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Vibe coding kills open source

arxiv.org

111–120 of 304 posts

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#111

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I started the project in my brain and it has many flaws and nuances which I think LLMs are struggling to respect. The project, or your brain? I think this is what a lot of LLM coders run into - they have a lot of intrinsic knowledge that is difficult or takes a lot of time and effort to put into words and describe. Vibes, if you will, like "I can't explain it but this code looks wrong"

I updated my original comment to explain my reasoning a bit more clearly. Essentially I ask an LLM to look at a project and it just sees the current state of the codebase, it doesn't see the iterations and hacks and refactors and reverts. It also doesn't see the first functionality I wrote for it at v1. This could indeed be solved by giving the LLM a git log and telling it a story, but that might not solve my issue?

I'm now letting Claude Code write commits + PRs (for my solo dev stuff), but the benefits have been pretty immense as it's basically Claude keeping a history of it's work that can then be referenced at any time that's also outside the code context window.

FWIW - it works a lot better to have it interact via the CLI than the MCP.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#112
This study seems flawed at the assumptions and from the start

"most" maintainers make exactly zero dollars. Further, OSS monetization rarely involves developer engagement, it's been all about enterprise feature gating

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#113
Not an answer to all of our problems, but I wonder if we will see a wider adoption of more complex contribution models. Like "Lieutenants Workflow" Linux was known for, for example. Many possible workflows are explored in the Git Book [1].

[1] https://git-scm.com/book/en/v2/Distributed-Git-Distributed-W...

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#114
post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it struggles It does not struggle, you struggle. It is a tool you are using, and it is doing exactly what you're telling it to do. Tools take time to learn, and that's fine. Blaming the tools is counterproductive. If the code is well documented, at a high level and with inline comments, and if your instructions are clear, it'll figure it out. If it makes a mistake, it's up to you to figure out where the communicati…

Not all tools are right for all jobs. My spoon struggles to perform open heart surgery.

But as a heart surgeon, why would you ever consider using a spoon for the job? AI/LLMs are just a tool. Your professional experience should tell you if it is the right tool. This is where industry experience comes in.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#115
Related but not sure how much attention it's getting:

GPL is a dead man walking since you can have any LLM cleanroom a new implementation in a new language from a public spec with verifiable "never looked at the original source" and it can be more permissively-licensed however you wish (MIT, BSD etc).

case in point, check out my current deps on the project I'm currently working on with LLM assist: https://github.com/pmarreck/validate/tree/yolo/deps

"validate" is a project that currently validates over 100 file formats at the byte level; its goal is to validate as many formats as possible, for posterity/all time.

Why did I avoid GPL (which I am normally a fan of) since this is open-source? I have an even-higher-level project I'm working on, implementing automatic light parity protection (which can proactively repair data without a RAID/ZFS setup) which I want to make for sale, whose code will (initially) be private, and which uses this as a dependency (no sense in protecting data that is already corrupted).

Figured I'd give this to the world for free in the meantime. It's already found a bunch of actually-corrupt files in my collection (note that there's still some false-positive risk; I literally released this just yesterday and it's still actively being worked on) including some cherished photos from a Japan trip I took a few years ago that cannot be replaced.

It has Mac, Windows and Linux builds. Check the github actions page.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#116
post #90

I have been trying to use Claude code to help improve my opensource Java NLP location library. However trying to get it to do anything other than optimise code or fix small issues it struggles. It struggles with high level abstract issues. For example I currently have an issue with ambiguity collisions e.g. Input: "California" Output: "California, Missouri" California is a state but also city in Missouri - https://gi…

> it struggles It does not struggle, you struggle. It is a tool you are using, and it is doing exactly what you're telling it to do. Tools take time to learn, and that's fine. Blaming the tools is counterproductive. If the code is well documented, at a high level and with inline comments, and if your instructions are clear, it'll figure it out. If it makes a mistake, it's up to you to figure out where the communicati…

[deleted]

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#117

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

I do not think that this is likely to be a successful model.

When (not if) software breaks in production, you need to be able to debug it effectively. Knowing that external libraries do their base job is really helpful in reducing the search space and in reducing the blast radius of patches.

Note that this is not AI-specific. More generally, in-house implementations of software that is not your core business brings costs that are not limited to that of writing said implementation.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#118

I have been trying to use Claude code to help improve my opensource Java NLP location library. However trying to get it to do anything other than optimise code or fix small issues it struggles. It struggles with high level abstract issues. For example I currently have an issue with ambiguity collisions e.g. Input: "California" Output: "California, Missouri" California is a state but also city in Missouri - https://gi…

One major part of successful LLM-assisted coding is to not focus on code vomiting but scaffolding.

Document, document, document: your architecture, best practices, preferences (both about code and how you want to work with the LLM and how do you expect it to behave it).

It is time consuming, but it's the only way you can get it to assist you semi-successfully.

Also try to understand that LLM's biggest power for a developer is not in authoring code as much as assistance into understanding it, connecting dots across features, etc.

If your expectation is to launch it in a project and tell it "do X, do Y" without the very much needed scaffolding you'll very quickly start losing the plot and increasing the mess. Sure, it may complete tasks here and there, but at the price of increasing complexity from which it is difficult for both you and it to dig out.

Most AI naysayers can't be bothered with the huge amount of work required to setup a project to be llm-friendly, they fail, and blame the tool.

Even after the scaffolding, the best thing to do, at least for the projects you care (essentially anything that's not a prototype for quickly validating an idea) you should keep reading and following it line by line, and keep updating your scaffolding and documentation as you see it commit the same mistakes over and over. And part of scaffolding requires also to put the source code of your main dependencies. I have a _vendor directory with git subtrees for major dependencies. LLMs can check the code of the dependencies, the tests, and figure out what they are doing wrong much quicker.

Last but not least, LLMs work better with certain patterns, such as TDD. So instead of "implement X", it's better to "I need to implement X, but before we do so, let's setup a way for testing and tracking our progress against". You can build an inspector for a virtual machine, you can setup e2es or other tests, or just dump line by line logs in some file. There's many approaches depending on the use case.

In any case, getting real help for LLMs for authoring code (editing, patching, writing new features) is highly dependent on having good context, good setup (tests, making it write a plan for business requirements and one for implementation) and following and improving all these aspects as you progress.

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#119

Small bespoke personalized on the spot apps are the future with LLMs. The future will absolutely not be "How things are today + LLMs" The paradigm now for software is "build a tool shed/garage/barn/warehouse full of as much capability for as many uses possible" but when LLMs can build you a custom(!) hammer or saw in a few minutes, why go to the shed?

[dead]

Re: Vibe coding kills open source

#120

Related but not sure how much attention it's getting: GPL is a dead man walking since you can have any LLM cleanroom a new implementation in a new language from a public spec with verifiable "never looked at the original source" and it can be more permissively-licensed however you wish (MIT, BSD etc). case in point, check out my current deps on the project I'm currently working on with LLM assist: https://github.com/…

Did something change? Is LLM generated stuff now able to be protected with copyrights?

I was under the impression that copyright was only available for works created by people.

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