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Perverse incentives of vibe coding

fredbenenson.medium.com

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Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#131

Post by NathanKP »

NegativeLatency wrote: post #59
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…

> Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution This has not been my experience, maybe sometimes, but certainly not always. As an example: asking chatgpt/gemini about how to accomplish some sql data transformation set me back in finding the right answer because the answer it did give me was so plausible but also super duper not correct in the end. Would've been better of…

In your anecdote I still see this as producing value. If I was lacking in knowledge about the problem space, and therefore fell into the trap of pursuing a "plausible but also super duper not correct" answer from an LLM, then I could have easily fell into that trap solo as well.

But with an LLM, I was able to eliminate this bad path faster and earlier. I also learned more about my own lack of knowledge and improved myself.

I truly mean it when I say that I have never had an unproductive experience with modern AI. Even when it hallucinates or gives me a bad answer, that is honing my own ability to think, detect inconsistencies, examine solutions for potential blindspots, etc.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#132

Post by NathanKP »

PaulDavisThe1st wrote: post #128
NathanKP wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's right. I don't think that AI makes coding easy or trivial. What it does do, is it accelerates your ability to get past the easy and trivial stuff, to the hard parts.

When you get deep into engineering with AI you will find yourself spending a dramatically larger percentage of your time thinking about the hardest things you have ever thought about, and dramatically less time thinking about basic things that you've already done hundreds of times before.

You will find the limits of your abilities, then push past those limits like a marathon runner gaining extra endurance from training.

I think the biggest lie in the AI industry is that AI makes things easier. No, if anything you will find yourself working on harder and harder things because the easy parts are done so quickly that all that is left is the hard stuff.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#133

Post by __mharrison__ »

tptacek wrote: post #127
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 a…

What agent do you recommend?

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#134

Post by AlexCoventry »

jazoom wrote: post #56
martin-t wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Honestly can't tell if satire or not.

It's not satire. Gemini is much better for coding, at least for me. Just to illustrate, I asked both about a browser automation script this morning. Claude used Selenium. Gemini used Playwright. I think the main reasons Gemini is much better are: 1. It gets my whole code base as context. Claude can't take that many tokens. I also include documentation for newer versions of libraries (e.g. Svelte 5) that the LLM is no…

How do you give it your whole code base, via the web UI?

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#135

Post by _--__--__ »

I agree with the thrust of the blog post but honestly most of the increased line count comes from the fact that LLMs have been whipped into leaving moronic comments like

// Create a copy of the state

const stateCopy = copyState(state);

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#136

Post by jckahn »

slurpyb wrote: post #102
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…

You are not alone! I strongly agree and I feel like I am losing my mind reading some of the comments people have about these services.

For me it's an additional tool, not the only tool. LSPs are still better for half of the things I do daily (renaming things, extracting things, finding symbols, etc.). I can't imagine using AI for everything and even meeting my current velocity.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#137

Post by Pxtl »

Suppafly wrote: post #87
Pxtl wrote: post #31

I can feel how the extreme autocomplete of AI is a drug. Half of my job is fighting the "copy/paste/change one thing" garbage that developers generate. Keeping code DRY. The autocompletes do an amazing job of automating the repeated boilerplate. "Oh you're doing this little snippet for the first and second property? Obviously you want to do that for every property! Let me just expand that out for you!" And I'm like "…

>That kind of code is not fine. Depends on your definition of fine. Is it less readable because it's doing the straight forward thing several times instead of wrapping it into a loop or a method, or is it more readable because of that. Is it not fine because it's slower, or does it all just compile down to the same thing anyway? Or is it not fine because you actually should be doing different things for the different…

It is not fine because it is too verbose for me to have any confidence that there isn't something awful hiding in there.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#138

Post by meander_water »

andy99 wrote: post #29

I wish more had been written about the first assertion that using an LLM to code is like gambling and you're always hoping that just one more prompt will get you what you want. It really captures how little control one has over the process, while simultaneously having the illusion of control. I don't really believe that code is being made verbose to make more profits. There's probably some element of model providers…

Agreed, I've been thinking about the first assertion a lot recently as I've been using Cursor to create a react app. I think it's more prevalent in frontend development because it tightens the feedback loop considerably, and the more positive feedback you get, the more conditioned you get to reach for it anytime you need to do anything in code.

I think there's another perverse incentive here - organisations want to produce features/products fast, which LLMs help with, but it comes at the cost of reduced cognitive capabilities/skills in the developers over the longer term as they've given that up through lack of use/practice.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#139

Post by nico »

andy99 wrote: post #29

I wish more had been written about the first assertion that using an LLM to code is like gambling and you're always hoping that just one more prompt will get you what you want. It really captures how little control one has over the process, while simultaneously having the illusion of control. I don't really believe that code is being made verbose to make more profits. There's probably some element of model providers…

> It really captures how little control one has over the process, while simultaneously having the illusion of control.

This is actually a big insight about life, that in some eastern philosophies, you are supposed to arrive to

We love the illusion of control, even though we don’t really have it. Life mostly just unfolds as we experience it

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#140

Post by SteveMqz »

panstromek wrote: post #46
xianshou wrote: post #26

Amusingly, about 90% of my rat's-nest problems with Sonnet 3.7 are solved by simply appending a few words to the end of the prompt: "write minimum code required" It's not even that sensitive to the wording - "be terse" or "make minimal changes" amount to the same thing - but the resulting code will often be at least 50% shorter than the un-guided version.

Well, the article mentions that this reduces accuracy. Do you hit that problem often then?

The study the article cited is specifically about when asking the LLMs about misinformation. I think on coding tasks and such shorter answers are usually more accurate.
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