Live data from Hacker News

Perverse incentives of vibe coding

fredbenenson.medium.com

161–170 of 239 posts

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#161
post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As someone who vibe codes at times (and is a professional programmer), I'm curious how yall go about resisting this? Just avoid LLMs entirely and do everything by hand? Very rigorously go over any LLM-generated code before committing? It certainly is hard when I'm say writing unit tests to avoid the temptation to throw it into Cursor and prompt until it works.

I resist it by realizing that while LLM are good at things like decoding obtuse error messages, having them write too much of your code leads to a project becoming almost impossible to maintain or add to. And there are many cases where you spend more time trying to correct errors from the LLM than if you were to slow down and inspect the code yourself.

If you don’t commit its output until it’s in a shape that is maintainable and acceptable to you— just like with any other pair programming exercise— you’ll be fine. I do think your skills will atrophy over time, though. I’m not sure what the right balance is, here.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#162

I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up. Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it. But any time I've tried to get AI services to h…

The first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor). Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is a…

It’s because the people doing rote programming with them don’t think they are doing rote programming, they think it’s exceptional.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#163

I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up. Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it. But any time I've tried to get AI services to h…

I find it's incredibly helpful for prototyping. These tools quickly reach a limit of complexity and put out sub par code, but for a green field prototype that's ok.

I've successfully been able to test out new libraries and do explorations quickly with AI coding tools and I can then take those working examples and fix them up manually to bring them up to my coding standards. I can also extend the lifespan of coding tools by doing cleanup cycles where I manually clean up the code since they work better with cleaner encapsulation, and you can use them to work on one scoped component at a time.

I've found that they're great to test out ideas and learn more quickly, but my goal is to better understand the technologies I'm prototyping myself, I'm not trying to get it to output production quality code.

I do think there's a future where LLMs can operate in a well architected production codebase with proper type safe compilation, linting, testing, encapsulation, code review, etc, but with a very tight leash because without oversight and quality control and correction it'll quickly degrade your codebase.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor). Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is a…

Funny, I would give the absolute opposite advice. In my experience, the use of agents (mainly Cursor) is a sure-fire way to have a really painful experience with LLM-assisted coding. I much prefer to use AI as a pair programmer, that I talk to and sometimes get to write entire files, but I'm always the one doing the driving, and mostly the one writing the code. If you aren't building up mental models of the problem a…

I mean, it might depend, but many of the most common complaints about LLM coding (most notably hallucination) are essentially solved problems if you're using agents. Whatever works for you! I don't even like autocomplete, so I sympathize with not liking agents.

If it helps, for context: I'll go round and round with an agent until I've got roughly what I want, and then I go through and beat everything into my own idiom. I don't push code I don't understand and most of the code gets moved or reworked a bit. I don't expect good structure from LLMs (but I also don't invest the time to improve structure until I've done a bunch of edit/compile/test cycles).

I think of LLMs mostly as a way of unsticking and overcoming inertia (and writing tests). "Writing code", once I'm in flow, has always been pleasant and fast; the LLMs just get me to that state much faster.

I'm sure training data matters, but I think static typing and language tooling matters much more. By way of example: I routinely use LLMs to extend intensely domain-specific code internal to our project.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yikes. The reactionary reach for more regulation from a certain group is just so tiresome. This is the real mind virus that I wish would be contained in Europe. I almost can't believe this idea is being seriously considered by anybody. By that logic buying any CPU is gambling because it's not deterministic how far you can overclock it. Just so you know, not every llm use case requires paying for tokens. You can even…

Do you understand what electricity is?

Oh so now you think because it consumes some resource it's gambling? Would you say farming is gambling because it consumes water and time and you won't know what the result will be?

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#166

I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up. Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it. But any time I've tried to get AI services to h…

>large, complex, potentially multi-language

I find that token memory size limits are the main barrier here.

Once the LLM starts forgetting other parts of the application, all bets are off and it will hallucinate the dumbest shit, or even just remove features wholesale.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor). Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is a…

What agent do you recommend?

I use Augment Code as a plugin in IntelliJ and PyCharm. It's quite good, but I only use it for narrow, targeted objectives, agent mode or not.

I haven't seen any mentions of Augment code yet in comment threads on HN. Does anyone else use Augment Code?

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#169

I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up. Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it. But any time I've tried to get AI services to h…

The first and most important question to ask here is: are you using a coding agent? A lot of times, people who aren't getting much out of LLM-assisted coding are just asking Claude or GPT for code snippets, and pasting and building them themselves (or, equivalently, they're using LLM-augmented autocomplete in their editor). Almost everybody doing serious work with LLMs is using an agent, which means that the LLM is a…

My sweet spot is Cursor to generate/tweak code, but I do all the execution and debugging iteration myself.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speaking up for Devin.ai here. What I like about it is that after the initial prompt nearly all of my interaction with it is via pull request comments. I have this workflow where I trigger a bunch of prompts in the morning, lunch and at the end of the day. At those same times I give it feedback. The async nature really means I can have it work on things I can’t be bothered with myself.

I need to know more about the morning/lunch/evening prompts, and I need to know right now. What are they? This sounds amazing.

Oh they aren’t like time based instructions or anything. First thing I do when I sit down in the morning is go through the list of tasks I thought up overnight and fire devin at them. Then I go do whatever “real” work I needed to get done. Then at lunch I check in to see how things are going and give feedback or new tasks. Same as the last thing I do at night.

It keeps _me_ from context switching into agent manager mode. I do the same thing for doing code reviews for human teammates as well.

Post reply on HN