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The Vibe Tax

insufferable.dev

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Re: The Vibe Tax

#61

Post by perarneng »

guybedo wrote: post #29

i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this. I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast know…

If you explicitly ask the agent to make the perfect architecture for the problem and write it down in to a spec and have the developer agents follow it they will. Its just that coding agents have a hard time coding at think about architecture at the same time.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#63

Post by devrob »

supriyo-biswas wrote: post #2

I 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.

Wasn't that what the first iterations of cursor were?

Re: The Vibe Tax

#64

Post by tptacek »

WD-42 wrote: post #33
ad_fontes wrote: post #22

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

Personal finance tracker - the TODO app of 2026.

I'm not sure if this is snark or not, but yes, there is something fundamentally interesting about the fact that "personal finance tracker" is now a project with the same craft valence as a todo list, the "hello world" of the last 20 years of programming. It also says something new about todo list programs, and programs of that ilk/level of complexity: they're now subthreshold programming, or, the way I look at things, a level of programming now accessible to nonprogrammers.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#65

Post by ymolodtsov »

You can't one shot a perfect app with AI. You definitely can create a pretty complex and beautiful production-ready app with AI in a couple of days or weeks depending on what exactly you're building.

I now have my own link catalog, read-latter app and an RSS reader. Tailored to work exactly how I like. Hardened, with automated backup, and external users for the RSS app. It works. It takes learning, some knowledge of terms and very high-level practices, plus design thinking, but I haven't written a line of code for these.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#66

Post by fxtentacle »

aggressively proactive

I'd say that's the correct way to describe frontier models. They were trained with reinforcement learning based on human feedback. And obviously, humans prefer the bug-free variant. That's why models are now super verbose and spam tests like crazy. In their training environment, tokens were effectively free. And the humans that got asked never saw the price. If you ask people to choose the better offer and both are free, you end up with bloat. It's like people over-filling their plate at a buffet, then leaving leftovers. Except in this case, it's AI models burning through your wallet.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#67

Post by JoshTriplett »

guybedo wrote: post #29

i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this. I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast know…

> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt.

Every time you see a benchmark for "how long the agent can go without asking for human intervention", that's encouraging vibe coding.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#68

Post by floren »

yladiz wrote: post #25
ad_fontes wrote: post #22

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

How in the world do you need 30k LOC for your CI/CD??

1. be the kind of guy who thinks more LOC = more betterer

2. ask an LLM to do the needful and never ever look at the results except to count LOC

Re: The Vibe Tax

#69

Post by ad_fontes »

zahlman wrote: post #44
ad_fontes wrote: post #22

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

> Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that). > a… personal financial management application… about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline Just how much functionality are you getting out of that? It's hard for me to imagine that people want t…

My wife was a diehard YNAB user before we met but it went by the wayside once we merged finances. She wanted to get back to better managing our money and started using Google Sheets and then got stuck. She asked me for help trying to create a pivot table and like any good engineer, I built her an entirely new application instead.

In my defense though, it does way more than a spreadsheet. Stuff like OCRing screenshots of bank transactions with a specialized, locally-hosted LLM to avoid data harvesters like Plaid. This became an entirely separate subsystem with verification, automated model benchmarking, prompt provenance, etc.

You'd be surprised at how quickly edge cases start to pile up when an accounting system makes contact with the real world. (If you buy something on a credit card and then return it after your statement closes but before your payment is due, do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase? Well... depends on your bank. Capital One and Chase: yes, US Bank: no.)

> Just how much functionality are you getting out of that?

I'm still dogfooding it. It's a pretty opinionated app that has things a month-end closing ceremony, reconciliation processes, envelope-based budgeting cycles. So unfortunately my feedback cycle is largely locked to the calendar. But my wife absolutely loves it so far.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#70

Post by lelanthran »

raincole wrote: post #41
ad_fontes wrote: post #22

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

> personal financial management application > 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline I mean... Yeah, that's pretty self-explanatory why you don't identify complains about AI-assisted coding.

Yeah. I was thinking the same thing :-)
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