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The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

bramcohen.com

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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#131

Post by ModernMech »

Gagarin1917 wrote: post #89
andrenotgiant wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true

Not according to some on HN. They consider it impossible to create a successful business with imperfect code. Lol

A cornerstone of this community is "if you're not embarrassed by the first release you've waited too long", which is a recognition that imperfect code is not needed to create a successful business. That's why ShowHN exists.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#132

Post by leptons »

semicolon_storm wrote: post #14

It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

>. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

The product is also a bit wonky and doesn't always provide the benefits it's hyped for. It often doesn't even produce any result for me, just keeps me waiting and waiting... and nothing happens, which is what I expect from a vibe coded app.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#133

Post by ahepp »

tombert wrote: post #106
babelfish wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward

I'm pretty sure that will be true with AI as well. No accounting for taste, but part of makes code hard for me to reason about is when it has lots of combinatorial complexity, where the amount of states that can happen makes it difficult to know all the possible good and bad states that your program can be in. Combinatorial complexity is something that objectively can be expensive for any form of computer, be it a hu…

What do you think about the argument that we are entering a world where code is so cheap to write, you can throw the old one away and build a new one after you've validated the business model, found a niche, whatever?

I mean, it seems like that has always been true to an extent, but now it may be even more true? Once you know you're sitting on a lode of gold, it's a lot easier to know how much to invest in the mine.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#134

Post by aerhardt »

bearjaws wrote: post #23

This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases and redis cache layer... and won't scale beyond 50k users". As if 97% of web apps aren't just basic CRUD with some integration to another system if you are lucky. 99% of companies won't even have 50k users.

Distributing an app to 100 users inside an enterprise is already a hellish nightmare and I'm pretty convinced that citizen developers will never be a thing - we'll sooner reach the singularity.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#135

Post by sunnybeetroot »

cladopa wrote: post #56

"Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos" The ship has sailed. Vibe coding works. It will only work better in the future. I have been programming for decades now, I have managed teams of developers. Vibe coding is great, specially in the hands of experts that know what they are doing. Deal with it because it is not going to stop. In the near future it will be local and 100x faster.

An expert doesn’t deploy code without reviewing it, at that point they’re vibe engineering not vibe coding.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#136

Post by eloisant »

andrenotgiant wrote: post #28
semicolon_storm wrote: post #14

It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true

Still, talk about "good" code exist for a reason. When the code is really bad, you end up paying the price by having to spend too more and more time and develop new features, with greater risk to introduce bugs. I've seen that in companies in the past, where bad code meant less stability and more time to ship features that we needed to retain customers or get new ones.

Now whether this is still true with AI, or if vibe coding means bad code no longer have this long term stability and velocity cost because AI are better than humans at working with this bad code... We don't know yet.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#137

Post by enraged_camel »

nextos wrote: post #84
shimman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.

Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes. The tooling can be hacky and of questionable quality yet, with such a model, things can still work out pretty well. The moat is their training and fine-tuning for common programming languages.

>> Also Claude owes its popularity mostly to the excellent model running behind the scenes.

It's a bit of both. Claude Code was the tool that made Anthropic's developer mindshare explode. Yes, the models are good, but before CC they were mostly just available via multiplexers like Cursor and Copilot, via the relatively expensive API.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#138

Post by Waterluvian »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #124
scrame wrote: post #7

This is the guy that created bittorrent, btw. I know that was a long time ago, but he's not just some random blogger.

Given his background, you'd think he'd know that he should provide some evidence for his position (instead of making this completely unsupported rant).

I think you're interpreting the structure and goal of "Bram's Thoughts" wrong. It's a guy's blog, not a thesis defense.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#139

Post by il-b »

bs7280 wrote: post #57

In my opinion there are two main groups on the spectrum of "vibe coding". The non technical users that love it but don't understand software engineering enough to know what it takes to make a production grade product. The opposite are the AI haters that used chatgpt 3.5 and decided LLM code is garbage. Both of these camps are the loudest voices on the internet, but there is a quiet but extremely productive camp somew…

> extremely productive camp somewhere in the middle

How do you quantify and measure this productivity gain?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#140

Post by therobots927 »

conductr wrote: post #112
semicolon_storm wrote: post #14

It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

It kind of reminds me of grammar police type personalities. They are so hung up on the fact it reads “ugly” they can’t see the message; this code powers a rapidly growing $400B company. They admit refactoring is easy, but fail to realize they probably know that too and it’s just not a priority yet.

The underlying model powers the valuation.

Not the front end

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