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How do we stop vibe coding?

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Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#61

Post by johnpdoe1234 »

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 agree, so many things to disagree in the article.

However, I think you are missing that people are lazy. We all are to some extent, some more than others. Putting effort in doing something, well, takes effort. In my experience most people given the opportunity to do a mediocre job turning their brain off or an excellent job at the expense of great brain effort, they would take the former. And this is happening left, right and center now with LLMs.

And the skill atrophy is real, or at least, I am witnessing it real time on a bunch of coworkers.

I agree with you, you don't HAVE to turn your brain off and produce slop, but people do. And at scale, it diminishes greatly the impact of the self-improvement that you, or a minimal subset of developers are doing.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#62

Post by waffletower »

I am much later in my career, and I have established many skills that have atrophied which I have restored in need and/or desire over a span of decades. I think it is fair for younger people to be much more cautious with AI assisted coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex) and their impact upon their skills. But understand that some atrophy may not be bad and simply a symptom of focus. If you want to stay a master juggler, keep juggling. But you can also ask yourself, do I need to be master juggler? You will still be able to juggle regardless.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#63

Post by freedomben »

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.

What is your definition? Is there any difference between AI assisted development and vibe coding to you?

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#64

Post by ethagnawl »

encyclopedism wrote: post #57
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…

That's pretty much how I feel. I've been extremely lucky in that, for the last ~15 years, work often hasn't felt like work as a result. I also think I was (am?) _average at best_ but continually saw improvement, found new tricks, etc. and was kept engaged.

If I wind up stocking shelves at Tractor Supply, like I keep threatening to (because I have no interest in feeding bots with markdown), I'm sure I'll be in for a rude awakening.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#65

Post by asdff »

encyclopedism wrote: post #51
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.

If things were based on pure economics in a vacuum, there would be no good SF based tech jobs. There'd be middling salaries for developers across the country, and probably actually the bulk of the work would actually happen in say latvia or laos. Instead, we have weird layers of cultural assumptions that keep many of these jobs onshored to the bay area in particular, for no reason at all really. Even with the AI tidal wave, companies still want butts in seats in SF for some reason.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#66

Post by enraged_camel »

prohobo wrote: post #9
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 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 does not match my experience at all. I use Fable as an orchestrator, and describe the end goal I want to achieve. It investigates the current state of affairs, and determines the smaller work units needed. We discuss each one, and eventually ticket it out in Linear. By that point, each ticket has all the relevant details, scope, decisions and acceptance criteria.

Then I have it write prompts for implementation agents based on the ticket. These agents are almost always Opus, except for the most complex issues. The prompts contain broader contextual details (like what other tickets might be worked on in parallel, the boundaries, operational/environment constraints, and so on). Each implementation agent starts in plan mode and uses a skill I created called "super plan". Super plan has the agent write the plan and then have it adversarially reviewed by three subagents, and hardened based on their feedback. I then read that plan and greelight it. Once the agent is done with the implementation, it then uses three subagents to do a code review of different aspects (like test quality, regression risk, security, etc.) and incorporate the changes. Then it does a live QA in the browser (if there are UI changes) to make sure the feature has good UX and the UI works as expected at different breakpoints and so on.

Then the Fable orchestrator does one last code review and gives a ship/no-ship verdict, along with a 1-10 rating.

This works incredibly well, and is almost completely hands off. I make all the major decisions and review the results. I never find myself "arguing" with the orchestrator. I might sometimes get frustrated at the implementation agent but that's mostly for UI fidelity issues and honestly pretty rare these days.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#67

Post by encyclopedism »

asdff wrote: post #65
encyclopedism wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If things were based on pure economics in a vacuum, there would be no good SF based tech jobs. There'd be middling salaries for developers across the country, and probably actually the bulk of the work would actually happen in say latvia or laos. Instead, we have weird layers of cultural assumptions that keep many of these jobs onshored to the bay area in particular, for no reason at all really. Even with the AI tida…

I'm not saying it's economics in a vacuum. I'm suggesting that it is LARGELY economics.

> There'd be middling salaries for developers across the country, and probably actually the bulk of the work would actually happen in say latvia or laos

Yes that's what happened and it's called offshoring. If you're in the US or Europe it happened to manufacturing too. It's in China for economic reasons. That doesn't mean there isn't any manufacturing going on in your country.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#68

Post by encyclopedism »

ethagnawl wrote: post #64
encyclopedism wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

That's pretty much how I feel. I've been extremely lucky in that, for the last ~15 years, work often hasn't felt like work as a result. I also think I was (am?) _average at best_ but continually saw improvement, found new tricks, etc. and was kept engaged. If I wind up stocking shelves at Tractor Supply, like I keep threatening to (because I have no interest in feeding bots with markdown), I'm sure I'll be in for a r…

Anecdotally at least I've seen devs who have checked out by completely flipping careers or doing something zany such as living off grid. Unfortunately like most things your options are limited to your economic circumstances.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#69

Post by azinman2 »

fidotron wrote: post #34
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…

The people struggling with this most are also the ones that never got to grips with human delegation either. At least in my circle it's the classic leads/seniors (that predate the scrum "everyone's the same" thing) that are managing to get the most real mileage out of this.

But when you lead there’s a level of trust in the people who are going to implement. You may still have a high level view of what’s going on, but that’s different from sweating the details. It also is different from bottoms up building those details where consequences become clear in thought.

I’ve noticed the pressure to keep velocity and move forward means I’m less sure of those details compared to before. LLMs are also inconsistent in the work they do - some of it is brilliant, other parts are idiotic. It’s totally different than what you’d get when leading humans.

Re: How do we stop vibe coding?

#70

Post by fidotron »

azinman2 wrote: post #69
fidotron wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The people struggling with this most are also the ones that never got to grips with human delegation either. At least in my circle it's the classic leads/seniors (that predate the scrum "everyone's the same" thing) that are managing to get the most real mileage out of this.

But when you lead there’s a level of trust in the people who are going to implement. You may still have a high level view of what’s going on, but that’s different from sweating the details. It also is different from bottoms up building those details where consequences become clear in thought. I’ve noticed the pressure to keep velocity and move forward means I’m less sure of those details compared to before. LLMs are…

> But when you lead there’s a level of trust in the people who are going to implement.

"Trust but verify". This is why you have QA processes, testing, checklists etc. All the sanity checks that got thrown away in the web tech rush pre-AI.

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