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“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

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Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#131

Post by dr_dshiv »

MarkMarine wrote: post #92

This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. We already have examples of a model finding more performant sorts [0], given the right incentives and time, and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it) the computer will best us at creating things for the computer. Is “vibe coding” real today? Not in my experience, with even Claude code. My hand ha…

Vibe coding is 100% real. Or maybe we should call it code vibing when there is no coding ability. But I just taught 18 professionals with no coding ability to build functional software. Their minds were blown

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#132

Post by id00 »

jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #95

Making the arguing that these tools have flaws seem like a losing battle. Soon those flaws will be fixed[1] and youll have to find new flaws to complain about. Eventually hopefully you'll realize that you just don't like feeling displaced. [1] it's unbelievable what a difference in quality 1 year made for chat gpt

Why are you so certain that flaws will be fixed? Seems like there is a giant leap between a machine spewing words based on probability and actual deep understanding of the code it's suppose to write

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#133

Post by oblio »

margalabargala wrote: post #120
MarkMarine wrote: post #92

This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. We already have examples of a model finding more performant sorts [0], given the right incentives and time, and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it) the computer will best us at creating things for the computer. Is “vibe coding” real today? Not in my experience, with even Claude code. My hand ha…

Where we are now, I wonder if is similar to the early days of compiled languages existing, back when people still somewhat commonly wrote assembly by hand and didn't trust compilers. Sure, things like Roller Coaster Tycoon exist, but but writing in a compiled language is so much faster, easier, and more broadly accessible than writing in assembly that compilers took over.

My worry about this approach is: there is a reasonably popular saying that writing code is hard but debugging it is twice as hard (at least), which I think is an accurate description.

LLMs will greatly increase code production, will they also increase debuggability to match?

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#134

Post by ehutch79 »

18172828286177 wrote: post #18

> ever since I started to share how I built my SaaS using Cursor > random thing are happening, maxed out usage on api keys, people bypassing the subscription, creating random shit on db This has to be a troll no?

Sadly, there's a good chance it's not.

They're basically advertising they have a poorly coded, insecure app.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#135

Post by TeMPOraL »

Clubber wrote: post #115
TeMPOraL wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the reality hit. The reality in which people like me get to do work for US/UK for 4x the salary relative to equivalent work locally, and some of this work is actually cleaning up after folks elsewhere, who being cheapest labor available still got 4x their local salary for this work, and the total is still 4x cheaper than what the US/UK company would pay locally? :). (I'm only half-joking; in a previous life, I…

The company I worked for 15 years ago outsourced QA to save money. It was sold as paying $15 for a 4080 video card. When they opened the package, instead of a 4080, it was a brick. The salt in the wound was when they realized they overpaid 3x for a $5 brick. If it wasn't for vendor lock-in (they being the vendor), they would be dead. The local QA person could run through 100 or so scenarios a day. The offshore people…

There's an art to outsourcing, and - even worse than with LLMs - it's not something you can ever just do and forget, because without active management, you'll eventually end up wasting money and time while getting nothing in return.

QA is a whole other story, too. Outsourcing QA is stupid, but even more stupid and short-sighted is not having QA in the first place, and that unfortunately is becoming a norm.

There's lots of false economy going with jobs, too. Getting rid of QA may save you salaries, but the work doesn't disappear - it just gets dumped on everyone else, and now you're distracting much more expensive engineers (software or otherwise), who do a much worse job at it (not being dedicated specialists) and cost more. On the net, I doubt it's ever saving companies any money, but the positives are easy to count, while negatives are diffused and hard to track beyond overall feeling that "somehow, everything takes longer than it should, and comes out worse than it should, who knows why?".

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#136

Post by acdha »

stusmall wrote: post #82
CharlesW wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

I think that's a great point. There is a place for outsourcing. Some projects and organizations are well suited for it. Some projects end up only using outsourcing at supplementing some parts of the work. Some can't do it for quality or compliance reasons. I think we will see something similar with LLMs. There will be areas where it will deliver cheaper and faster. There will be areas where it will deliver nothing bu…

I’ve seen a number of outsourcing project failures. The two things they all had in common were that the organizations in question were terrible at managing projects but they blamed the developers for management’s inability to plan or make decisions, and they were trying for unrealistic savings – it wasn’t enough to save 30-50% on salary, they wanted 90% even if that was below the market rate for those skills even in India.

The first one is definitely happening with the LLM bubble where companies really want to pretend that the hard part of the job isn’t understanding what to build and how to do so maintainability.

The second one is going to be more interesting: I expect LLMs to put downward pressure on wages in a lot of places but also for smarter companies to realize that nothing short of true AGI is going to replace the need for people who can actually understand what the customer needs. If I’m right, this will swing the pendulum back towards specialists again – the seagull guys who come in, declare that their favorite framework will solve everything, and leave are more vulnerable to being replaced by an LLM than someone who knows how to code but is also bringing actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#138

Post by gooseus »

I've been "Vibe-TDDing" all afternoon and I'll tell you what, vibe tests are better than no tests.

And so long as you have some decent-to-solid understanding of coding and testing (this is non-trivial, I've been coding for professionally for ~20 years) then you can direct the machine to put up decent guardrails first, and then you can kinda go nuts and let shit grow, prune it back, repeat.

Basically, if you know what code/tests ought to look and act like, then you can significantly reduce the negative externalities of having LLMs do your coding for you.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#139

Post by mentos »

dr_dshiv wrote: post #131
MarkMarine wrote: post #92

This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. We already have examples of a model finding more performant sorts [0], given the right incentives and time, and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it) the computer will best us at creating things for the computer. Is “vibe coding” real today? Not in my experience, with even Claude code. My hand ha…

Vibe coding is 100% real. Or maybe we should call it code vibing when there is no coding ability. But I just taught 18 professionals with no coding ability to build functional software. Their minds were blown

Cursor? I finally got around to trying it this week and it exceeded my expectations.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#140

Post by tokioyoyo »

falkensmaize wrote: post #98
jocoda wrote: post #80

My, very limited experience with LLM assisted coding is that it depends... For basic frameworks done in something like Python it is very good, but not perfect, yet. But the iteration cycle to get to where you want to be is still faster than doing the whole job manually and I see this as a big win. For more esoteric fast changing languages/frameworks it has me chasing my tail in a chain of code updates where each fix…

"But it will get better, a lot better." I see statements like this a lot when talking about AI in general. People seem to think it is a foregone conclusion that no limit to LLM model improvement and capability exists. What causes you to believe this and what evidence do you have to back it up?

Because compared to a year ago, it's much better. Compared to two years ago, it almost didn't exist. Compared to three years ago, nobody was actually talking about it.
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