Earlier quoted context omitted.
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“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
161–170 of 312 posts
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#162Earlier quoted context omitted.
Because compared to a year ago, it's much better. Compared to two years ago, it almost didn't exist. Compared to three years ago, nobody was actually talking about it.
https://xkcd.com/605/
Like I get the jokes, and I totally agree that they won’t totally replace the humans. But come on, the way an average coder writes anything nowadays has dramatically changed. Especially for web and app stuff. I’ve onboarded some junior/mid-level engineers recently, and it’s such a different experience compared to 5 years ago.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
The growth of demand for software development is absurd and heavily skews people's expectations. It won't last forever.
>" It won't last forever." And who cares if it is true? So far programming is one of very few professions when person can set themselves for life in a relatively short period of time. When / if it is gone there will be something else. I have few friends who'd switched to be a handyman. They are doing great from what I see.
> So far programming is one of very few professions when person can set themselves for life in a relatively short period of time.
If you specifically optimize for it. Most people don't - they specialize and expect to be in their line of work for decades.
> When / if it is gone there will be something else.
There will be something else for young people who are just starting. If you're 20 years into a career and then your line of work disappears overnight, of course you can switch to something else - and enjoy your entry-level salary while competing for jobs with people who are 20+ years younger than you and have no meaningful costs or obligations yet.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
Vibe coding is 100% real. Or maybe we should call it code vibing when there is no coding ability. But I just taught 18 professionals with no coding ability to build functional software. Their minds were blown
If its something like "tic-tac-toe in Javascript", thats been done 1000x before, I wouldn't find it all that impressive.
Most of webdev has been done 1000000x before. Though to be fair, Wix and Squarespace already bit a huge chunk out of that market.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
the next version of AI will simply make it into a bigger mess.
Nah, the magic/promise of AI is that it has positive chance of getting there, so you can keep feeding it dollars until it eventually gets you the thing you want, and that it's still cheaper than having people do it the old-school way. We're not there yet, but I don't see anything preventing us from getting there in ~5 years. (Remember: 5 years ago, SOTA in this space was letting a genetic algorithm poke at an AST and…
And full self driving is always just 5 years away.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#166I think it's a good thing. Let them experience our little hell. They'll come out appreciating our craft more once they get through :)
And when it finally works..? I suspect (vibe) coding can be significantly improved by multi-step structural approach. Including coding, review, testing in a loop. Fully automatic. Like Chain of Thoughts helps solving logical tasks. This can be done today. The main limitation here is affective context window. I.e. big project doesn't fit. The solution is splitting, separating, and documenting. Brief doc instead of the whole code in prompt.
With this developers need to level up to architects, get more domain knowledge.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Where we are now, I wonder if is similar to the early days of compiled languages existing, back when people still somewhat commonly wrote assembly by hand and didn't trust compilers. Sure, things like Roller Coaster Tycoon exist, but but writing in a compiled language is so much faster, easier, and more broadly accessible than writing in assembly that compilers took over.
My worry about this approach is: there is a reasonably popular saying that writing code is hard but debugging it is twice as hard (at least), which I think is an accurate description. LLMs will greatly increase code production, will they also increase debuggability to match?
o1 has lately seemed more useful for debugging than for actually writing code. With writing code, it may give me some scaffold but I have a pretty particular idea of what I want and I have to rewrite most of it.
With debugging, there have been multiple cases where I was stuck on something, I described the problem in detail and o1 gave me an insightful explanation of what I didn't understand.
It's not magic, but mostly what makes it not magic is it can't respond to very detailed questions. But if I can get it the relevant information into a small space it can draw connections I can't.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#168Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think that's a great point. There is a place for outsourcing. Some projects and organizations are well suited for it. Some projects end up only using outsourcing at supplementing some parts of the work. Some can't do it for quality or compliance reasons. I think we will see something similar with LLMs. There will be areas where it will deliver cheaper and faster. There will be areas where it will deliver nothing bu…
I’ve seen a number of outsourcing project failures. The two things they all had in common were that the organizations in question were terrible at managing projects but they blamed the developers for management’s inability to plan or make decisions, and they were trying for unrealistic savings – it wasn’t enough to save 30-50% on salary, they wanted 90% even if that was below the market rate for those skills even in…
> the seagull guys who come in, declare that their favorite framework will solve everything, and leave are more vulnerable to being replaced by an LLM than someone who knows how to code but is also bringing actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have.
But that's just a continuous variant of the discrete-sounding claim that programming will get eaten by AI soon. After all, the "actual business-relevant experience and judgement which an LLM can’t have" is mostly not related to programming - and the better LLMs get at coding, the less value will the programming parts of the skillset have; take it to the limit, and it's just saying the managers and sales people will stay, while software developers will be gone.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#169I'll share a new wrinkle that casts more shade on the coding LLMs. We have a fair number of offshore resources that are used for dev. They developers are fully integrated into the team, are in all the stand-ups, and substitute for the usual role of junior programmers. They don't get the grunt-work shoveled on them, they get the same work as everyone else, they're just expected to not be as fast. In 6 months 2 out of…
BTW, Copilot is not the best at coding. With the quality LLM return exponentially grows. Bigger chunks, fewer bugs, less time checking. From my experience LLMs do not impress on complex algorithms and shine on small utilities. They can use libs I even don't want to learn about.
I haven't really noticed that myself. I go "LLM shopping" fairly frequently trying to find which one of the few I'm paying for gives the best result for the current problem. They all seem to have their shortfalls, although I will say Claude is better for Greenfield work.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#170Earlier quoted context omitted.
Nah, the magic/promise of AI is that it has positive chance of getting there, so you can keep feeding it dollars until it eventually gets you the thing you want, and that it's still cheaper than having people do it the old-school way. We're not there yet, but I don't see anything preventing us from getting there in ~5 years. (Remember: 5 years ago, SOTA in this space was letting a genetic algorithm poke at an AST and…
And full self driving is always just 5 years away.
I wouldn't bet against it. Self-driving tech benefits directly from the outputs of sudden and continued growth of R&D in AI, fueled by hype-driven investments.