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Vibe coding creates fatigue?

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Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#111

Post by Zigurd »

Avicebron wrote: post #18
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

Can you share why it was non-trivial? I'm curious about how folks are evaluating the quality of their solutions when the project space is non trivial and unfamiliar

It's a real, complete, social media client app. Not a huge project. But the default app was clearly written by multiple devs, each with their own ideas. One goal was to be cleaner and more orthogonal, among other goals.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#112

Post by westoncb »

hansmayer wrote: post #94
observationist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it m…

> I'm not a professional SWE It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for…

It sounds more like you just made an overly simplistic interpretation of their statement, "everything works like I think it should," since it's clear from their post that they recognize the difference between some basic level of "working" and a well-engineered system.

Hopefully you aren't discouraged by this, observationist, pretty clear hansmayer is just taking potshots. Your first paragraph could very well have been written by a professional SWE who understood what level of robustness was required given the constraints of the specific scenario in which the software was being developed.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#113

Post by stonemetal12 »

pyrophane wrote: post #78
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

> I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. You didn’t find that to be a little too much unfamiliarity? With the couple of projects that I’ve worked on that were developed using an “agent first” approach I found that if I added too many new things at once it would put me in a difficult space where I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what…

> I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what the agent was doing

So don't. It is vibe coding, not math class. As long as it looks like it works then all good.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#114

Post by Zigurd »

Animats wrote: post #64
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

> I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. You, too, can be awarded the Order of Labor Glory, Third Class.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Labour_Glory

Had I been doing other than interesting exploratory coding, I would agree with you. I can readily imagine standups where the "scrum master" asks where our AI productivity boost numbers are. Big dystopia potential.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#115

Post by jack_tripper »

hansmayer wrote: post #94
observationist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it m…

> I'm not a professional SWE It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for…

[flagged]

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#116

Post by steveklabnik »

seattle_spring wrote: post #106
QuercusMax wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A lot of that stuff can be handled by linters and static analysis tools.

What are some examples of linters / static analysis catching hallucinated solutions to problems? I feel like it would just yield a well-formatted, type safe incorrect solution, which is no better than a tangled mess.

A specific example: for some reason, when working on Playwright scripts, Claude really likes to inject

  await page.waitForLoadState('networkidle');
But this isn't good, and is not encouraged. So much so that there's an eslint that suggests removing it. This means that by running the linter, if Claude does decide to inject this, it gets taken out, because the linter runs and then tells it so.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#117

Post by tjr »

burningChrome wrote: post #108
hansmayer wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm not a professional SWE It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for…

>> even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right? Longer than writing code from scratch, with no templates or frameworks? Longer than testing and deploying manually? Even eight years ago when I left full-stack development, nobody was building anything from scratch, without any templates. Serious questions - are there still people who work at large companies who still build things…

What do you mean by "the conventional way"?

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#118

Post by brailsafe »

hansmayer wrote: post #94
observationist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it m…

> I'm not a professional SWE It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for…

By your response, it really seems like you read their first sentence as advocating for vibe coding, but I think they were saying something more to the effect of "While it's exciting to reach those milestones more quickly and frequently, as it becomes easier to reach a point where everything seems to be working on the surface, the easier it then is to bypass elegant, properly designed, intimately internalized detail—unavoidable if written manually—and thus when it comes time to troubleshoot, the same people may have to confront those rapidly constructed systems with less confidence, and hence the maintenance burden later may be much greater than it otherwise would be"

Which to me, as a professional SWE, seems like a very engineer thing to think about, if I've read both of your comments correctly.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#119

Post by stonemetal12 »

crazygringo wrote: post #55
habinero wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's the joke. "vibe coding" only sounds cool if you don't know how to code but horrific if you do.

Right but there are tons of examples of things that started out as insults or negative only to be claimed as the proper or positive name. Impressionism in painting, for a start. The Quakers. Queer. Punk. Even "hacker", which started out meaning only breaking into computer systems -- and now we have "Hacker News." So vibe coding fits in perfectly. In other words, everyone's in on the joke.

> Even "hacker", which started out meaning only breaking into computer systems

No. The Etymology of Hacker in the technical scene started at MIT's Tech Model Railroad Club in the late 1950s/early 1960s, "hack" described clever, intricate solutions, pranks, or experiments with technology.

A hacker is one who made those clever solutions, pranks, and technology experiments. "Hacker News" is trying to take it back from criminal activity.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#120

Post by etothet »

Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

I 100% agree. It's been incredible for velocity and the capabilities and accuracy of the models I've been (mostly from Anthropic) have improved immensely over the last few months.
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