A year of vibes • Hacker News Board

Re: A year of vibes

#61

Post by mekoka » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:23 PM UTC

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 think pretending it to be a machine, on the same level as a coffee maker does help setting the right boundaries.

Why would you say pretending? I would say remembering.

Re: A year of vibes

#62

Post by Arainach » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:24 PM UTC

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…

> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc.

I've tried and fail to write this in a way that won't come across as snobbish but it is not the intent.

It's a matter of standards. Using proper language is how I think. I'm incapable of doing otherwise even out of laziness. Pressing the shift key and the space bar to do it right costs me nothing. It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots. You won't be arrested or punished for not returning the shopping cart to where it belongs, you still get your groceries (the same results), but it's what you do in a civilized society and when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.

Re: A year of vibes

#63

Post by tjr » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:27 PM UTC

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.

There have been lots of tools and resources that have promised (and delivered!) increased programming productivity.

Individual results may vary, but it seems credible that thoroughly learning and using an editor like Vim or Emacs could yield a 2x productivity boost. For the most part, this has never really been pushed. If a programmer wanted to use Nano (or Notepad!), some may have found that odd, but nobody really cared. Use whatever editor you like. Even if it means leaving a 2x productivity boost on the table!

Why is it being pushed so hard that AI coding tools in particular must be used?

Re: A year of vibes

#64

Post by ashot » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

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…

Checkout codecast.sh

Re: A year of vibes

#65

Post by simonw » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:34 PM UTC

YesBox wrote: post #55

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…

Over time, do you think this process could lock you into an inflexible state? I'm reminded of the trade off between automation and manual work. Automation crystalizes process, and thus the system as a whole loses it's ability to adapt in a dynamic environment.

Nothing about this feels inflexible to me at the moment - I'm evolving the way I use these tools on a daily basis, constantly discovering new tricks that work.

Just this morning I found out that I can tell Claude Code how to use my shot-scraper CLI tool to debug JavaScript and it will start doing exactly that:

  you can run javascript against the page using:
  shot-scraper javascript /tmp/output.html \
  'document.body.innerHTML.slice(0, 100)'
  - try that

Transcript: https://gistpreview.github.io/?1d5f524616bef403cdde4bc92da5b... - background: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Dec/22/claude-chrome-cloudfla...

Re: A year of vibes

#66

Post by zombiemama » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:48 PM UTC

Secondly, if his creations are going to be relied upon, it will be the programmer's primary task to design his artifacts so understandable, that he can take the responsibility for them, and, regardless of the answer to the question how much of his current activity may ultimately be delegated to machines, we should always remember that neither "understanding" nor "being responsible" can properly be classified as activities: they are more like "states of mind" and are intrinsically incapable of being delegated.

EWD 540 - https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD05xx/EWD540...

Re: A year of vibes

#67

Post by mjr00 » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:49 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #62

mjr00 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. I've tried and fail to write this in a way that won't come across as snobbish but it is not the intent. It's a matter of standards. Using proper language is how I think. I'm incapable of doing otherwise even out of laziness. Pressing the shift key and the space bar to do it right c…

> It's a matter of standards. [...] when I see someone not doing it that says things to me about who they are as a person.

When you're communicating with a person, sure. But the point is this isn't communicating with a person or other sentient being; it's a computer, which I guarantee is not offended by terseness and lack of capitalization.

> It's akin to shopping carts in parking lots.

No, not returning the shopping cart has a real consequence that negatively impacts a human being who has to do that task for you, same with littering etc. There is no consequence to using terse, non-punctuated, lowercase-only text when using an LLM.

To put it another way: do you feel it's disrespectful to type "cat *.log | grep 'foo'" instead of "Dearest computer, would you kindly look at the contents of the files with the .log extension in this directory and find all instances of the word 'foo', please?"

(Computer's most likely thoughts: "Doesn't this idiot meatbag know cat is redundant and you can just use grep for this?")*

Re: A year of vibes

#68

Post by anamexis » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #49

vunderba wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I've had good luck doing something like this first (but more specific to the issue at hand):

We are getting stuck in an unproductive loop. I am going to discard all of this work and start over from scratch. Write a prompt for a new coding assistant to accomplish this task, noting what pitfalls to avoid.

Re: A year of vibes

#69

Post by kashyapc » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 5:58 PM UTC

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…

> It helps a lot if you treat LLMs like a computer program instead of a human.

If one treats an LLM like a human, he has a bigger crisis to worry about than punctuation.

> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc

No need for confusion. I'm one of those who does aim to write cleanly, whether I'm talking to a man or machine. English is my third language, by the way. Why the hell do I bother? Because you play like you practice! No ifs, buts, or maybes. You start writing sloppily because you go, "it's just an LLM!" You'll silently be building a bad habit and start doing that with humans.

Pay attention to your instant messaging circles (Slack and its ilk): many people can't resist hitting send without even writing a half-decent sentence. They're too eager to submit their stream of thought fragments. Sometimes I feel second-hand embarrassment for them.

Re: A year of vibes

#70

Post by logicprog » Mon, Dec 22, 2025, 6:00 PM UTC

Arainach wrote: post #62

mjr00 wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> It always confuses me when I see shared chats with prompts and interactions that have proper capitalization, punctuation, grammar, etc. I've tried and fail to write this in a way that won't come across as snobbish but it is not the intent. It's a matter of standards. Using proper language is how I think. I'm incapable of doing otherwise even out of laziness. Pressing the shift key and the space bar to do it right c…

This is exactly it for me as well. I also communicate with LLMs in full sentences because I often find it more difficult to condense my thoughts into grammatically incorrect conglomerations of words than to just write my thoughts out in full, because it's closer to how I think them — usually in something like the mental form of full sentences. Moreover, the slight extra occasional effort needed to structure what I'm trying to express into relatively good grammar — especially proper sentences, clauses and subclauses, using correct conjunctions, etc — often helps me subconsciously clarify and organize my thinking just by the mechanism of generating that grammar at all with barely any added effort on my part. I think also, if you're expressing more complex, specific, and detailed ideas to an LLM, random assortments of keywords often get unwieldy, confusing, and unclear, whereas properly grammatical sentences can hold more "weight," so to speak.