The problem with "vibe coding" • Hacker News Board

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#151

Post by cco » Wed, Apr 16, 2025, 5:12 PM UTC

int_19h wrote: post #143

cco wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I couldn't think of any two concepts less associated with "hacking". I think you may have an understanding of that word that is not very common.

It sounds like you're thinking about a "hack", as in quick and dirty solution. But that does not relate to "hacking", and most certainly does not relate to "hacker ethos". And while "hacking" is sort of ambiguous, I don't recall ever seeing "hacker ethos" defined by quick and dirty solutions.

No, though those concepts are of course related historically, I'm not confusing the two.

The hacker's ethos is about freedom of information, freedom of access (apropos to this video about vibe coding accessibility tools), community, collaboration and so on.

I've never seen or heard "elegance" associated with hackers, hacking, the hacking ethos etc. If I were to go further, elegance as it is used here has some anti-hacker connotations, i.e. it is a gatekeeping term to separate "true" coders from "amateurs" which is very anti-hacker.

Anyway, I don't think I'm conflating these terms, but it could be true that my understanding of the hacker ethos is wrong.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#152

Post by int_19h » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 1:13 AM UTC

cco wrote: post #151

int_19h wrote: post #143

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It sounds like you're thinking about a "hack", as in quick and dirty solution. But that does not relate to "hacking", and most certainly does not relate to "hacker ethos". And while "hacking" is sort of ambiguous, I don't recall ever seeing "hacker ethos" defined by quick and dirty solutions.

No, though those concepts are of course related historically, I'm not confusing the two. The hacker's ethos is about freedom of information, freedom of access (apropos to this video about vibe coding accessibility tools), community, collaboration and so on. I've never seen or heard "elegance" associated with hackers, hacking, the hacking ethos etc. If I were to go further, elegance as it is used here has some anti-ha…

> I've never seen or heard "elegance" associated with hackers, hacking, the hacking ethos etc. If I were to go further, elegance as it is used here has some anti-hacker connotations, i.e. it is a gatekeeping term to separate "true" coders from "amateurs" which is very anti-hacker.

This is where I would strongly disagree. Are you familiar with shibboleths like 1337?

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#153

Post by caspper69 » Thu, Apr 17, 2025, 8:05 PM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #116

caspper69 wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I am in the middle of my third AI assisted project. I disagree ~90%. If you prompt an LLM like an architect and feed it code rather than expecting it to write your code, both ChatGPT 4o and Claude 3.7 Sonnet do a great job. Do they mess up? Regularly. But the key is to guide the LLM and not let the LLM guide you, otherwise you'll end up in purgatory. It takes some time to get used to what types of prompts work. Remem…

I wonder how many lines of code you write in a day. Most PR I’ve seen has a diff in the lowe 2 digits, unless it’s refactoring or formatting.

If I had to guess, probably a couple hundred lines a day, maybe more if I get in a groove or have a deadline.

But with an LLM, that number goes to about 500 or so, 200 of which are real code and not definitions of some kind. Truthfully, that’s where the LLMs shine. I have this enum with 50 variants, and need to build a dictionary (with further constraints and more complex objects). That shit takes forever even with cut & paste, unless you code with code, and those one-offs aren’t my cup of tea anymore.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#154

Post by edg5000 » Sun, Apr 20, 2025, 10:20 AM UTC

skydhash wrote: post #118

edg5000 wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

With the Altair you had switches to input bits of CPU instructions. Then punchcards. Then Telex. Then assembly in a terminal. Then C, Pascal and Smalltalk. Then Java, C++, Python, PHP. Then the mountains of libraries and frameworks, realtime indexers, linters, autocomplete, suggestions. The next step seems that we will write programs in prompts. Maybe we will get a language that is more structured than the current na…

You can’t eliminate formalism in programming. You can only abstract it away by creating a metaprogramming layer for the current one. And prompt isn’t that. Prompting is a blind shot hoping to hit something good.

Indeed, that is why we may end up with some sort of standardized and structured way to write functional descriptions of software that we can train AIs on. How close to natural language it will be I'm not sure. Arguably, since the birth of computing we see programming languages inching ever closer to natural language, albeit still far removed. Perhaps we will end up with something indeed really formal and strict, but much more high-level. AIs could than be trained on the full language; maybe we can then solve the "confident yet wrong" problem with current agentic programming.