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The problem with "vibe coding"

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Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#101

Post by motorest »

roncesvalles wrote: post #95
motorest wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking. That's perfectly fine, because that's what you expect from human work to begin with. From natural text like blog article or tecnical reports to software changes, all output is expected to comply with patterns we are already familiar with. Heck, look at pull requests, where you ask your audience to evaluate your work hoping to reach a conse…

You'd expect that from an average person, but not a genius in the subject. "Genius" is almost by definition a contrarian viewpoint or technique that happens to be better than the consensus or the best-known.

> You'd expect that from an average person, but not a genius in the subject.

That's perfectly fine. It doesn't take a genius to write a webpage or a report.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#102

Post by animuchan »

kemayo wrote: post #18
alchemist1e9 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree they may not and that’s very interesting. As an experienced developer myself I’m starting to think these tools are likely going to increase our market value not decrease it.

It's not implausible that we'll wind up with something like the extremely long-lasting market for COBOL developers. A niche skill that's absolutely essential in a few places, and which can command high salaries as a result... for a few people. Only so many huge legacy banking systems, after all. The problem, as with COBOL, would be the loss of the existing pipeline that created new competent high-level developers.

Sounds fantastic! And it might also help with ageism, when "learned programming long before LLMs" is recognized as a differentiator.

I, for one, welcome this change very much, disastrous as it sounds.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#103

Post by mhast »

mvdtnz wrote: post #16
charcircuit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pure definition is to have AI do everything for you without caring about what the actual code is.

Yeah this is how I interpret it. Type text into the chatbot, copy and paste the outputted code. If it fails to compile, paste the error message and get the resulting code. Similar if it fails at runtime. Supply the LLM with additional code files where necessary but don't really look at the code, just copy and paste in, copy and paste out.

When I've been experimenting with Cursor I've found that one of the essential parts is the agent MUST be able to close the loop itself for it to be useful in any real sense.

So if you are having the agent write a script to call an endpoint and do something with the result. Have it write a script that does that and then ask it to run the script itself. It will then be able to close the loop by itself and iterate on the code until it does what you want (usually).

It is also very useful to ask the agent to write a test for something and then run that test to close the loop in the same way.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#104

Post by TiredOfLife »

makeitdouble wrote: post #45

> To me, programs are “works on my machine” code. My main takeaway from vibe-coding is that nobody cared enough to fill that niche and expectation. And it was really frustrating, yet we're getting there through convolutated, inefficient and borderline barbaric means. People are still lamenting after HyperCard. Automation on windows or macos didn't go anywhere. Shortcuts were a better step into that direction but I fe…

Also Visual Basic and Delphi.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#105

Post by kikimora »

0xCE0 wrote: post #47

The real problem with "vibe coding" (or any coding, or with any product what so ever) is that the end user probably is not a programmer, and therefore cannot have professional judgement on the quality of the implementation. The only thing typical end user care is the perceived behavior, not the implementation details. As it is easier and cheaper to do anything, the result is low-quality products. This of course serve…

I doubt that vibe coded software is maintainable. Time will tell, so far no indication it is.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#106

Post by kikimora »

cess11 wrote: post #82
asadotzler wrote: post #38

The real takeaway here is that programs you whip up for your own use, by any means, are not the same things as maintainable products you can deliver to customers. Vibe coding, or VB tricks and hacks 25 years ago, or whatever, sure, do it if that works for you, but that's not a product you can maintain for a customer base. It's a program, not a product.

I think "maintainable" is carrying a lot of weight in there. A lot of profitable or otherwise successful software has been built by people who reasonably couldn't be called software engineers or computer scientists or whatever academic title. With Excel, Access, VB, Delphi, Wordpress. I'm sure there's an astrologer somewhere that made OK money from a hack in Delphi or VB for divining the stars on a computer. It shoul…

The difference with VB or any RAD is AI generates so much code that a human won’t be able to maintain it manually. Like, 3 months into the vibe-coded project you discover there is a concurrency issue. But it is now all over the place in hundreds variations. How do you even fix it?

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#107

Post by pjmlp »

constantcrying wrote: post #98
pjmlp wrote: post #65

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hence why software developers are out of job, eventually. The day of only a few people around the factory floor to babysit the robots will come, but lets keep celebrating the day they start unloading them from the delivery trucks for installation.

No. Software development is here to stay, they just will not be writing much software. Even before AI much of software development was managing overseas teams.

Not everywhere in the globe, the difference now is that those overseas teams can be reduced as well, as we outsource their work into AI managed systems.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#108

Post by ffsm8 »

thaanpaa wrote: post #99
az09mugen wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As you said, I think also the key differences between skilled and unskilled devs in the context of AI tooling are : 1°) Know how to diagnose and fix critical problems by themselves, because there will be bugs in production for which AI won't be any help 2°) Write maintainable code, AI doesn't care at all of maintainability of code while devs should (must imho) consider pasting AI code as a merge/pull request. For 2°)…

I think it's already happening. I've been using Claude a lot since 3.5. For a while, I barely bothered to check what it was doing because the code it generated tended to be fairly straightforward and usually worked on the first try. But in the last few weeks, I've started reading everything line by line again, because now it's not only often incorrect but also written in a goofy, convoluted way. AI-generated code bei…

That's likely just you starting the read the "straightforward" code and not looking through Rose tinted glasses.

The cutoff date for Claude 3.5 is April 2024, that's currently slightly over one year ago.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#110

Post by Zambyte »

vaylian wrote: post #90
kmoser wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can examine the code at any time, ask for an explanation, and even make changes yourself. In other words, you get out of it exactly what you put into it. If you choose to let the AI do all the coding and never dig into the actual code, you'll learn more about how to communicate with an LLM than you will about how to write code.

> ask for an explanation That is risky. The AI might just hallucinate an explanation.

So can any human-based sources. A healthy learning experience with AI takes discipline, just as it does with humans.
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