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Vibe coding is mad depressing

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Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#121

Post by DANmode »

theshrike79 wrote: post #105
begueradj wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's like hiring a plumber then trying to tell them how to fix the toilet. I never faced or witnessed that in software dev.

I once had to give my non-technical boss Frontpage and told him to make the fucking login page himself because nothing I did matched his exact wishes. The result was a piece of shit, but it was his piece of shit and he loved it.

This is an awesome comment.

History doesn’t repeat itself, but it definitely rhymes – I can’t wait for the modern versions of this.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#122

Post by supratims »

For the longest of times contract (and perm) developers/project managers/agencies have taken a lot of liberties of time and money only to develop sub standard products and then charge more for change requests and bug fixes. The model was long due to be disrupted. This new way of vibe coding is not perfect yet but produces results and thats what the sponsors are looking at as a return on investment. As technologists we have to play a big role to find that right balance and educate everyone, not just the business folks about what could go wrong and where are the areas where it might be actually used.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#123

Post by bonesss »

satvikpendem wrote: post #63
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…

This is exactly what happened with my experience of vibe coding, you don't understand the code after a while and pushing the project from the 80 percent mark to the 100 percent mark is exponentially more difficult, and that's where the AI fails and you have to take over. Only, you don't know anything about the code and you give up. I had to rewrite several vibe coded projects from scratch due to this effect. It's use…

I have had similar experiences, and wonder how the subjective experience is impacting my estimations of progress and productivity.

Specifically: what if I just started downloading repo’s and aggressively copying and pasting to my needs… I’d get a whole bunch of code kinda quick, it’d mostly work.

It feels less interactive, but shares a high level similarity in output and understanding.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#124

Post by bunderbunder »

zahlman wrote: post #115
bunderbunder wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 c…

No, he believed he had Technicolor skin parasites. Suggesting it might be a psychiatric condition was a good way to start a nasty fight.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#125

Post by DANmode »

throwaway2037 wrote: post #54
112233 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API. Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested! Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile. Me: it does not compile. AI: Yes, but the code…

Holy shit, I feel the same. I was arguing with an LLM one day about how to do Kerberos auth on incoming HTTP requests. It kept giving me bogus advice that I could disprove with a tiny snip of code. I would explain. It would react just like yours. After a few rounds, it would give the first answer again. Awful. So infuriating. I had a similar issue with GNU plot. The LLM-suggested scripts frequently had syntax errors.…

Willing to name “an LLM”?

Was this a local model?

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#126

Post by DonHopkins »

bheadmaster wrote: post #94
DonHopkins wrote: post #89

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's like hiring a plumber then trying to tell them how to fix the toilet. And continuing to shit and piss and puke in the toilet while they are trying to fix it.

A disgusting analogy, but hilariously accurate.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30359560

DonHopkins on Feb 16, 2022 | prev | next [–]

When I implemented the pixelation censorship effect in The Sims 1, I actually injected some random noise every frame, so it made the pixels shimmer, even when time was paused. That helped make it less obvious that it wasn't actually censoring penises, boobs, vaginas, and assholes, because the Sims were actually more like smooth Barbie dolls or GI-Joes with no actual naughty bits to censor, and the players knowing that would have embarrassed the poor Sims.

[...]

The other nasty bug involving pixelization that we did manage to fix before shipping, but that I unfortunately didn't save any video of, involved the maid NPC, who was originally programmed by a really brilliant summer intern, but had a few quirks:

A Sim would need to go potty, and walk into the bathroom, pixelate their body, and sit down on the toilet, then proceed to have a nice leisurely bowel movement in their trousers. In the process, the toilet would suddenly become dirty and clogged, which attracted the maid into the bathroom (this was before "privacy" was implemented).

She would then stroll over to toilet, whip out a plunger from "hammerspace" [1], and thrust it into the toilet between the pooping Sim's legs, and proceed to move it up and down vigorously by its wooden handle. The "Unnecessary Censorship" [2] strongly implied that the maid was performing a manual act of digital sex work. That little bug required quite a lot of SimAntics [3] programming to fix!

[1] Hammerspace: https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/Hammerspace

[2] Unnecessary Censorship: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D-ayfR3UtcY [broken link updated]

[3] SimAntics: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22987435 and https://simstek.fandom.com/wiki/SimAntics

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#127

Post by DANmode »

globular-toast wrote: post #96
112233 wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API. Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested! Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile. Me: it does not compile. AI: Yes, but the code…

> I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". The niche is "the same boring CRUD web app someone made in 2003 but with Tailwind CSS".

Good work, if you can get it.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#128

Post by DANmode »

bunderbunder wrote: post #124
zahlman wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 c…

No, he believed he had Technicolor skin parasites. Suggesting it might be a psychiatric condition was a good way to start a nasty fight.

I’ve observed people in this “community” from a distance.

Does your family member have the sores?

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#129

Post by [deleted] »

tptacek wrote: post #27
qsort wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who does consulting, it's more about the attitude than the tool itself. Clients trying to understand the problem by themselves with whatever tools they can use are generally well-disposed and easy to work with. Those who email you stuff like "Why don't you have chatgpt do this???" as if it's a revolutionary thought are mostly a PITA. I assume doctors feel largely the same.

I feel like my consulting bona fides are also pretty strong, and while I get how annoying this must feel, it's hard for me personally to be irritated either at clients or at frontier models for enabling clients to do this. To me it's more like the board, in some small way, being shaken up, and what I mostly see is an opportunity for consultancies to excel at interfacing with clients who come to them with LLM code and…

[deleted]

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#130

Post by MichaelZuo »

andai wrote: post #10
satvikpendem wrote: post #6

This article is not about vibe coding per se, it's about not having strong boundaries between you as the developer, and your client. You should not be allowing the client to dictate how you work, much less them having the permissions to merge in code. This was true before AI too, where clients might say, do X this way, and you should simply say no, because they are paying for your expertise*. It's like hiring a plumb…

Here is the full price list :) https://files.catbox.moe/1d87t7.jpg

It seems to be missing “You design, we will provide guaranteed counselling”.
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