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Vibe coding is mad depressing

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Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#111

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

112233 wrote: post #87
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #36

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's terrible at the niches I actually have expertise in, which are in mathematics. I'd guess an expert is going to find the flaws in anything it's doing in their field. That being said, if you're just trying to e.g. see what some GUI library can do then it's pretty useful to get something going. I personally would prefer not using it in anything that's not very much a throwaway test project though, but that is my lu…

But doesn't your argument actually mean it is terrible at absolutely everything in a very subtle, convincing way, so that it takes an actual expert in the field to tell that the generated text is not a profound revelation but a bag of nonsense? Meaning, is the answer in the field I'm not an expert of good, or am I simply being fooled by emoji and nice grammar?

I don't think it's expert, I just don't think being expert is necessary to get some value out of it if you aren't an expert. The trap is letting the charade go on longer than it should though. I personally only see the main value in using it to create test projects or to get the gist of what a library can do. I do think that's pretty valuable, and I also think real expertise is more valuable.

Or you can do like some of the others suggest and eliminate pure vibecoding. Just use it as a back and forth where you understand along the way and make well-reasoned changes. That looks a lot more like real engineering, so it's not surprising the other commenters report better results.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#112

Post by duskdozer »

jgilias wrote: post #45
randallsquared wrote: post #35

> Okay, so this non-technical person is sending me codes now. I started wondering if this person was actually a developer here. Maybe just a typo, or maybe a dialect thing, but does anyone actually use "codes" as a plural?

It’s not just that, there are other things in the article pointing to the person being a non-native English speaker. Which is fine, I’m one too. It’s somehow ironic though that his written output could’ve been improved by running it through an AI tool.

I'd much rather read someone's actual errored, nonnative writing than whatever an LLM would produce from it. Not only because it's annoying reading the same fake style over and over, but also because the less fluent they are the less able they are to tell when the LLM output is changing things in ways that don't reflect what they're thinking.

And if the main complaint is just a few odd words or structures, it's really not that big of a deal to me.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#113

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

fragmede wrote: post #93
112233 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But doesn't your argument actually mean it is terrible at absolutely everything in a very subtle, convincing way, so that it takes an actual expert in the field to tell that the generated text is not a profound revelation but a bag of nonsense? Meaning, is the answer in the field I'm not an expert of good, or am I simply being fooled by emoji and nice grammar?

Gell-Mann amnesia, but for LLMs.

It's an interesting concept, but inapplicable here because I don't trust the media reporting on LLMs and I personally believe expert programmers are never going to be replaced. My concept of the value of LLMs is that they are good for generating throwaway test code to assess the use of a library or to prototype a feature.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#114

Post by zahlman »

Morromist wrote: post #17
ctime wrote: post #4

We’re in the geocities phase of LLM, mostly trash, very basic, but eventually, people will either get bored and go back to whatever it is they were doing or actually use the tools for useful and productive work. As for the feelings that using LLM has when it one shots your project start (and does a pretty good job), have a German word: Automatisierungskummer (automation sorrow) • Kummer is emotional heaviness, a mild…

Some remember the Geocities era as one of the best phases of the internet. Its hard to know what things will look like in 20 years but people may miss the time when AI cost nothing, or very little, and was less fettered. I think probably not- it would be like being nostalgic for really low-res, low frame youtube videos, but nostalgia is pretty unpredictable and some people love those old FMV games.

> Some remember the Geocities era as one of the best phases of the internet.

I remember the feeling of realizing that I had terrible taste just like everyone else and I was putting huge amounts of effort into trying to do seamless tiling background images that still looked awful and distracting and ruined the contrast. And also the feeling of having no idea what to talk about or why anyone would care.

Now I have way too much to talk about — so much that I struggle to pick something and actually start writing — and I'm still not sure why anyone would care. But at least I've learned to appreciate plain, solid-colour backgrounds.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#115

Post by zahlman »

bunderbunder wrote: post #80
goosejuice wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's not at all difficult for a scientifically literate person to be more up to date on the literature of something they have, or could have, than even a specialist in that broad area. There's too many disorders and not enough time. I have something that about a quarter percent of individuals have in the US. A young specialist would know how to treat based on guidelines but beyond that there's little benefit in keepi…

My PCP and I have a really good rapport, and so when I stated having weird confusing health problems they were quite happy to hear what I was finding in PubMed and then share their thoughts on it, and together we figured things out and got my situation handled. I thought it was a nicely complementary situation: they didn’t have the time to do a literature dive, and I didn’t have the expertise to fully understand what…

> Morgellons (/mɔːrˈɡɛlənz/) is the informal name of a self-diagnosed, scientifically unsubstantiated skin condition in which individuals have sores that they believe contain fibrous material.[1][2] Morgellons is not well understood, but the general medical consensus is that it is a form of delusional parasitosis,[3] on the psychiatric spectrum.[4]

Your family member... mistakenly believed that he had a psychiatric condition involving a mistaken belief?

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#116

Post by zahlman »

moomoo11 wrote: post #15

“I made a chat app using Claude in two hours” Ah yes a supabase backed, hallucinated data model with random shit, using deprecated methods, and a copy paste UI. Zero access control or privacy, 1% of features, no files uploading or playback or calling. “Can you scale this to 1M users by end of the week? Something similar to WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal” Sybau mf

>Sybau mf

What does this mean?

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#117

Post by kukkeliskuu »

satvikpendem wrote: post #21
tptacek wrote: post #8

All the consulting practice arguments aside, this is fundamentally a gatekeeping argument about clients staying in their lane. I'm sure doctors feel the same way about patients with weirdly specific questions about HFpEF diagnoses. Doctors have always hated "Doctor Google", and now they have to contend with "Doctor GPT". It's up to you how much sympathy to have for them.

Not related to other types of clients, but for doctors and patients specifically, I have heard stories where doctors dismissed patients' concerns until the patients themselves googled and found out exactly what issue they had and then the doctors were much more amenable to solving it [0]. Indeed, [1] > researchers found that searching symptoms online modestly boosted patients’ ability to accurately diagnose health is…

I think this is similar in other fields, and appears to be related to your self-esteem. Some junior (and sometimes even senior) developers may have hard time accepting improvements on their design and code. If you are identified with your code, you may be unwilling to listen to suggestions from others. If you are confident, you will happily accept and consider suggestions from others and are able to admit that anything can be improved, and others can give you valuable insight.

Similarly, it appears that some doctors are willing to accept that they have limited amount of time to learn about specific topics, and that a research-oriented and intelligent patient very interested in few topics can easily know more about it. In such a case a conducive mutual learning experience may happen.

One doctor told me that what he is offering is statistical advice, because some diseases may be very rare and so it makes sense to rule out more common diseases first.

Other doctors may become defensive, if they have the idea that the doctor has the authority and patients should just accept that.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#119

Post by [deleted] »

iberator wrote: post #97
WhyOhWhyQ wrote: post #18

For me vibecoding has a similar feeling to a big bag of Doritos. It's really fun at first to slap down 10k lines of code in an afternoon knowing this is just an indulgence. I think AI is actually really useful for getting a quick view of some library or feature. Also, you can learn a lot if you approach it the right way. However, every time I do any amount of vibecoding eventually it just transitions into pure lethar…

Whay do you mean? I love Doritos!

[deleted]

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#120

Post by hexagonwin »

theshrike79 wrote: post #104
hackingonempty wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Devs too, this one is at least 30 years old: https://www.pcuf.fi/~pjt/pink/software-architecture.html

It's also taking over 30 years to open, any chance of a mirror? :)

https://web.archive.org/web/20250513130958/https://www.pcuf....
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