151–160 of 555 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it
Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward
Ive noticed that theyre often quite bad at refactoring, also.
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Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward
I'm pretty sure that will be true with AI as well. No accounting for taste, but part of makes code hard for me to reason about is when it has lots of combinatorial complexity, where the amount of states that can happen makes it difficult to know all the possible good and bad states that your program can be in. Combinatorial complexity is something that objectively can be expensive for any form of computer, be it a hu…
I don't entirely disagree that there is code that's objectively difficult to work with, but I suspect that the Venn diagram of "code that's hard for humans" and "code that's hard for computers" has much less overlap than you're suggesting.
It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
This product rides a hype wave. This is why it is crazy popular and successful. The situation there is akin to Viaweb - Viaweb also rode hype wave and code situation was awful as well (see PG's stories about fixing bugs during customer's issue reproduction theater). What did Viaweb's buyer do? They rewrote thing in C++. If history rhymes, then buyer of Anthropic would do something close to "rewrite it in C++" to the…
It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have…
Everything depends on context. Most code written by humans is indeed, garbage.
No, I completely disagree with this entire article. Bad code or good code is no longer relevant anymore. What matters is whether or not AI fulfills the contract as to how the application is supposed to work. If the code sucks, you just rerun the prompt again and the next iteration will be better. But better doesn't matter because humans aren't reading the code anymore. I haven't written a line of code since January a…
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Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.
Huh what moronic failure did Anthropic do? Every Claude Code user I know loves it.
It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true
It looks vibe coding, or at AI coding in general, has been challenging a few empirical laws: - Brooks' No Silver Bullet: no single technology or management technique will yield a 10-fold productivity improvement in software development within a decade. If we write a spec that details everything we want, we would write soemthing as specific as code. Currently people seem to believe that a lot of the fundamentals are w…
I thought you were gonna go the opposite direction with this. Debugging is now 100x as hard as writing the code in the first place.
> Lehman’s Law, which states that as a system's complexity increases as it evolves, unless work is done to maintain or reduce it. Similar to above, people start to believe otherwise.
Gotta disagree with this too. I find a lot of work has to be done to be able to continue vibing, because complexity increases beyond LLM capabilities rapidly otherwise.
So I set out to build an app with CC just to see what it's like. I currently use Copilot (copilot.money) to track my expenditures, but I've become enamored with sankey diagrams. Copilot doesn't have this charting feature, so I've been manually exporting all my transactions and massaging them in the sankey format. It's a pain in the butt, error prone, and my python skills are just not good enough to create a conversion script. So I had CC do it. After a few minutes of back and forth, it was working fine. I didn't care about spaghetti code at all.
So next I thought, how about having it generate the sankey diagrams (instead of me using sankeymatic's website). 30 minutes later, it had a local website running that was doing what I had been manually doing for months.
Now I was hooked. I started asking it to build a native GUI version (for macOS) and it dutifully cranked out a version using pyobjC etc. After ironing out a few bugs it was usable in less than 30 min. Feature adds consumed all my tokens for the day and the next day I was brimming with changes. Burned through that days tokens as well and after 3 days (I'm on the el cheapo plan), I have an app that basically does what I want in a reasonable attractive, and accurate manner.
I have no desire to look at the code. The size is relatively small, and resource usage is small as well. But it solved this one niche problem that I never had the time or skill to solve.
Is this a good thing? Will I be downvoted to oblivion? I don't know. I'm very very concerned about the long term impact of LLMs on society, technology and science. But it's very interesting to see the other side of what people are claiming.