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Why I don’t vibe code

jacobharr.is

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Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#101

Post by gverrilla »

extr wrote: post #16

This is like reading an article "I Don't Drive Cars" that goes on like - They're too expensive - My buddy's 1995 Accord breaks down a lot - Walking is healthier, plus you can stop and smell the roses - I enjoy caring for my horse - Sometimes you can get stuck in traffic Fine if that's the way you want and can afford to live your life. But it is an exotic luxury belief. For those of us who are participating in the eco…

'For those of us americans who are participating in the economy for real, the preference to not drive cars is not realistic.'

Fixed that for you.

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#102

Post by ChiperSoft »

beepbooptheory wrote: post #4

I taught myself linux/coding/servers because there was a long period of time where all I had was a chromebook for school, but I still wanted to explore this thing called "pure data" that i'd heard about, and thought I could make art with it. I distinctly remember being continually amazed at how you could get so many things for free, if you know where to look. And yeah.. once I found emacs it was all over. To this day…

Likewise. I avoided programming for years when I was young because the only way to get into it was to spend money on development suites like Borlund or Visual Studio. As a poor kid growing up in rural Michigan, that wasn't gonna happen.

The internet changed all that, because every net connected platform was built on platforms that cost nothing to learn or work in. I wrote my first HTML in freaking MS-DOS Edit. I learned JavaScript by copying code from View Source into an unregistered copy of BBEdit.

Do I have dev software I pay for? Of course! But not many (even fewer today than before everything switched to subscription pricing), and every one can be replaced with something that costs nothing.

The top thread on this post is people discrediting the author because they only used cheaper/free models, as if we should just accept and embrace the commoditization and enshitification of software development, even while it actively deskills us and creates codebases that cannot be maintained without the services that built them.

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#103

Post by cookiengineer »

Aurornis wrote: post #3

I thought this was going to be an article about intelligent use of LLM tools without vibecoding, but it's actually entirely against LLMs altogether. The person who wrote it used a free trial of some tool (most likely not a frontier model) and then gave up forever when the trial ran out. > I then tried using one of the AI tools to analyze my code in a project and a few other small tasks before it all came to an awkwar…

Talking about LLM without harness/environment engineering is like talking about children on a playground without safety measurements.

Managing agents is a lot like managing children. They will outsmart you 99% of the time. If your agentic environment isn't built for good sandboxing, you won't succeed.

If you build an environment that can represent mutual cooperation (e.g. helping an agent by doing the tool calls yourself if it was stuck) then it's soooo much better than just trying to rephrase the ruleset of the engagement.

Don't optimize for retries. Optimize for sandboxing and strong agent to agent communication that you can also observe, modify, and summarize.

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#104

Post by fito »

Aurornis wrote: post #82
tasuki wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're the one in a bubble. [Edit:] That wasn't very helpful of me, let me expand: I live in a city of 400,000 people. It can be crossed on foot in an hour, faster by bicycle. For people who can't or don't want to, the public transport is good. And yet there are traffic jams everywhere. I used to live in Amsterdam, which is a bigger place. I cycled around 13 km each way, which isn't entirely unusual. I stand by my po…

> You're the one in a bubble. The average one-way commute in the United States is 27 minutes. Source https://www.census.gov/newsroom/press-releases/2021/one-way-... Unless you were making a statement about your city, it's not true that most people could easily get to work without a car. > I stand by my point that most people can easily get to work without a car. This probably feels true if you're in a bubble where ev…

Usonians...

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#106

Post by wvenable »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #98
Aurornis wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This article comes from a niche of people who read a lot of news articles about LLMs (links scattered throughout) but have also avoided learning about the tools directly. Like you said, the models available on free trials are usually toys compared to what developers use. Even Opus and GPT-5.5 are available on $20/month plans and you can buy a single month to try it out. The way they write about paying for a tool seem…

So the free trial, designed to convince you that it's worth paying, doesn't well? That isn't the users' fault, that is the companies' fault. If a free trial sucks it's perfectly rational to not pay just in case the paid version doesn't suck.

Not free trials, free versions.

Certainly if the user gets a bad impression from the free version that's on the provider but if you're writing about it then you shouldn't get to be that ignorant.

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#107

Post by LuminaNAO »

sergeym wrote: post #46
Aurornis wrote: post #3

I thought this was going to be an article about intelligent use of LLM tools without vibecoding, but it's actually entirely against LLMs altogether. The person who wrote it used a free trial of some tool (most likely not a frontier model) and then gave up forever when the trial ran out. > I then tried using one of the AI tools to analyze my code in a project and a few other small tasks before it all came to an awkwar…

Regardless of the minimal time with LLMs, I think he hit major points on importance of clarity of abstractions, unreliability, shipping more features and working harder than even and losing touch with the underlying implementation.

Yeah there has to be a middle ground. Agentic engineering you could say is that middle ground, you know your code base and inspect it often. Isn't vibe coding treating your code as a black box where your prompts are the only interface? Sometimes I vibe code if the task is simple, if I'm doing serious work then I'm inspecting the code often. I don't think I will ever do "pure" coding ever again unless I'm in an env that is too secure to trust an agent to exist there.

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#108

Post by leptons »

stephenr wrote: post #100
leptons wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I wanted to spend a lot of time reading the code and figuring out what part actually needs changing, sure... but in this case it's faster to pay for more tokens and get the AI to do it. For code I wrote, it's typically faster for me to modify it than to get the AI to do it.

So what you're saying is, you don't really know what spicy autocomplete is generating because you aren't reading it. Great stuff champ. Really dispelling the idea that vibe coders have no idea what slop is being churned out. Top marks.

[dead]

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#109

Post by pijon »

sublinear wrote: post #87
pijon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are serious about building a startup the best choice you could make is to learn to use these tools intelligently. ESPECIALLY if what you are building is an app… virtually everyone building a startup uses these tools to automate a huge chunk of the work. you have no real chance otherwise. my advice is to get on the cheap claude code sub and to check out the superpowers plugin. the idea of the plugin is to help…

> virtually everyone building a startup uses these tools to automate a huge chunk of the work. you have no real chance otherwise. Huh? Do you mean people "building a startup" without any experience at all ? The list of tasks in the comment you're replying to are well within the skillset of any software engineer that has that old job description classic "3 to 5 years experience". Not to be rude, but if the code is the…

Where did I say that you didn't need to already have the skillset in order to build something with it? It's just a force multiplier. And learning to use these tools effectively is a skill of it's own.

I'll never understand why folks on here look at this tech in such black and white. Of course it has no concept of logic or understanding. But if you do, you can bring out whatever is in your head out into code at 10x the speed.

When building startups you need to move quickly because usually you have quite a bit of competition. If you think you can build a startup by being slow and thorough and take years to produce an MVP go for it :) i don't think you will succeed

Re: Why I don’t vibe code

#110

Post by pijon »

ge96 wrote: post #66
pijon wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

if you are serious about building a startup the best choice you could make is to learn to use these tools intelligently. ESPECIALLY if what you are building is an app… virtually everyone building a startup uses these tools to automate a huge chunk of the work. you have no real chance otherwise. my advice is to get on the cheap claude code sub and to check out the superpowers plugin. the idea of the plugin is to help…

least suspicious account lol

Not sure what you mean by this, I've had this account for years, just never commented.
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