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Vibe coding creates fatigue?

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Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#151

Post by exitb »

johnsmith1840 wrote: post #38
LocalH wrote: post #5

Downtime for the conscious brain is paramount in life, as that allows the sub-conscious to absorb and act on new information. I have no science to point to, but I believe wholeheartedly that the conscious and sub-conscious minds cannot access the same neurons at the same time, it's like single-ported RAM. More than one thing in my life has been improved by taking a conscious break and letting the subconscious churn

I did alot of AI research around this (memory/finetuning) Coolest bit of research I cam across was what the brain does during sleep. It basically reduces connection during this. But it also makes you hallucinate (sleep). This was found in researching fish and also training LLMs there's great value in "forgetting" for generalization. After studying it in LLMs for awhile I also came to your same conclusion about my own…

That’s super visible in young children. If you teach one to ride a bike, you don’t actually see much progress within a span of a single session. The progress is there the next day.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#152

Post by lelanthran »

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…

>> I'm not a professional SWE, I just know enough to understand what the right processes look like, and vibe coding is awesome but chaotic and messy.

> 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 ;)

I mean, he qualified it, right? Sounds like he knew exactly what he was getting :-/

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#153

Post by solumunus »

blitz_skull wrote: post #84
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 think it's less "going fast" and more "going fast forever." To your point, you can blow through damn-near anything pretty quickly now. Now I actually find myself problem-solving for nearly 8 hours every day. My brain feels fried at the end of the day way more than it used to.

This. I’m able to be more productive for long hours more consistently than before. The occasions where I’m engineering for 8 solid hours are much more frequent now, and I’m certainly more tired. Almost all of my time is now dedicated to problem solving and planning, the LLM executes and I sit there thinking. Not everyone’s brain or project is well suited for this, but for me as a personality combined with the way my product is structured, it’s a total game changer.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#154

Post by p_v_doom »

Zigurd wrote: post #114
Animats wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. You, too, can be awarded the Order of Labor Glory, Third Class.[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Order_of_Labour_Glory

Had I been doing other than interesting exploratory coding, I would agree with you. I can readily imagine standups where the "scrum master" asks where our AI productivity boost numbers are. Big dystopia potential.

People in some places already are doing that. The Dystopia is now

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#155

Post by lelanthran »

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. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag.

It depends. No one is running their brain at full-throttle for more than a few hours on end.

If your "niggling" defects is mostly changes that don't require deep thought (refactor this variable name, function parameters/return type changes, classes, filename changes, etc), then I can see how it is energising - you're getting repeated dopamine hits for very little effort.

If, OTOH, you are doing deep review of the patterns and structures the LLM is producing, you aren't going to be doing that for more than a few hours without getting exhausted.

I find, myself, that repeatedly correcting stuff makes me tired faster than simply "LGTM, lets yolo it!" on a filename change, or class refactor, etc.

When the code I get is not what I wanted even though it passes the tests, it's more mental energy to correct the LLM than if I had simply done it myself from the first.

A good example of the exhausting tasks from today - my input has preprocessing directives embedded in it; there's only three now (new project), so the code generated by Claude did a number of `if-then-else-if` statements to process this input.

My expectation was that it would use a jump table of some type (possibly a dictionary holding function pointers, or a match/switch/case statement).

I think a good analogy is self-driving cars: if the SDC requires no human intervention, then sure it's safe. If the SDC requires the human to keep their hand on the wheel at all time because it might disengage with sub-second warnings, then I'm going to be more tired after a long drive than if I simply turned it off.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#156

Post by lukan »

closewith wrote: post #134
Nashooo wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One means (used to mean?) actually checking the LLM's output one means keep trying until it outputs does what you want.

That's the original context of the Andrej Karpathy comment, but it's just synonymous with LLM assisted coding now.

Not yet, but the more you will insist, the more it will be. But what is your proposal for differentiating between just prompting without looking at code vs just using LLM to generate code?

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#157

Post by vidarh »

prmph wrote: post #90
vidarh wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Really, this. You still need to check its work, but it is also pretty good at checking its work if told to look at specific things. Make it stop. Tell it to review whether the code is cohesive. Tell it to review it for security issues. Tell it to review it for common problems you've seen in just your codebase . Tell it to write a todo list for everything it finds, and tell it fix it. And only review the code once it'…

So why can't the deterministic part of the agent program embed in all these checks?

It increasingly is. E.g. if you use Claude Code, you'll notice it "likes" to produce todo lists that rendered specially via the TodoWrite tool that's built in.

But it's also a balance of avoiding being over-prescriptive in tools that needs to support very different workflows, and it's easy to add more specific checks via plugins.

We're bound to see more packaged up workflows over time, but the tooling here is still in very early stages.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#158

Post by vidarh »

habinero wrote: post #60
colechristensen wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Tell it to grade its work in various categories and that you'll only accept B+ or greater work. Focusing on how good it's doing is an important distinction.

It's very funny that I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. "Just tell it to do better."

Think of it as a "you should - and is allowed to - spend more time on this" command, because that is pretty much what it is. The model only gets so much "thinking time" to produce the initial output. By asking it to iterate you're giving it more time to think and iterate.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#159

Post by lelanthran »

jmalicki wrote: post #45
louthy wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> But not having to spend hours here and there getting up to speed on some mundane but unfamiliar aspect of the implementation Red flag. In other words you don’t understand the implementation well enough to know if the AI has done a good job. So the work you have committed may work or it may have subtle artefacts/bugs that you’re not aware of, because doing the job properly isn’t of interest to you. This is ‘phoning…

Learning an unfamiliar aspect and doing it be hand will have the same issues. If you're new to Terraform, you are new to Terraform, and are probably going to even insert more footguns than the AI. At least when the AI does it you can review it.

> Learning an unfamiliar aspect and doing it be hand will have the same issues.

I don't think so. We gain proficiency by doing, not by reading.

If all you are doing is reading, you are not gaining much.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#160

Post by lelanthran »

Kiro wrote: post #131
JohnMakin wrote: post #3

There probably needs to be some settled discussion on what constitutes "vibe coding." I interpret this term as "I input text into $AI_MODEL, I look at the app to see my change was implemented. I iterate via text prompts alone, rarely or never looking at the code generated." vs. what this author is doing, which seems more like agent assisted coding than "vibe" coding. With regard to the subject matter, it of course ma…

I think the difference between the two is shrinking by the day. At this point I almost never need to address anything with the LLM's solution and could easily just go straight to testing for most things. The key difference is still the prompts and knowing what to reference/include in the context.

> I think the difference between the two is shrinking by the day. At this point I almost never need to address anything with the LLM's solution and could easily just go straight to testing for most things.

Do you believe that atrophy is not a real thing?

I've found that LLMs massively over-engineer things, regardless of the prompt used. How do you counter that without going back and forth at least a few times?

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