Earlier quoted context omitted.
Users want programs to be predictable. Especially non-technical users.
laughs in clippy
I didn't realize I had to specify that "predictably useless" doesn't count.
A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
111–120 of 122 posts
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#112Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which LLM? How are you prompting it? I've been using Cursor for the last few months and notice that for tasks like this, it helps to give examples of the code you're looking for, tell it more or less how the feature flags are implemented and also have it spit out a list of files it would modify first.
I gave it explicit ordering, instructions on what tools to _not_ use, and before/after examples from the codebase. A full page of instructions. After iterating on that for a while, I did a bunch manually (90) and then gave the LLM a list of pull requests as examples, and asked _it_ to write the prompt. It still failed. Finally, I broke the problem up and started to ask it to generate tools to perform each step. It st…
Yep, I think you did everything that's reasonable. I'm surprised myself only because I've been able to have Cursor do similar things for my codebase with no issues. Granted it's a react codebase following fairly standard practices.
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#113I think the idea that it's important to know how to code is going to be seriously challenged. I know I feel like the learning process and insight I gain is important, but I wonder if it is, beyond the subjective. Like I'm sure the grad students working for Euler learned a ton generating logarithmic tables by hand, but it proved to be useless in the end. Could having a solid grasp on memory management/access in C be t…
> Could having a solid grasp on memory management/access in C be the same?
Perhaps not when the code is getting written (by yourself or by an AI).
When you're dealing with a memory leak in production (yes, they can and do happen), or worse -- if you're dealing with a drop in performance -- good luck with the vibe debugging.
Maybe there will be a time not too far off in the future when the stochastic cockatoos become sentient enough to do all of this by themselves, it's sure as hell not happening tomorrow.
Oh, and logarithmic tables were still a useful thing as late as forty odd years ago :)
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#114Earlier quoted context omitted.
> mundane grunt work. this is my favourite kind of work. i can switch my brain off and just do something repetitive for a bit. boredom is necessary for good ideas.
Yeah, but what about your productivity? You could commit and have to maintain 40% more code for the same pay if you had used an LLM.
> You could commit and have to maintain 40% more code for the same pay if you had used an LLM.
that ... doesn't sound like a positive argument for using LLMs... was this sarcasm that totally passed me by?
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#115> For the record, I now have about 32 Claude agents continuously running in tmux windows that I can ssh to, so all day long I can just check via laptop or phone and keep plugging along. What's the cost of 32Cph?
How the hell he's using so much argents at the same time. Is it for 32 different "issues" like feature 1, 2, 3, ...?
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#116This appears to me to be a surprisingly low-effort article. Nothing about managing context length and starting tasks from a good context, managing .md files and structuring repos, very anthropomorphising which does not help, nothing about tools to use to build the right context, no comparison of different approaches, what kind of MCP and/or RAG to get agents to look at documentation.
That's kind of the whole point. Setting up a few MCPs etc. is really a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I have setup context7, Sequential Thinking, etc. and my Claude.md has a lot of details in it, but that only improves the accuracy so much. My whole point is that if the mindset is "I need this to be very accurate for it to work", then you're already putting too much effort into it. I personally have…
ok you're right, i got fooled by the title: "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Expert Programmers"
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#117This appears to me to be a surprisingly low-effort article. Nothing about managing context length and starting tasks from a good context, managing .md files and structuring repos, very anthropomorphising which does not help, nothing about tools to use to build the right context, no comparison of different approaches, what kind of MCP and/or RAG to get agents to look at documentation.
That's kind of the whole point. Setting up a few MCPs etc. is really a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I have setup context7, Sequential Thinking, etc. and my Claude.md has a lot of details in it, but that only improves the accuracy so much. My whole point is that if the mindset is "I need this to be very accurate for it to work", then you're already putting too much effort into it. I personally have…
> They did really well in some things like ... devops
Did they, though? I ask because the vast majority of people touting LLM as a huge win usually seem to speak from a.. DK-heavy perspective. As in, the bulk of their profession experience hasn't actually been doing the subject they're gushing about the LLM crushing.
So I ask you, what is your level of devops experience to make such a dismissive, sweeping statement? I am pointedly inquiring about my own area of expertise, in case that wasn't clear.
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#118Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's kind of the whole point. Setting up a few MCPs etc. is really a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I have setup context7, Sequential Thinking, etc. and my Claude.md has a lot of details in it, but that only improves the accuracy so much. My whole point is that if the mindset is "I need this to be very accurate for it to work", then you're already putting too much effort into it. I personally have…
> They did really well in some things like ... devops Did they, though? I ask because the vast majority of people touting LLM as a huge win usually seem to speak from a.. DK-heavy perspective. As in, the bulk of their profession experience hasn't actually been doing the subject they're gushing about the LLM crushing. So I ask you, what is your level of devops experience to make such a dismissive, sweeping statement?…
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Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#119Earlier quoted context omitted.
> Not a single soul on this planet can review the thousands of lines of vibe coded bullshit that LLMs spit out. Even if you could the code can't be copyrighted.
Citation needed on that one. If that is true, how come huge companies like Microsoft and Salesforce and Google keep boasting about the increasing percentage of their code that is written by LLMs? What do you know that they don't?
> Citation needed on that one.
I can't speak for every country but Copyright laws in the US, EU and UK require a human creator to be valid for copyright.
A casual search brought up this:
- https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell...
- https://www.openpolicy.co/resources/u-s-copyright-office-cla...
- https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2025/02/copyrightabilit...
To add to that you can't patent anything created by an AI either.
> What do you know that they don't?
Oh they are well aware of this.
At enterprise level coding, everything normally needs a programmers certificate of origin as it were. So AI generated code is tagged within the source.
A good example of this (pre-gpt) was SCO vs IBM. Where SCO claimed IBM stole their code. IBM could prove the full history of code they created because of these procedures.
So.. if a person vibe codes a whole application and it gets stolen/copied, legally they have no way to protect that.
[edit] Reading further for UK when it comes to computer generated the law is a bit vague when it comes to vibe coding. There are laws to protect digital works. [edit]
Re: A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers
#120Earlier quoted context omitted.
Citation needed on that one. If that is true, how come huge companies like Microsoft and Salesforce and Google keep boasting about the increasing percentage of their code that is written by LLMs? What do you know that they don't?
> Citation needed on that one. I can't speak for every country but Copyright laws in the US, EU and UK require a human creator to be valid for copyright. A casual search brought up this: - https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell... - https://www.openpolicy.co/resources/u-s-copyright-office-cla... - https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2025/02/copyrightabilit... To add to that you can't patent any…
> While prompt engineering can require skill, the Copyright Office found that a user’s textual input alone does not constitute authorship unless it demonstrably shapes the final output in an original, creative, and expressive way.
I imagine the big tech company's lawyers have decided that the way most professional software engineers use LLMs to help them write code counts as "demonstrably shapes the final output in an original, creative, and expressive way".