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

Vibe coding creates fatigue?

tabulamag.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

141–150 of 174 posts

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#141

Post by Jeff_Brown »

habinero wrote: post #57
Jeff_Brown wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Some strategies that seem to help exist, though. Write extensive tests before writing the code. They serve as guidance. Commit tests separately from library code, so you can tell the AI didn't change the test. Specify the task with copious examples. Explain why yo so things, not just what to do.

Yeah, this is where I start side-eying people who love vibe coding. Writing lots of tests and documentation and fixing someone else's (read: the LLM's) bad code? That's literally the worst parts of the job.

Absolutely. Honestly some days I'm not sure the AI saves me any time at all.

But on the other hand, writing thorough tests before coding the library is good practice with or without an assistant.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#142

Post by motbus3 »

Same for me. I feel fatigue and I have also been reflecting about that as it reminded me the same type of mind exhaust I felt when I was a manager.

Choosing, analysing, verifying, talking to others rather than thinking in a sequential and organised way.

One of the reasons I moved away of that position was this constant fatigue by the end of the day. I was happy on seeing things moving forward but it felt that it took more energy to do less

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#143

Post by observationist »

hansmayer wrote: post #94
observationist wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it m…

> I'm not a professional SWE It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for…

Exactly - I know enough to know what I don't know, since I've been able to interact with professionals, and went down the path of programming far enough to know I didn't want to do it. I've also gotten good at enough things to know the pattern of "be really shitty at doing things until you're not bad, and eventually be ok, and if you work your ass off, someday you'll actually be good at it".

The neat thing about vibe coding is knowing that I'm shitty at actual coding and achieving things in hours that would likely have taken me months to learn to do the right way, or weeks to hack together with other people's bubblegum and duct tape. I'd have to put in a couple years to get to the "OK" level of professional programming, and I feel glad I didn't. Lucky, even.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#144

Post by damiangriggs »

Going fast is awesome. If you have a bit of caffeine in the morning, turn on some tunes, and get into your workflow it's awesome. I get so sucked into my coding projects that when I'm done I'm disoriented. Nothing quite like being in the zone.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#145

Post by damiangriggs »

observationist wrote: post #34
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it m…

I've noticed that as well. I don't memorize every single syntax error, but when I use agents to help code I learn why they fail and how to correct them. The same way I would imagine a teacher learns the best way to teach their students.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#146

Post by WhyOhWhyQ »

Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

Everyone in this conversation talks about different activities. One version of vibe coding happens with Netflix open and without ever opening a text editor, and another happens with thoroughly reviewing every change.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#147

Post by rozal »

ewoodrich wrote: post #102
habinero wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, this is where I start side-eying people who love vibe coding. Writing lots of tests and documentation and fixing someone else's (read: the LLM's) bad code? That's literally the worst parts of the job.

I also get confused when I see it taken for granted that "vibe coding" removes all the drudgery/chores from programming. When my own experience heavily using Claude Code/etc every day routinely involves a lot of unpleasant clean up of accumulated LLM slop and "WTF" decisions. I still think it saves me time on net and yes, it typically can handle a lot on its own, but whenever it starts to fuck up the same request rep…

[dead]

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#148

Post by djmips »

scuff3d wrote: post #76
inetknght wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even asking it to do little tests, Claude 4.5 Sonnet Thinking still ends up writing tests that do nothing or don't do what it says will do. And it's always fucking cheery about it: "you're code is now production-ready!" and "this is an excellent idea!" and "all errors are now fixed! your code is production-ready!" and "I fixed the compiler issue, we're now production ready!" ...almost as if it's too eager to make its…

Yeah that aggressive sycophancy is incredibly annoying. Someone telling me I'm being a fucking idiot is more useful then "what a fantastic observation! You're so right" for the millionths time. Even using it to spitball ideas can be a problem. I was using Claude to bounce ideas off of for a problem I was working on it, and it was dead set a specific solution involving a stack and some complex control logic was correc…

I agree - that's why it's great to have a lot of experience so that you can choose the correct way. I run into way more issues and fatigue when I'm venturing into areas I'm not familiar with.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#150

Post by rightbyte »

Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

> I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster.

Is that contrarian though? Seems like pretty normal corparate setting bragging to me. (Note: I am not accusing you of it since your boss or collegues does not read this).

On the variant of "I am bad at not working too hard".

Post reply on HN