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Perverse incentives of vibe coding

fredbenenson.medium.com

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Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#141

Post by tptacek »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #133
tptacek wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I think they're all fine. Cursor is popular and charges a flat fee for model calls (interposed through their model call router, however that works). Aider is probably the most popular open source command line one. Claude Code is probably the most popular command line agent overall; Codex is the OpenAI equivalent (I like Codex fine).

later

Oh, I like Zed a lot too. People complain that Zed's agent (the back-and-forth with the model) is noticeably slower than the other agents, but to me, it doesn't matter: all the agents are slow enough that I can't sit there and wait for them to finish, and Zed has nice desktop notifications for when the agent finishes.

Plus you get a pretty nice editor --- I still write exclusively in Emacs, but I think of Zed as being a particularly nice code UI for an LLM agent.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#142

Post by tptacek »

meander_water wrote: post #138
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 p…

That's not a great argument for talking down their utility for experienced developers, though.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#143

Post by tptacek »

_--__--__ wrote: post #135

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);

I'm waiting for the front line coding agents to just strip all comments from LLM output; it seems like a very reasonable thing to do, given you can just ask for comments where you think they're useful.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#144

Post by mullingitover »

I've definitely noticed that LLMs want to generate Enterprise-Grade™ code right out of the box. I customize the prompts to tell them that we're under intense pressure to minimize line counts, every line costs $10k, and so to find the simplest solution that will get the job done.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#145

Post by haiku2077 »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #133
tptacek wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I've been having okayish results with Zed + Claude 3.7

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#146

Post by bandoti »

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…

For my workflow a lot of the benefit is in the smaller tasks. For example, get a medium size diff from two change-sets, paste it in, and ask to summarize the “what” and “why”. You have to learn how to give AI the right amount of context to get the right result back.

For code changes I prefer to paste a single function in, or a small file, or error output from a compile failure. It’s pretty good at helping you narrow things down.

So, for me, it’s a pile of small gains where the value is—because ultimately I know what I generally want to get done and it helps me get there.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#147

Post by kasey_junk »

__mharrison__ wrote: post #133
tptacek wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

Speaking up for Devin.ai here. What I like about it is that after the initial prompt nearly all of my interaction with it is via pull request comments.

I have this workflow where I trigger a bunch of prompts in the morning, lunch and at the end of the day. At those same times I give it feedback. The async nature really means I can have it work on things I can’t be bothered with myself.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#148

Post by OutOfHere »

gpt4.1 doesn't have the issue of doing more than it should. It is why I prefer it for agentic coding. If anything, it may do a little less than it should, which I can remedy with my handwritten code or with a follow-up prompt. Oh and gpt4.1 has an input context that is over twice as large as claude.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#150

Post by nativeit »

nico wrote: post #139
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

This has certainly been my own experience in life. My step-father was a very studious and responsible person. He worked 30-years from the age of 19 with the state as an HVAC service tech until he retired at 49yo with a full state pension, and then went to work for a private company. His plan was to earn as much as he could until he turned 55, and then retire to live/work on the small farm he and my mother had just purchased. Everything was coming together, his new job placed him in a senior project management position, and gave him a considerable salary compared with the state.

Shortly after he turned 50, he was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and he died several months later, following a very painful and difficult attempt to treat it.

In my mind, this kind of thing is the height of tragedy—he did everything right. He exhibited an incredible amount of self-control and deferred his happiness, ensuring that his family and finances were well-cared for and secured, and then having fulfilled his obligations, he was almost immediately robbed of a life that he’d worked so hard to earn.

I experienced a few more object lessons in the same vein myself, namely having been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis at the age of 18, and readjusting my life’s goals to accommodate the prospect of disability. I’m thankfully still churning along under my own capacities, now at 41yo, but MS can be unpredictable, and I find it is necessary to remind myself of this from time to time. I am grateful for every day that I have, and to the extent it’s possible, I try to find nearer-term sources for happiness and fulfillment.

Don’t waste any time planning for more than the next five years (with the obvious exceptions for things like financial planning), as you can’t possible know what’s coming. Even if the unexpected event is a happy one, like an unexpected child or sudden financial windfall, your perspective will almost certainly be dramatically altered 1-2x each decade.

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