Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vibe coding is mad depressing

law.gmnz.xyz

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 168 posts

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#141

Post by cweagans »

ekropotin wrote: post #75
cweagans wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IMO, UCEPROTECTL3 is a scam and it's not worth even acknowledging their existence. https://www.reddit.com/r/sysadmin/comments/eur4ju/removal_fr... among many other similar posts. https://www.uceprotect.net/en/index.php?m=7&s=8 -- "pay us to fix a problem that we've caused, and if you have the gall to call it what it is (extortion), then we'll publish your email and be massive dicks about it" (To be clear, not all spa…

You may be right, and I'd be happy to ignore it, but unfortunately, my work laptop has baked it in. I assume many other companies are using it as well.

Baked in?? Are you saying that your work laptop uses email blacklists as a way to block you from e.g. visiting a website? Please say more. Also where do you work so that I know where I never want to work?

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#142

Post by Mikho »

The author should really rethink the relations with clients and "freedom" they get in the process.

Back when I did websites for clients, often after carefully thinking a project through and getting to some final idea on how everything should look, feel, and operate, I presented this optimal concept to clients. Some would start recommending changes and adding their own ideas—which I most often already iterated through earlier during ideation and designing.

It rarely builds a good rapport with clients if you start explaining why their ideas on "improvements" are really not that good. Anyway, I would listen to them, nod, and do nothing as to their ideas. I would just stick to mine concept without wasting time for random client's "improvements"—leaving them to the last moment if a client would insist on them at the very end.

Funny thing is that clients usually, after more consideration and time would come on their own to the result I came to and presented to them—they just needed time to understand that their "improvements" aren't relevant.

Nevertheless, if they insisted on implementing their "improvements" (which almost never happened) I'd do it for additional price—most often for them to just see that it wasn't good idea to start with and get back to what I already did before.

So, sometimes, ignoring client's ideas really saves a lot of time.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#143

Post by ekropotin »

cweagans wrote: post #141
ekropotin wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You may be right, and I'd be happy to ignore it, but unfortunately, my work laptop has baked it in. I assume many other companies are using it as well.

Baked in ?? Are you saying that your work laptop uses email blacklists as a way to block you from e.g. visiting a website? Please say more. Also where do you work so that I know where I never want to work?

I apologize for my sloppy use of words.

What I'm saying is that I can't access this website from my work laptop - it shows me branded blocked page.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think there is a policy set up on Zcaler, blocking access to the domains defined in some sort of blacklist. The reason why I assumed it's UCEPROTECTL3 is because it's the only positive result I got at online blacklist lookup against gmnz.xyz.

And no, I don't feel comfortable sharing my employer.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#144

Post by DANmode »

zahlman wrote: post #116
moomoo11 wrote: post #15

“I made a chat app using Claude in two hours” Ah yes a supabase backed, hallucinated data model with random shit, using deprecated methods, and a copy paste UI. Zero access control or privacy, 1% of features, no files uploading or playback or calling. “Can you scale this to 1M users by end of the week? Something similar to WhatsApp or Telegram or Signal” Sybau mf

>Sybau mf What does this mean?

“Shut yo bitch ass up, mothafucka.”

Like a neck tattoo, but the text form.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#145

Post by prewett »

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…

Heh, that reminds me of the BASIC games I used to write as a kid. I didn't know that variables could be more than one letter, so S would be score, but then if I needed speed and S was taken, I'd just use T. After a while I'd hit a bug that was difficult to reason about, or leave the codebase for a while and not have any clue what the variables meant. So I'd abandon it and start with the fresh, new idea.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#146

Post by whattheheckheck »

overfeed wrote: post #135
rcruzeiro wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 tea…

What are your thoughts on the idea from the book High Output Management where everyone's outputs under the manager is considered the managers output. Aka if they're choosing incorrectly it's trivial to explain the facts for them to choose right. If they don't you get them to agree to the wrong choice in writing and move on

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#147

Post by wvenable »

throwdbaaway wrote: post #98
wvenable wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're using. I've used Claude in agent mode to port a very complex and spaghetti coded C application to nicely structured C++. The original code was so intertwined that I didn't want to figure out so I had shelved the project until AI came along. It wasn't super bad at converting the code but even it struggled with some of the logic. Luckily, I had it design a test suite to compare the outputs of t…

At the high level, you asked LLM to translate N lines of code to maybe 2N lines of code, while GP asked LLM to translate N lines of English to possibly 10N lines of code. Very different scenarios.

The OP said the LLM didn't build anything, said it was great, and didn't even compile it. My experience has been far the opposite: not only compiling it and fixing compile time errors but also running it and fixing runtime issues as well. Even going so far as to write waveform analysis tools in Python (the output of this project was WAV files) to determine the issues.

It doesn't really matter what we told it do; a task is a task. But clearly how each LLM performed that task very different for me than the OP.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#148

Post by wvenable »

jpc0 wrote: post #68
wvenable wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure what you're using. I've used Claude in agent mode to port a very complex and spaghetti coded C application to nicely structured C++. The original code was so intertwined that I didn't want to figure out so I had shelved the project until AI came along. It wasn't super bad at converting the code but even it struggled with some of the logic. Luckily, I had it design a test suite to compare the outputs of t…

Are you sure claude didn't do exactly the same thing but the harness, claude code, just hid it from you? I have seen AI agents fall into the exact loop that GP discussed and needed manual intervention to fall out of. Also blindly having the AI migrate code from "spaghetti C" to "structured C++" sounds more like a recipe for "spaghetti C" to "fettuccine C++". Sometimes its hidden data structures and algorithms you wan…

> Are you sure claude didn't do exactly the same thing but the harness, claude code, just hid it from you?

What do you mean? Are you under the impression I'm not even reading the code? The code is actually the most important part because I already have working software but what I want is working software that I can understand and work with better (and so far, the results have been good).

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#149

Post by wvenable »

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…

As I'm getting better and better results with it, I'm having it do more and more things. I went through a complete agentic refactor of a project from Angular 17 to Angular 20 (RxJS to Signals) and I'd say it did it perfectly. A few times I'd get it summarize and start a new chat because it can start to get less effective when the history gets too long. I also had to iterate on what I wanted and do things a step a time. Although it was very clear that it also wanted to do things in pieces and test each major change before continuing on.

I think like any tool it's has it's pros and cons and the more you use it the more you figure out how to make the best use out of it and when to give up.

Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing

#150

Post by wvenable »

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…

Programmers are the last people on earth who should complain about job loss due to automation. Our entire jobs since the beginning has been automating people out of jobs and we've done a wonderful job of that for decades. Entire classes of jobs no longer exist. Although I'm not personally responsible for anyone losing their job I'm certainly responsible for less people being hired.

AI is just the next step and not even a particularly large leap. We already needed less law secretaries due to advances of technology. We killed most journalism two decades ago. Art and Music had Photoshop and autotune. Now we've actually achieved something we've literally been striving for since the dawn of computing -- the ability to speak natural language to a computer and have it do what we ask. But it's just one more step.

Post reply on HN