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Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

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Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#11

Post by danielbln »

Insanity wrote: post #9
mycentstoo wrote: post #4

I believe choosing a well known problem space in a well known language certainly influenced a lot of the behavior. AIs usefulness is correlated strongly with its training data and there’s no doubt been a significant amount of data about both the problem space and Python. I’d love to see how this compares when either the problem space is different or the language/ecosystem is different. It was a great read regardless!

100% this. I tried haskelling with LLMs and it’s performance is worse compared to Go. Although in fairness this was a year ago on GPT 3.5 IIRC

Post-training in all frontier models has improved significantly wrt to programming language support. Take Elexir, which LLMs could barely handle a test ago, but now support has gotten really good

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#13

Post by kachapopopow »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #10
numpad0 wrote: post #8

I don't feel good doing it, but is anyone else feeling not capitalizing text, maintaining a slightly abrasive attitude, and consciously stealing credits, yield better results from coding agents? e.g. "i want xxx implemented, can you do", "ok you do" than "I'm wondering if..." etc.

There is so much subjective placebo with “prompt engineering” that anyone pushing any one thing like this just shows me they haven’t used it enough yet. No offense, just seeing it everywhere. Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”… It’s a subjective system without control testing. Humans are definitely going to apply religion, dogma…

I tell my agent to off it self every couple of hours, it's definitely placebo as you're just introducing noise which might or might not be good. Adding hmm, has been my goto for a bit if I want it to force to give me different results cause it appears to trigger some latent regions of the llms.

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#16

Post by MangoCoffee »

stavros wrote: post #3

I've come to view LLMs as a consulting firm where, for each request, I have a 50% chance of getting either an expert or an intern writing my code, and there's no way to tell which. Sometimes I accept this, and I vibe-code, when I don't care about the result. When I do care about the result, I have to read every line myself. Since reading code is harder than writing it, this takes longer, but LLMs have made me too laz…

>When I do care about the result, I have to read every line myself.

isn't that the same as delegated task to jr developer but you still have to check their work as sr?

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#18

Post by diggan »

Insanity wrote: post #9
mycentstoo wrote: post #4

I believe choosing a well known problem space in a well known language certainly influenced a lot of the behavior. AIs usefulness is correlated strongly with its training data and there’s no doubt been a significant amount of data about both the problem space and Python. I’d love to see how this compares when either the problem space is different or the language/ecosystem is different. It was a great read regardless!

100% this. I tried haskelling with LLMs and it’s performance is worse compared to Go. Although in fairness this was a year ago on GPT 3.5 IIRC

> Although in fairness this was a year ago on GPT 3.5 IIRC

GPT3.5 was impressive at the time, but today's SOTA (like GPT 5 Pro) are almost night-and-difference both in terms of just producing better code for wider range of languages (I mostly do Rust and Clojure, handles those fine now, was awful with 3.5) and more importantly, in terms of following your instructions in user/system prompts, so it's easier to get higher quality code from it now, as long as you can put into words what "higher quality code" means for you.

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#19

Post by diggan »

SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #10
numpad0 wrote: post #8

I don't feel good doing it, but is anyone else feeling not capitalizing text, maintaining a slightly abrasive attitude, and consciously stealing credits, yield better results from coding agents? e.g. "i want xxx implemented, can you do", "ok you do" than "I'm wondering if..." etc.

There is so much subjective placebo with “prompt engineering” that anyone pushing any one thing like this just shows me they haven’t used it enough yet. No offense, just seeing it everywhere. Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”… It’s a subjective system without control testing. Humans are definitely going to apply religion, dogma…

> Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”…

I'm not saying I've proven it or anything, but it doesn't sound far-fetched that a thing that generates new text based on previous text, would be affected by the previous text, even minor details like using ALL CAPS or just lowercase, since those are different tokens for the LLM.

I've noticed the same thing with what exact words you use. State a problem as a lay/random person, using none of the domain words for things, and you get a worse response compared to if you used industry jargon. It kind of makes sense to me considering how they work internally, but happy to be proven otherwise if you're sitting on evidence either way :)

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#20

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

kachapopopow wrote: post #13
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much subjective placebo with “prompt engineering” that anyone pushing any one thing like this just shows me they haven’t used it enough yet. No offense, just seeing it everywhere. Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”… It’s a subjective system without control testing. Humans are definitely going to apply religion, dogma…

I tell my agent to off it self every couple of hours, it's definitely placebo as you're just introducing noise which might or might not be good. Adding hmm, has been my goto for a bit if I want it to force to give me different results cause it appears to trigger some latent regions of the llms.

This seems to be exactly what I’m talking about though. We made a completely subjective system and now everyone has completely subjective advice about what works.

I’m not saying introducing noise isn’t a valid option, just doing it in ‘X’ or ‘y’ method as dogma is straight bullshit.

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