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How do we stop vibe coding?

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Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#41

Post by prohobo »

resonious wrote: post #36
prohobo wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said you have to turn your brain off to feel the limitations. Actually, for more complex work I think it's pretty common to spend a long time crafting some elaborate prompt, and then arguing with the agent for 10-20 turns, getting a "passable" plan, accepting it then arguing with the agent every step of the way because it's doing it wrong. It's incredibly frustrating, even with models like Fable. Even after t…

This sounds like not the best workflow. If your prompt is that long, you may not be spending your time very efficiently. Splitting problems into smaller problems is huge. You want a concrete idea that you still own. Only tell an agent to do something you know it can nail - this will likely be one subsystem. The subsystems and how they talk is on you.

I agree, I tend to give a high-level concept for what I want done first, and then break it into smaller tasks. That said, there's almost always a misunderstanding within the smaller tasks anyway, which I have to test to find out about, then ask the agent to fix.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#42

Post by bentobean »

throwaway6977 wrote: post #4

Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route. I've never been mo…

> I've never been more informed or understood more about my code, pipelines, and stack than now...

Would you mind clarifying if this includes code, pipelines, stacks, etc... on which many other people are simultaneously working on in a group setting? Or are these all things that you alone are working on as an individual?

My experience has been that AI makes me tremendously more productive as an individual working alone. Put 20 people (all empowered by AI) on a project however, and it quickly falls to shit.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#43

Post by danlitt »

jubilanti wrote: post #18
1718627440 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding You have too, because that's the definition of vibe coding. If you use an LLM to assist you, but still keep your brain on, that's not vibe coding.

Feels like a No True Scotsman fallacy.

By that logic every appeal to the truth is a No True Scotsman fallacy.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#45

Post by lelanthran »

throwaway6977 wrote: post #4

Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route. I've never been mo…

> If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem

No. There are multiple studies showing that skills atrophy is an actual thing. If your brain does not turn off while you are vibe-coding, keep it up and it soon will.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#46

Post by krater23 »

Towaway69 wrote: post #6

Howabout: just turn off AI. I scanned the article, never made it to the bottom, didn’t find the point the author was trying to make. Howabout just learning to code better as a human without using AI. Just like learning a craft. Just refuse to use AI. Not possible because of peer pressure? Well then stop worrying and continue to vibe. Either stop or stop complaining but don’t make excuses or write long articles that r…

The fear that I have that I end up in a team that don't care that I hand code my stuff and let their shit everywhere in the code, so that hand coding isn't possible anymore in a team. It's the same with frameworks. Building a webinterface with a framework is really easy, but the result is just bullshit compared to plain php. It looks good, but your load und wait time goes straight up.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#47

Post by svara »

throwaway6977 wrote: post #4

Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route. I've never been mo…

You're not wrong, but there are levels to understanding.

For example, when studying maths or physics, it is very common to feel like you've understood everything, until you get to the exercises, and need to apply that understanding, and it's only then that you consolidate the knowledge and begin to truly understand in depth.

I like AI enhanced coding, but I do sometimes worry that we're not getting enough of that depth anymore.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#48

Post by danlitt »

zeroxfe wrote: post #32
1718627440 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding You have too, because that's the definition of vibe coding. If you use an LLM to assist you, but still keep your brain on, that's not vibe coding.

> because that's the definition of vibe coding. That's _your_ definition of vibe coding.

> Karpathy described it as a form of coding where you "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists"

If that's not "turning your brain off", what is?

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#49

Post by cyanydeez »

bentobean wrote: post #42
throwaway6977 wrote: post #4

Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route. I've never been mo…

> I've never been more informed or understood more about my code, pipelines, and stack than now... Would you mind clarifying if this includes code, pipelines, stacks, etc... on which many other people are simultaneously working on in a group setting? Or are these all things that you alone are working on as an individual? My experience has been that AI makes me tremendously more productive as an individual working alo…

I've running local models; before having a coding harness, i'd basically do the same misteps the AI does; add the same logging lines, and trace with the errors are, etc. This was exhausting so no docs and tests were rarely if ever created.

Now, to actually get the AI to do anything complex, it's basically required to both write docs and write tests because solidifying behavior only works when there's AI tests it can run to verify some behavior I've verified once.

Then there's things I'm never going to remember the AI had to do; recenly it was "blitting" to /dev/fb0 and it was trying to remember which encoding was which and what order, etc. Things I simply do not want to have to get a detail account of nor is it something I need to remember above the statement "some video drivers have their own RGB, BGR encoding standards" and "an image has a bit depth and size" etc.

These things I would have learned doing it myself, but I would also had to learn where it all breaks and how to interoperate between pillow and video drivers, etc. If I ever do this again, i'll still point the LLM at it with or without this library, and it'll do the same abstract reasoning.

So my knowledge is compact because I don't need to know the implementation for this video display code; I just need the tests and docs and I'll point the LLM at it if I need to extend it.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#50

Post by KronisLV »

bitexploder wrote: post #25
Havoc wrote: post #22

>Writing code by hand will always be around for bespoke and novel, complex work. That sentence is probably the key. There is zero chance of this stopping overall. Much like with artists 90% of the commercial stuff - copy/ads with generic guy in suit picture - will be AI that is "good enough". Less concerned about the code quality and more the labour market dynamics. If this goes anything like translation & creative s…

We now have more work, not less. Engineers can finally address security and tech debt! Surely businesses will see the value in that. Right?

> Engineers can finally address security and tech debt!

I’ve been gradually moving test coverage up, updating packages with CVEs (even if in some cases it’s more like a migration), fixing more bugs, writing load testing solutions, fixing badly made architectural choices and recently even migrated a codebase away from Oracle onto PostgreSQL and figured out some pretty good settings for the DB itself with the aforementioned test tool. Oh and introduced Testcontainers to actually do proper DB tests.

None of this would have happened without agents that churn even while I sleep, but somehow that is still more work cause I have to iterate on their output a lot and come up with additional ProjectLint rules whenever something new comes up. It’s like burnout². Obviously I also bear the blame when the slop inevitably goes wrong despite efforts to keep it manageable, so maybe touching nothing would be better.

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