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The Vibe Tax

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Re: The Vibe Tax

#141
post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How in the world do you need 30k LOC for your CI/CD??

Because it's complex and I'm stuffing 30-50 PRs a day through it. 7 GHA workflows across four self-hosted runners. I'm on my third iteration, after constantly log jamming previous versions. Most steps aren't "run pytest", they're gates that guard against an LLM's bias to continuously add more and more complexity to a system. I'm aware of the irony of having a complex system to mitigate complexity, but the key differe…

What are the project's capabilities? I have also written a personal finance application, and it's ~3k LOC total. And have several projects that are dramatically more complicated than a typical personal finance app, and are 30-50k.

This begs the question: If you're using LLMs heavily, wouldn't it be better from a time, correctness, and token perspective to have a more compact and maintainable code base? We don't know what the personal finance app does, how quickly it runs, how much it improves your finance management, how easy it is to install and update etc, or how maintainable it is by people or LLMs. What you did post is a red flag of consequence, without mitigating factors: We know only the red flag.

Another perspective: I use LLMs heavily as well, but don't find they appreciably increase code verbosity, for a given set of features/requirements.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#142

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

No disrespect but 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline sounds truly terrible.

If your build scripts are more than 100-300 LOC you are doing something very wrong.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#143

Most, if not all, of the code in the company I work in is written by AI. Our tests are useless. We have tests that make sure that mongoose schemas are creating the collections defined in them. We have tests that check that zod shcemas parse objects currently. Every PR, even if 1 line change, will drag 25 file changes because our tests are so ad-hoc, so verbose, and so incompatible with each other. Imagine how the cod…

What a disgusting mess. Hopefully at some point people will be willing to listen to arguments in the vein of: “we spent $x dollars writing y loc that was then reviewed using z hours that did nothing, added no revenue and we then spent w additional budget removing it”

Re: The Vibe Tax

#144
post #44

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

> Or their predisposition to add, add, and add more stuff when proper engineering practices are more often about subtraction (but I've built mitigation guardrails against a lot of that). > a… personal financial management application… about 126k LOC against 240k LOC of regression tests and 30k LOC of CI/CD pipeline Just how much functionality are you getting out of that? It's hard for me to imagine that people want t…

Pretty sure LibreOffice Calc is a lot more than 126k LOC.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#145
post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife was a diehard YNAB user before we met but it went by the wayside once we merged finances. She wanted to get back to better managing our money and started using Google Sheets and then got stuck. She asked me for help trying to create a pivot table and like any good engineer, I built her an entirely new application instead. In my defense though, it does way more than a spreadsheet. Stuff like OCRing screenshots…

> do you still owe a minimum payment based on that purchase? I'm skeptical that the UX is improved much by having the app know the answer. The bank tells you what to pay, a month beforehand. The user has to get that number from the bank anyway, to be sure they don't incur fees. Your app should just pull it from the statements, not independently calculate it.

That's a valid point.

But ad_fontes was describing an edge case and that was an excellent example of one (regardless of whether it was an important or necessary feature).

Re: The Vibe Tax

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because it's complex and I'm stuffing 30-50 PRs a day through it. 7 GHA workflows across four self-hosted runners. I'm on my third iteration, after constantly log jamming previous versions. Most steps aren't "run pytest", they're gates that guard against an LLM's bias to continuously add more and more complexity to a system. I'm aware of the irony of having a complex system to mitigate complexity, but the key differe…

What are the project's capabilities? I have also written a personal finance application, and it's ~3k LOC total. And have several projects that are dramatically more complicated than a typical personal finance app, and are 30-50k. This begs the question: If you're using LLMs heavily, wouldn't it be better from a time, correctness, and token perspective to have a more compact and maintainable code base? We don't know…

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