whole back-and-forth with the agent?

Someone can, and should, create a plug-and-play system here with the right permission model that empowers everyone, including the Programmer-Archaeologists (to borrow shamelessly from Vernor Vinge) who are brought in to "un-vibe the vibe code" and benefit from understanding the context and evolution.

But I don't think that "just dump it in clickhouse" is a viable solution for most folks out there, even if they have the infrastructure and experience with OTel stacks.

Re: A year of vibes

#46

Post by theptip »

A really interesting point that keeps coming up in discussions about LLMs is “what trade-offs need to be re-evaluated”

> I also believe that observability is up for grabs again. We now have both the need and opportunity to take advantage of it on a whole new level. Most people were not in a position where they could build their own eBPF programs, but LLMs can

One of my big predictions for ‘26 is the industry following through with this line of reasoning. It’s now possible to quickly code up OSS projects of much higher utility and depth.

LLMs are already great at Unix tools; a small api and codebase that does something interesting.

I think we’ll see an explosion of small tools (and Skills wrapping their use) for more sophisticated roles like DevOps, and meta-Skills for how to build your own skill bundles for your internal systems and architecture.

And perhaps more ambitiously, I think services like Datadog will need to change their APIs or risk being disrupted; in the short term nobody is going to be able to move fast enough inside a walled garden to keep up with the velocity the Claude + Unix tools will provide.

UI tooling is nice, but it’s not optimized for agents.

Re: A year of vibes

#47

Post by kashyapc »

the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #32
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…

I know what you mean, it's the uncanny valley. But we don't need to "pretend" that it is a machine. It is a goddamned machine. Surely, only two unclouded brain cells can help us reach this conclusion?!

Yuval Noah Harari's "simple" idea comes to mind (I often disagree with his thinking, as he tends to make bold and sweeping statements on topics well out of his expertise area). It sounds a bit New Age-y, but maybe it's useful in the context of LLMs:

"How can you tell if something is real? Simple: If it suffers, it is real. If it can't suffer, it is not real."

An LLM can't suffer. So no need to get one's knickers in a twist with mental gymnastics.

Re: A year of vibes

#48

Post by comex »

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

Just be glad that there remains a concrete benefit to not atrophying your mind and deeply understanding your code. For now. In the long run, I suspect the behemoth will become just as capable at debugging and dealing with complexity as humans. At that point, human involvement in the actual code will be pointless, and the only remaining human skill needed will be properly directing the agents – the skill those people are learning right now.

(I don’t relish this future at all, myself, but I’m starting to think it really will happen soon.)

Re: A year of vibes

#49

Post by johnsmith1840 »

vunderba wrote: post #39
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…

When you get stuck in a loop it's best to remove all code back to a point it didn't have problems. If you continue debugging in that hammering failure loop you get TONS of random future bugs.

Re: A year of vibes

#50

Post by comex »

kashyapc wrote: post #47
the_mitsuhiko wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

I know what you mean, it's the uncanny valley. But we don't need to "pretend" that it is a machine. It is a goddamned machine. Surely, only two unclouded brain cells can help us reach this conclusion?! Yuval Noah Harari's "simple" idea comes to mind (I often disagree with his thinking, as he tends to make bold and sweeping statements on topics well out of his expertise area). It sounds a bit New Age-y, but maybe it's…

LLMs can produce outputs that for a human would be interpreted as revealing everything from anxiety to insecurity to existential crises. Is it role-playing? Yes, to an extent, but the more coherent the chains of thought become, the harder it is to write them off that way.
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