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“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

cendyne.dev

101–110 of 312 posts

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#101

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

> Then the reality hit.

The reality in which people like me get to do work for US/UK for 4x the salary relative to equivalent work locally, and some of this work is actually cleaning up after folks elsewhere, who being cheapest labor available still got 4x their local salary for this work, and the total is still 4x cheaper than what the US/UK company would pay locally? :).

(I'm only half-joking; in a previous life, I worked on a project with this exact development history.)

The outsourcing market is alive and kicking, and offers a whole spectrum of quality and price. The more to the east of US you are, the easier it is to see :).

> The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

Nah, the difference here is, in outsourcing-to-LLMs scenario, there are no people who do the work and benefit from favorable salary/costs-of-living ratio.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

The market where I live is far larger than it was 15-20 years ago. So both have grown, the outsourcing didn't kill local as predicted.

The growth of demand for software development is absurd and heavily skews people's expectations. It won't last forever.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#106

I'll share a new wrinkle that casts more shade on the coding LLMs. We have a fair number of offshore resources that are used for dev. They developers are fully integrated into the team, are in all the stand-ups, and substitute for the usual role of junior programmers. They don't get the grunt-work shoveled on them, they get the same work as everyone else, they're just expected to not be as fast. In 6 months 2 out of…

I've been contracting for a fairly largish company (around 300 devs split across ~40 teams). The US based company was bought out by private equity about a year ago and many senior/lead engineers were forced out and contracted out to cheaper overseas labor.

The company has been relatively ambivalent about the usage of code assistant AI, but during PR reviews it has become very apparent that its seen widespread adoption among the outsourced dev teams purely because of code duplication. Our company has a fairly large number of repositories and bespoke libs for utility type functionality.

In the past, a programmer might have internally said to themselves, "There's no way that somebody hasn't already written this stupid function X or method Y", and they'd take a few minutes to search or reach out to see if it exists within an organization.

Instead during some of the recent code reviews, there has been a huge uptick in core functionality that is very obviously being spit out by the LLM. At best its just extra unnecessary code. At worst it will introduce new bugs since our custom functions often handle business domain specific edge cases that an LLM simply wouldn't know about.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#107
post #90

I think the bigger "AI hype vs. Reality" gap is about the productivity numbers people casually throw around, like "10x as productive" or even 100x. For example, here are YC partners quoting a company in a batch claiming "100x speedup" in coding performance compared to the previous month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=1837s You can tell this claim is false, because that level of productivity increase w…

I see your problem (at least according to Yegge's theory): the batch applicants are just too senior. If they were more junior, only then would they benefit from the 100x multiplier. The olds are just too far removed from the enlightened way, you see

Not sure if this is a joke, but it's hilarious either way.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#108
post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first job in the industry was cleaning up a large codebase created overseas by indian developers. Maybe the new kids today will break into the industry by cleaning up messes that have been generated by AI.

the next version of AI will simply make it into a bigger mess.

Nah, the magic/promise of AI is that it has positive chance of getting there, so you can keep feeding it dollars until it eventually gets you the thing you want, and that it's still cheaper than having people do it the old-school way.

We're not there yet, but I don't see anything preventing us from getting there in ~5 years.

(Remember: 5 years ago, SOTA in this space was letting a genetic algorithm poke at an AST and hopefully maybe arrive at a trivial program solving a small algorithmic problem.)

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#109

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

This is not about "LLM coding agents". It's about those agents being (mis)used in the very specific blind faith approach of "vibe coding", not least due to the hype merchants and grifters picking up the phrase and running with it shorn of the original cautionary notes about it being useful for bringing a bit of fun back into non-serious coding. Criticizing the idea (and conflating it with the wider field of LLM codin…

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