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Vibe coding is mad depressing

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Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#131

Post by encyclopedism »

The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. Software/coding is once of these activities. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding where it provides value to others/society and financial upkeep for you and your family is far more meaningful.

For those who have swallowed the AI panacea hook line and sinker. Those that say it's made me more productive or that I no longer have to do the boring bits and can focus on the interesting parts of coding. I say follow your own line of reasoning through. It demonstrates that AI is not yet powerful enough to NOT need to empower you, to NOT need to make you more productive. You're only ALLOWED to do the 'interesting' parts presently because the AI is deficient. Ultimately AI aims to remove the need for any human intermediary altogether. Everything in between is just a stop along the way and so for those it empowers stop and think a little about the long term implications. It may be that for you right now it is comfortable position financially or socially but your future you in just a few short months from now may be dramatically impacted.

As someone said "I want AI to do my laundry and dishes so that I can do art and writing, not for AI to do my art and writing so that I can do my laundry and dishes".

I can well imagine the blood draining from peoples faces, the graduate coder who can no longer get on the job ladder. The law secretary whose dream job is being automated away, a dream dreamt from a young age. The journalist whose value has been substituted by a white text box connected to an AI model.

I don't have any ideas as to what should be done or more importantly what can be done. Pandora's box has been opened, Humpty Dumpty has fallen and he can't be put back together again. AI feels like it has crossed the rubicon. We must all collectively await to see where the dust settles.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#132

Post by cindyllm »

encyclopedism wrote: post #131

The core issue is that AI is taking away, or will take away, or threatens to take away, experiences and activities that humans would WANT to do. Things that give them meaning and many of these are tied to earning money and producing value for doing just that thing. Software/coding is once of these activities. One can do coding for fun but doing the same coding where it provides value to others/society and financial u…

[dead]

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#133

Post by fetztfetzig »

tptacek wrote: post #8

All the consulting practice arguments aside, this is fundamentally a gatekeeping argument about clients staying in their lane. I'm sure doctors feel the same way about patients with weirdly specific questions about HFpEF diagnoses. Doctors have always hated "Doctor Google", and now they have to contend with "Doctor GPT". It's up to you how much sympathy to have for them.

There is a big difference between a client that thinks for themself, researches and challenges a professionals assesment or a client that wants to dictate or participate in the implementation process. In case of medical services we would talk about a patient that wants to do the operation...

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#134

Post by z33k »

112233 wrote: post #85
Footprint0521 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Include in the prompt a verifiable testable exit criteria (compiling) and use agentic AI like cursor or codex with this, you’d be surprised what happens :)

Is claude code with both Sonnet and Opus agentic enough? Because it is constantly finding creative ways to ignore direct, repeated instructions ("user asked X but it is hard, let's do Y instead"), implement fake tests ("feature X is complex. we need to test it completely. let's write script that will create files that feature X would have created, then test that files exist"), sabotage and delete working code ("we ne…

You need to use the features that Claude Code gives you in order to be successful with it. Your build and tests should be in a Stop hook that prevent Claude from stopping if the build or tests fail. Combining this with a Stop hook that bails out if the first hook failed n times already prevents infinite loops.

With anything above a toy project, you need to be really good with context window management. Usually this means using subagents and scoping prompts correctly by placing the CLAUDE.md files next to the relevant code. Your main conversation's context window usage should pretty much never be above 50%. Use the /clear command between unrelated tasks. Consider if recurring sequences of tool calls could be unified into a single skill.

Instead of sending instructions to the agent straight away, try planning with it and prompting it to ask your questions about your plan. The planning phase is a good place to give Claude more space to think with "think > think hard > ultrathink". If you are still struggling with the agent not complying, try adding emplasis with "YOU MUST" or "IMPORTANT".

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#135

Post by overfeed »

rcruzeiro wrote: post #20
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…

Back when I saw doing freelance work, the worst type of client was the one who was semi-technical, meaning they were technical enough to write code that they wanted to contribute to the project or to have strong architectural opinions, but not technical enough to understand the nuances and the implications of their suggestions. I guess that, with vibe coding, it is very easy for every client to become like this.

> [...] they wanted to contribute to the project or to have strong architectural opinions

Also the worst kind of tech line-manager - typically promoted from individual contributors , but still want to argue about architecture, having arrived at their strong opinion within the 7 minutes they perused the design document between meetings.

If you're such a manager, you need to stop, if you're working with one, change teams or change jobs - you cannot win.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#136

Post by WorldMaker »

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've had it stuck in my head for months now that "LLMs are Legacy Code as a Service". A lot of what they ~~plagiarize~~ produce is based on other people's legacy code. A lot of vibe coding is producing "Day 0 Legacy Code" that is hard to debug/maintain in a lot of the exact same ways Legacy Code always is. (It was written by a developer who is not currently around. It's probably poorly commented/documented in the hows/whys rather than the whats. If it was fast tracked into production somewhere it is probably already in a "not broke, don't fix it" state where the bugs are as much a part of the expected behavior as the features.)

As a developer that has spent far too much of my career maintaining or upgrading companies' legacy code, my biggest fear with the LLM mania is not that my skills go away, but become in so much higher demand in an uncomfortable way because the turn around time between launch and legacy code becomes much shorter and the management that understands why it is "legacy code"/"tech debt" shrinks because it is neither old or in obviously dead technologies. "Can you fix this legacy application? It was launched two days ago and nobody knows what it does. Management says they need it fixed yesterday, but there's no budget for this. Good luck."

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#137

Post by j45 »

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…

This is exactly it. Some clients end up turning everything into a messy room and messy desk, decide to get help not to do it, see a clean space to create, and then start making a mess all over again.

Asking such clients why are we here? What have previous attempts (becuase they have been done) provided and not provided, and why do you think they did or didn't have long term viability so we didn't need to talk.

This is less about coding and helping people learn how to think about where and how things cna fit in.

It's great to go fast with vibe coding, especially if you like disposable code that you can iterate with. In the hands of an a developer they might be able to try more things or get more done in some way, but maybe not all the ways especially if the client isn't clear.

The ability of the client ot explain what they want well with good external signals and how well they know how to ask will often be a huge indicator long before they try to pull you into their web of creating spider diagrams like the spiders who have taken something.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#138

Post by j45 »

irjustin wrote: post #41
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…

Us developers are experiencing what designers have had to deal with for decades. 2009 anyone? https://theoatmeal.com/comics/design_hell

Product ppl who are devs, or devs who can product have already enjoyed this.

For example, "Can't we just add a button that does this?"

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#139

Post by j45 »

begueradj wrote: post #51
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…

> 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.

If you haven't faced or witnessed it, it is a moment that you will not forget, and then over time little by little, realize it might not be so uncommon.

We don't have to seek it out, it finds us.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#140

Post by j45 »

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…

Lines of code used to be a moat for a company, it no longer is.

Being effective with the code to get the same things done is. That requires a new kind of driving for a new kind of vehicle.

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