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I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

varunraghu.com

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Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#111

Post by 3np »

Sayrus wrote: post #31
josephwegner wrote: post #13

> coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing This doesn't seem applicable in most contexts. Yes, when I'm coding for fun or purely for learning the finished product is less relevant... but I'd guess the vast majority of code that is written is for a business that _only_ cares about the product. Code is an implementation detail. If (and this is a _big_ if) AI-based coding can increase developer ve…

> even as little as 50% Depending on how you measure that velocity (e.g. including security risks, debugging capabilities, ...) even as little as 5% increase is a no brainer for a business. Whether it's AI, powerful laptops, a fully-fledged IDE, an environment with a good dev experience, anything that gives a few percent increase snowballs into millions over an entire workforce. Whether the current AI capabilities pr…

Meanwhile, my last big employer "couldn't motivate the expense" of a hardware upgrade for the most productive dev on the team (who spends a large part of their time waiting for CI jobs and builds) of I do not believe that corps make rational decisions around these matters.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#112

Post by jerkstate »

jey wrote: post #87
captainkrtek wrote: post #28

Using AI to assist in locating the right library function or similar to documentation has been effective to speed up my development, but I really dislike using it to autocomplete whole functions or large swathes of code, because then I have to spend time reading and understanding code I didn't write. This doesn't ultimately feel "faster" when I own what I write.

I’ve had good results using Claude Code by specifically coaching it on how its implementation should be. It’s not always perfect and sometimes I do have to try again, but it’s remarkably effective when given enough guidance. If only I could figure out how to reliably keep it from adding useless comments or preserving obsolete interfaces for “backward compatibility”…

Me too, I’m using Roo Code and have substantially updated the system prompt to describe the project standards, correct way to restart the services and inspect the logs, specific hints about the frameworks im using and how to use DI and patterns, like think about what kind of code it’s writing and where to put it in the project structure, admonitions not to do certain things it would otherwise do (like in Python it’s common for it to generate code to import inside of functions which can cause runtime errors). I’m experimenting with a tree sitter MCP to see if I can make it aware of the structure of the entire project in a more compact way without all of the code in the context window, we will see where that goes.

Anyways, a year or two ago, the state of the art models couldn’t do math, and the image models couldn’t render hands or text, and those problems are broadly fixed, and I pretty much expect vibe coding to dramatically improve in the next year or two.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#113

Post by NoahKAndrews »

jey wrote: post #94
azthecx wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, with vibe coding you are not a reviewer an editor or an author, quoting from the source: There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. ... I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.

Odd. How can one get the vibes without looking at the code? Like gleaming diamond vibes versus confused spaghetti vibes.

I think the vibes refer to the running software, not to the code itself. I hate the whole concept deeply.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#114

Post by danielbln »

jey wrote: post #87
captainkrtek wrote: post #28

Using AI to assist in locating the right library function or similar to documentation has been effective to speed up my development, but I really dislike using it to autocomplete whole functions or large swathes of code, because then I have to spend time reading and understanding code I didn't write. This doesn't ultimately feel "faster" when I own what I write.

I’ve had good results using Claude Code by specifically coaching it on how its implementation should be. It’s not always perfect and sometimes I do have to try again, but it’s remarkably effective when given enough guidance. If only I could figure out how to reliably keep it from adding useless comments or preserving obsolete interfaces for “backward compatibility”…

Another thing Claude loves is fixing type errors by vomiting up conditionals 10 levels deep that check for presence, and type, and time of day, and age of the universe before it fixes the actual type issue..

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#115

Post by kmac_ »

normie3000 wrote: post #70
kmac_ wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm using AI for grepping, analyzing flow, finding cross-project dependencies, etc. It provides a significant speedup. But the generated code is mediocre at best. Changes look like patches on fabric, not woven threads. AI generates too much redundant code.

How do you use AI to grep?

Grepping is an oversimplification: I ask for specific use cases, for listing all code paths that perform some action, etc. It works really well.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#116

Post by CharlesW »

azthecx wrote: post #66
CharlesW wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> One problem I have is that AI is writing code I don't understand completely, yet I'm still responsible for it. With vibe coding, you are as much a reviewer/editor as an author, and as an editor should never accept generated code that you don't understand. Happily, the same technology that generated the code can explain the code.

No, with vibe coding you are not a reviewer an editor or an author, quoting from the source: There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. ... I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it.

> No, with vibe coding you are not a reviewer an editor or an author, quoting from the source:

That was the joke, which Karpathy found "quite amusing" and "not too bad for throwaway weekend projects". In reality, you won't even get that far with vibe coding if you don't understand what's going on.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#117

Post by aeonik »

kmac_ wrote: post #115
normie3000 wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How do you use AI to grep?

Grepping is an oversimplification: I ask for specific use cases, for listing all code paths that perform some action, etc. It works really well.

How though? Do you setup RAG for this? Large context window? What do you use?

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#118

Post by AlexandrB »

hooverd wrote: post #53
BayArea925 wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Coding will not be done by juniors anymore. We are quickly progressing to humans no longer needing to learn machine langauage (syntax) and computers better developing code by interpreting human languages (english). Teams will be led by one subject matter expert, and fulfilled by thousands of agents. I would not be advising anyone under 21 to become a "coder". Studying computer sceince still has value, but coding was…

God, software is about to get so much worse, isn't it.

Absolutely. If you thought Electron was bloated, prepare yourself for Electron running a bunch of AI-generated slop.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#119

Post by alabastervlog »

magicink81 wrote: post #7

One problem I have is that AI is writing code I don't understand completely, yet I'm still responsible for it. Vibe coding seems like an echo from the future.

It's like importing libraries.

... but without all the signs we look for as proof that a given library must not be too bad, since those signs are traces left by developers and by other users of the library, and LLM-generated code doesn't have any other users (I mean, to the extent it's copying existing code, kinda, but it'll be remixed and removed from its original context, so good luck tracking down the source and double-good-luck figuring out if any proof of quality found there is relevant to what you've got)

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#120

Post by AlexandrB »

bloppe wrote: post #49
billy99k wrote: post #5

"that’s when it struck me. coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing. its about the process. its about how you approach a problem. its critical thinking." From a business perspective, they don't care about this. They just want it built as inexpensively as possible in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding is here to stay.

Software isn't just built. It has to be maintained over time. A long, unplanned outage is much more destructive to a brand than a delayed release. Vibe coding prioritizes the latter at the expense of the former.

I look forward to reading war stories about debugging "vibes" applications during a 3am outage.
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