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How do we stop vibe coding?

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Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#51

Post by encyclopedism »

thenatureboy wrote: post #3

Economics will dictate that working bespoke on coding will simply not be profitable anymore. Great article but there is no stopping this trend at this rate.

I would guess that most HN users are employees. By far the largest dictator of your day to day life is your employer. Sentences such as this one from the article

"Hopefully, many developers will slowly rediscover their love for programming when they can apply it to problems that actually interest and challenge them"

Simply to not understand this dynamic. The economics will dictate what will happen and NOT much else.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#52

Post by krater23 »

thenatureboy wrote: post #3

Economics will dictate that working bespoke on coding will simply not be profitable anymore. Great article but there is no stopping this trend at this rate.

That is, assuming you believe "vibe coding" is actually more efficient than hand-coding. If your users simply accept bugs that can't be fixed because doing so would lead to a day-long discussion with your AI, then it is true. Human language is one of the worst ways to describe software.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#53

Post by bitexploder »

KronisLV wrote: post #50
bitexploder wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 aforement…

That is what I have learned over the last year. I still only have so much mental bandwidth. I can definitely do more now, but I have become relatively disciplined about what I nudge along each week with agents and it's okay if it doesn't happen in 2 days or 3 days. The efficiency gains are there. Agentic work is horrible for stealing our attention and the way it encodes in our brain as unfinished threads that occupy mental bandwidth. I keep it all in tasks now like everything else. Even "Go prompt agent X.". I have several projects I just prompt once a day with a thinking agent. And I only work on things that have some meaningful result driven outcome that aligns with my overall goals. No more "I am doing this because I can projects" or if I do start those they are much smaller and constrained. It helps. I still feel like I could be doing more, but I think it is a fundamental misalignment of how agentic workflows hijack our brain's reward system and I am extremely cautious about it now.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#54

Post by js8 »

IMHO and IME, we need new programming language(s).

I started on Pascal and C/C++. Then I moved to Python. It freed my mind from types, and I was able to think more high-level about the data structures.

After another decade and half, I discovered Haskell. Turns out the types were not the problem; the lack of proper type inference was.

So it turned out to be a usability issue of C/C++. Writing type explicitly everywhere is just bad UX.

My point is this. LLM's allow you to program and reason about code in a natural language. It clearly has some advantages over programming in traditional programming languages. But it has a significant disadvantage that natural language is not semantically sound. (And as a result, you get what people incorrectly call indeterminism of LLMs.)

I believe we need better programming language in which we can also express metalogical properties of programs, as if we expressed them in natural language, but with soundness guarantees. This new language would then become the new source code.

This language needs to have primitives for fuzzy and modal logic, and there need to be some algorithm that can typecheck (check if the statement is consistent) and type-infer (if the statement is inconsistent or ambigous, fill-in the likely parts, possibly interactively).

We know such a formal system must exists, because a very close variant of it has already been implemented (or discovered?) within LLM.

We essentially need to discover true metaprogramming - writing programs that manipulate programs. From Curry-Howard isomorphism, we know there is analogy between program execution and reasoning. So it is time to start using same language for both. (I am looking into using Triage Calculus for this.)

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#56

Post by IAmGraydon »

True vibe coding (as in, using an LLM to write software end to end without understanding what's going on under the hood) just doesn't work in the long term, so it will likely stop itself. No one who's serious creates software this way.

That said, I don't understand why it seems like it has to be all or nothing. Just architect the software yourself and tell the LLM to modify small chunks of code that you understand. Or maybe not even small, but a body of code where you understand what it does and can understand what the LLM is changing. Don't tell it to implement a feature - tell it to implement a function. If you can't do this, then you're a wannabe who's using LLMs to LARP as an actual programmer.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#57

Post by encyclopedism »

ethagnawl wrote: post #44

> ... why would we even want to do this manually? All it did was lead to burnout and cynicism. Speak for yourself. If anything is leading _me_ to burnout, it's this bullshit hype cycle.

For many people coding isn't just a means to an end but a pleasure in itself. Coding by hand, the raw intellectual challenge to my mind has been one of the greatest 'jobs' you could have. Earning money for what is essentially 'solving puzzles' is amazing!

With vibe coding that's out the window and a race to the bottom to remove as MUCH intellectual human input is at hand. To reiterate Human intellectual input is what AI is attempting to do away with or reduce as much as possible.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#58

Post by scottLobster »

svara wrote: post #47
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 dep…

Even at a basic level when asking the AI how to do something in a new language, sure it saves time, but I no longer have to manually scan documentation and get the incidental discovery of "oh, that function also exists, cool" which then sticks in my memory for later.

It's like using SparkNotes for classic novels, there's value in the friction of having to wrestle with the source material yourself. Whether that's more valuable than what the AI brings to the table I'm not sure yet.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#59

Post by encyclopedism »

ls-a wrote: post #8

[flagged]

It is not always the case that there is a way to adapt to a certain thing.

How can the immense investment in AI pay off? AI is doing away with human intellectual input.

There are 25 million developers globally, AI efficiency may mean in the future we need only 15 million. That 10 million saving is the return on investment. Those 10 million developers aren't adapting sorry.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#60

Post by waffletower »

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 have not worked on a project with 20 AI-assisted contributors. I have worked on a team with 4. While smaller, I can already see that the code churn, and conflict resolution is more a kin to a larger team. However, we also have been introspective about how we can interoperate with these new disruptive tools -- ritualizing the LLM's ability to create and maintain documentation and perform code reviews has been indispensable. Perhaps 20 on a project is unsustainable, and even unnecessary.
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