Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Perverse incentives of vibe coding

fredbenenson.medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

121–130 of 239 posts

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#121

Post by jiggawatts »

brooke2k wrote: post #98

I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up. Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it. But any time I've tried to get AI services to h…

I’ve had good experiences using it, but with the caveat that only Gemini Pro 2.5 has been at all useful, and only for “spot” tasks.

I typically use it to whip up a CLI tool or script to do something that would have been too fiddly otherwise.

While sitting in a Teams meeting I got it to use the Roslyn compiler SDK in a CLI tool that stripped a very repetitive pattern from a code base. Some OCD person had repeated the same nonsense many thousands of times. The tool cleaned up the mess in seconds.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#122

Post by exiguus »

I understand your point. The Vibe approach is IMO only effective when you adopt a software engineering mindset. Here's how it works (at least for me with Copilote agent mode):

1. Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or prototype that functions.

2. Write tests, either before or after the initial development.

3. Implement coding guidelines, style guides, linter etc. Do code reviews.

4. Continuously adjust, add features, refactor, review and expand your test suite. Iterate and let AI run tests and linters on each change

While this process may seem lengthy, it ensures reliability and efficiency. Experienced engineers might find it as quick as working solo, but the structured approach guarantees success. It feels like pairing with a inexperienced developer.

Also, this process may run you into rate limits with Copilot and might not work with your current codebase due to a lack of tests and the absence of applied coding style guides.

Additionally, it takes time. For example, for a simple to mid-level tool/feature in Go, it might take about 1 hour to develop the MVP or prototype, but another 6 to 10 hours to refine it to a quality that you might want to show to other engineers.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#123

Post by nowittyusername »

lubujackson wrote: post #89

I feel like "vibe coding" as a "no look" sort of way to produce anything is bad and will probably remain bad for some time. However... "vibe architecting" is likely going to be the way forward. I have had success with generating/tuning an architecture plan with AI, having it create stub files/functions then filling them out individually. I can get pretty much the whole way without typing code, but it does require a f…

What you are talking about is the "proper" way of vibe coding. Most of the issues with vibe coding stem from user misunderstanding the capabilities of the technology they are using. They are overestimating the capabilities of current systems and are essentially asking for magic to happen. They don't give proper guidance, context or anything of value for the coding IDE to work with. They are relying a mindset of the 2030's to work with systems from 2025. We aint there yet folks, give as much guidance and context as you can and you will have a better time.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#124

Post by NathanKP »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #80
NathanKP wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only makes sense if you have an all or nothing concept of the value of output from AI. Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution, even if that value is just narrowing the latent space of potential outputs by keeping track of failed paths in the context window, so that it can avoid that path in a future answer after you provide followup feedback. The vast majorit…

This assumes you can easily and reliably identify the 10% you need to fix.

Why wouldn't you be able to do identify the 10% that you need to fix?

AI is not an excuse to turn off your brain. I find it ironic that many people complain that they have a hard time identifying the hallucinations in LLM generated content, and then also complain that LLM's are making LLM users dumber.

The problem here is also the solution. LLM's make smarter people even smarter, because they get even better at thinking about the hard parts, while not wasting time thinking about the easy parts.

But people who don't want to think at all about what they are doing... well they do get dumber.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#125

Post by samtp »

jobs_throwaway wrote: post #94
samtp wrote: post #20

I've pretty clearly seen the critical thinking ability of coworkers who depend on AI too much sharply decline over the past year. Instead of taking 30 seconds to break down the problem and work through assumptions, they immediately copy/paste into an LLM and spit back what it tells them. This has lead to their abilities stalling while their output seemingly goes up. But when you look at the quality of their output, a…

As someone who vibe codes at times (and is a professional programmer), I'm curious how yall go about resisting this? Just avoid LLMs entirely and do everything by hand? Very rigorously go over any LLM-generated code before committing? It certainly is hard when I'm say writing unit tests to avoid the temptation to throw it into Cursor and prompt until it works.

I resist it by realizing that while LLM are good at things like decoding obtuse error messages, having them write too much of your code leads to a project becoming almost impossible to maintain or add to. And there are many cases where you spend more time trying to correct errors from the LLM than if you were to slow down and inspect the code yourself.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#126

Post by NathanKP »

secabeen wrote: post #62
NathanKP wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This only makes sense if you have an all or nothing concept of the value of output from AI. Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution, even if that value is just narrowing the latent space of potential outputs by keeping track of failed paths in the context window, so that it can avoid that path in a future answer after you provide followup feedback. The vast majorit…

> One of the stupidest takes about AI is that a partial hallucination or a single bug destroys the value of the tool. If a response is 90% of the way there and I have to fix the 10% of it that doesn't meet my expectations, then I still got 90% value from that answer. That assumes that the value of a solution is linear with the amount completed. If the Pareto Principle holds (80% of effects come from 20% of causes), t…

This isn't a bad thing at all. It just means that AI utilization doesn't have quite the exponential impact that many marketers are trying to sell. And that's okay.

I personally think of AI tools as an incremental aid that enables me to focus more of my efforts on the really hard 10-20% of the problem, and get paid more to excel at doing what I do best already.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#127

Post by tptacek »

brooke2k wrote: post #98

I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up. Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it. But any time I've tried to get AI services to h…

The first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor).

Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is authoring files, linting them, compiling them, and iterating when it spots problems.

There's more to using LLMs well than this, but this is the high-order bit.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#128

Post by PaulDavisThe1st »

NathanKP wrote: post #124
PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This assumes you can easily and reliably identify the 10% you need to fix.

Why wouldn't you be able to do identify the 10% that you need to fix? AI is not an excuse to turn off your brain. I find it ironic that many people complain that they have a hard time identifying the hallucinations in LLM generated content, and then also complain that LLM's are making LLM users dumber. The problem here is also the solution. LLM's make smarter people even smarter, because they get even better at think…

It is extremely well known in the world of programming that reading code is substantially harder than writing it. Just because you have the code in front of you does not mean that determining that it is correct is a trivial (or even moderately easy) task.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#129

Post by tptacek »

Starlevel004 wrote: post #99
brooke2k wrote: post #98

I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up. Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it. But any time I've tried to get AI services to h…

> Is there something I'm missing? Am I just not using it right? The talk about it makes more sense when you remember most developers are primarily writing CRUD webapps or adware, which is essentially a solved problem already.

I'm not doing either of those things with it.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#130

Post by tptacek »

jiggawatts wrote: post #118
erulabs wrote: post #85

These perverse incentives run at the heart of almost all Developer Software as a Service tooling. Using someone else's hosted model incentivizes increasing token usage, but it's nothing special about AI. Consider Database-as-a-service companies: They're not incentivized to optimize on CPU usage, they charge per cpu. They're not incentivized to improve disk compression, they charge for disk-usage. There are several DB…

My favourite example of this is the recent trend towards “wide events” replacing logs and metrics… spearheaded and popularised by companies that charge by the gigabytes ingested.

Companies that ingest logs generally rip their customers faces off with their pricing. At least oTel spans can be tail-sampled.
Post reply on HN