The Vibe Tax
insufferable.dev
The Vibe Tax
1–10 of 138 posts
Re: The Vibe Tax
#2I feel this, yes.
In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
Re: The Vibe Tax
#3Create a spec and have a dumb model execute it. Problem solved.
Re: The Vibe Tax
#4Create a spec and have a dumb model execute it. Problem solved.
Ask the AI to create a detailed spec according to a few simple requirements. Review the spec yourself and correct what you want changed. Then ask the AI to implement the spec. Each time you request something new, ask the AI to update the spec as well.
Re: The Vibe Tax
#5Pre-October 2025, maybe yes. But now? Couldn't disagree more. There is no insight in this post.
Re: The Vibe Tax
#6I tried, but I’m not sure I understand. The vibe tax is caused by the model trying to one-shot everything and doing so requires unnecessary tests? How are vibe coders training the model over months? Do you mean their sessions and preferences are being fed back into the RL?
Re: The Vibe Tax
#7I feel this, yes. In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
I've found writing small well defined tickets and getting Claude to work on them works well for this type of workflow.
Re: The Vibe Tax
#8I feel this, yes. In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
I've found writing small well defined tickets and getting Claude to work on them works well for this type of workflow.
This sounds miserable, why not just give it specific tasks to do in your normal workflow/editor? Why would we want to do MORE of the miserable task of ticket creation.
Re: The Vibe Tax
#9I feel this, yes. In effect, I’ve always wanted a pair programmer agent, not a zero to one programming agent. Unfortunately models these days are mostly of the latter kind and it has caused a major disruption in the way I work. I’d much rather appreciate a small model making fast and specific edits that I ask if it, rather than ingesting 20 files to make changes, and then starting to write tests, etc.
Just said something similar myself in another thread. I'm either writing things by hand (and using LLMs for research, or double checking an idea), or having an LLM spit out something I treat as an external dependency. Its still too tedious for me to use them to write code when I care how it works or there's not obvious invariants the code needs to hold
Re: The Vibe Tax
#10Needs more info, has a good storyline but I am left trying to understand the overall pattern and trend implied there.