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An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

tobru.ch

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Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#111

Post by shivaniShimpi_ »

seethishat wrote: post #102

I saw something very similar a few months ago. It was a web app vibe coded by a surgeon. It worked, but they did not have an index .html file in the root web directory and they would routinely zip up all of the source code which contained all the database connection strings, API credentials, AWS credentials, etc.) and place the backup in the root web directory. They would also dump the database to that folder (for ba…

interesting, so the ai got the hard stuff right. password hashing, schema design, fine. it fumbled the stuff that isn't really "coding" knowledge, feels more like an operational intuition? backup folder sitting in web root isn't a security question, it's a "have you ever been burned before" question, and surgeon hadn't. so they didn't ask and the model didn't cover it, imo that's the actual pattern. the model secures exactly what you ask about and has no way of knowing what you didn't think to ask. an experienced dev brings a whole graveyard of past mistakes into every project. vibe coders bring the prompt

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#112

Post by embedding-shape »

abc123abc123 wrote: post #104
fainpul wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> AEPD […] known to be brutal. Nice. I wish more countries had something like that. Many of these organizations are lethargic and have to be forced into action by civilian efforts or the press.

Thta's wonderful! Most of europes GDPR/Data protection autohrities are completely worthless and seem to constantly side with big corps. Only when they start to side with the people, actually fining business billions and billions will things start to change. I hope we'll see this happen in europe at large, and not only in a few countries.

> Thta's wonderful! Most of europes GDPR/Data protection autohrities are completely worthless and seem to constantly side with big corps.

AFAIK, most ones seems to be acting at least once every now and then, judging by https://www.enforcementtracker.com/, is there any specific countries you're thinking about here?

Particularly, Romania, Italy and Spain seem to have had lots of cases.

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#113

Post by sajithdilshan »

t43562 wrote: post #64
sajithdilshan wrote: post #50

Don't blame the AI for what is clearly gross human negligence. It's like renovating your entire house and then acting surprised when the pipes burst because you used duct tape as a permanent fix.

At least part of the negligence is about the people who knowingly promote AI without also promoting knowledge of the limitations. Those who post stories about vibe-coding XXX in a week and don't bother to point out that they have no idea if it's not a piece of crap, waiting to explode, because there's no way they could have tested it properly in a week let alone read the mountains of code produced. There's a hype mac…

That's what is meant by human negligence. There will always be a hype about something and that is not an excuse to have a devil may care attitude on any work being done

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#114

Post by sajithdilshan »

Mordisquitos wrote: post #89
sajithdilshan wrote: post #50

Don't blame the AI for what is clearly gross human negligence. It's like renovating your entire house and then acting surprised when the pipes burst because you used duct tape as a permanent fix.

Are duct tape manufacturers and their investors constantly hyping about how duct tape is the future, and how it is making professional plumbing obsolete?

I assume you haven't seen those advertisements where they put duct tapes on everything and present it as a universal solution, also there will always be a hype about something in this world and that is not an excuse to jump on the bandwagon unless you're braindead

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#115

Post by coopykins »

I interviewed some years ago for an AI related startup. After looking at the live product, first thing I see is their prod dB credentials and openAI api key publicly send in some requests... Bad actors will be having a lot of fun these days

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#116

Post by consumer451 »

freakynit wrote: post #57

I think vibe-coding is cool, but it runs into limits pretty fast (at least right now). It kinda falls apart once you get past a few thousand lines of code... and real systems aren't just big, they're actually messy...shit loads of components, services, edge cases, things breaking in weird ways. Getting all of that to work together reliably is a different game altogether. And you still need solid software engineering…

There are all kinds of memory hacks, tools that index your code, etc.

The thing I have found that makes things work much better is, wait for it... Jira.

Everyone loves to hate on Jira, but it is a mature platform for managing large projects.

First, I use the Jira Rovo MCP (or cli, I don't wanna argue about that) to have Claude Code plan and document my architecture, features, etc. I then manually review and edit all of these items. Then, in a clean session, or many, have it implement, document decisions in comments etc. Everything works so much more reliably for large-ish projects like this.

When I first started doing this in my solo projects it was a major, "well, yeah, duh," moment. You wouldn't ask a human dev to magically have an entire project in their mind, why ask a coding agent to do that? This mental model has really helped me use the tools correctly.

edit: then there is context window management. I use Opus 4.6 1M all the time, but if I get much past 250k usage, that means I have done a poor job in starting new sessions. I never hit the auto-compact state. It is a universal truth that LLMs get dumb the more context you give them.

I think everyone should implement the context status bar config to keep an eye on usage:

https://code.claude.com/docs/en/statusline

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#117

Post by sajithdilshan »

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #28

Software engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards. Ie it needs to grow up and become like every other strand of engineering. Gone should be the days of “I taught myself so now I can [design software in a professional setting / design a bridge in a professional setting].” I’m not advocating gatekeeping - if you want to build a small bridge…

There are already laws and standards in almost every country. In this particular example, the people completely ignored all the privacy and data protection laws.

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#118

Post by bschwarz »

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #28

Software engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards. Ie it needs to grow up and become like every other strand of engineering. Gone should be the days of “I taught myself so now I can [design software in a professional setting / design a bridge in a professional setting].” I’m not advocating gatekeeping - if you want to build a small bridge…

Regulations are written in blood and it will take a bit for vibe coding to cause enough problems.

Re: An AI Vibe Coding Horror Story

#120

Post by voxleone »

BitsAndObjects wrote: post #28

Software engineering is looking more and more like it needs a professional body in each country, and accreditation and standards. Ie it needs to grow up and become like every other strand of engineering. Gone should be the days of “I taught myself so now I can [design software in a professional setting / design a bridge in a professional setting].” I’m not advocating gatekeeping - if you want to build a small bridge…

I agree with that and stand by these words. If people want to call it gatekeeping, so be it. Programming, software engineering if you will, is a serious discipline, and this craze needs to stop. Software building should be regulated and properly accredited as any serious activity.
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