Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

bramcohen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

161–170 of 555 posts

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#161

Post by eloisant »

tombert wrote: post #106
babelfish wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

All the good practices about strong typing, typically in Scala or Rust, also work great for AI.

If you make sure the compiler catches most issues, AI will run it, see it doesn't build and fix what needs to be fixed.

So I agree that a lot of things that make code good, including comments and documentation, is beneficial for AI.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#162

Post by mattmanser »

bearjaws wrote: post #23

This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases and redis cache layer... and won't scale beyond 50k users". As if 97% of web apps aren't just basic CRUD with some integration to another system if you are lucky. 99% of companies won't even have 50k users.

That's not actually true.

When you move to the enterprise layer, suddenly you get the opposite problem, you have a low amount of "users" but you often need a load of CPU intensive or DB intensive processing to happen quickly.

One company I worked for had their system built by, ummmm, not the greatest engineers and were literally running out of time in the day to run their program.

Every client was scheduled over 24 hours, and they'd got to running the program for 22 hours per day and were desperately trying to fix it before they ran out of "time". They couldn't run it in parallel because part of the selling point of the program was that it amalgamated data from all the clients.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#163

Post by _moof »

hungryhobbit wrote: post #124
scrame wrote: post #7

This is the guy that created bittorrent, btw. I know that was a long time ago, but he's not just some random blogger.

Given his background, you'd think he'd know that he should provide some evidence for his position (instead of making this completely unsupported rant).

It's a blog post, not an academic paper. Do you cite every source when you're conversing with colleagues?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#164

Post by jkingsman »

hibikir wrote: post #142

My favorite uses of Claude code is to do code quality improvements that would be seen as a total waste of time if I was doing them by hand, but are perfectly fine when they are done mostly for free. Looking for repetitive patterns in unit tests/functional tests. Making sure that all json serialization is done in similar patterns unless there's a particularly good reason. Looking for functions that are way too complic…

Absolutely. I've got a nice multi-paragraph prompt on hunting for subtle bugs, user expectation breaks, crufty/repeated code, useless tests (six tests that actually should be one logical flow; assertions that a ternary is still, indeed, a ternary; etc.), documentation gaps, and a few other bits and bobs.

I sick Opus, GPT5.4, and Gemini on it, have them write their own hitlists, and then have a warden Opus instance go and try to counterprove the findings, and compose a final hitlist for me, then a fresh context instance to go fix the hitlist.

They always find some little niggling thing, or inconsistency, or code organization improvement. They absolutely introduce more churn than is necessary into the codebase, but the things they catch are still a net positive, and I validate each item on the final hitlist (often editing things out if they're being overeager or have found a one in a million bug that's just not worth the fix (lately, one agent keeps getting hung up on "what if the device returns invalid serial output" in which case "yeah, we crash" is a perfectly fine response)).

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#165

Post by toomuchtodo »

MBCook wrote: post #147
thwarted wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code. We already knew that. This is a matter of people who didn't know that or didn't want to acknowledge that thinking they now have proof that it doesn't matter for creating a crazy popular & successful product, as if it's a gotcha on those who advocate for good practices. When your goal is to c…

VHS was not worse is better. It’s better is better.

Betamax was arguably better.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#166

Post by eloisant »

ahepp wrote: post #133
tombert wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

What do you think about the argument that we are entering a world where code is so cheap to write, you can throw the old one away and build a new one after you've validated the business model, found a niche, whatever? I mean, it seems like that has always been true to an extent, but now it may be even more true? Once you know you're sitting on a lode of gold, it's a lot easier to know how much to invest in the mine.

It hasn't always been true, it started with rapid development tools in the late 90's I believe.

And some people thought they were building "disposable" code, only to see their hacks being used for decades. I'm thinking about VB but also behemoth Excel files.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#167

Post by acedTrex »

seanosaur wrote: post #24
makerofthings wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I totally see what you're saying, but to me this feels different. Compilation is a fairly mechanical and well understood process. The large language models aren't just compiling English to assembler via your chosen language, they try and guess what you want, they add extra bits you didn't ask for, they're doing some of your solution thinking for you. That feels like more than just abstraction to me.

I think it's still abstraction by definition, but you're right in that it's a much larger single leap than in the past.

If this is true then a PMs jira tickets are an abstraction over an engineers code. It's not necessarily wrong by some interpretations but is not how the majority of engineers would define the word.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#168

Post by tayo42 »

datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #141
andrenotgiant wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true

It’s also possible to sell chairs that are uncomfortable and food that tastes terrible. Yet somehow we still have carpenters and chefs; Herman Miller and The French Laundry. Some business models will require “good” code, and some won’t. That’s how it is right now as well. But pretending that all business models will no longer require “good” code is like pretending that Michelin should’ve retired its list after the mi…

Those high end restaurants are more like art and exploration of food then something practical like code. The only similarity is maybe research in academia. There's not real industry uses of code that's like art.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#169

Post by quater321 »

semicolon_storm wrote: post #14

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.

I read this posts and I wonder how many people are thisdelusional or dishonest. I am programmer for 40 years and in most companies 90% of coders are so called stack overflow coders or google coders. Every coder who is honest will admit it and AI is already better than those 90%.FAR better. At least most influencer coder start to admit the fact that the code is actually awesome, if you know what you are doing. I am more of a code reviewer and I plan the implementation, what is far more exciting than writing the code itself. I have the feeling most feel the way I do but there are still those stack ovwerflow coders who are afraid to lose their jobs. And they will.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#170

Post by eloisant »

thesz wrote: post #109
semicolon_storm wrote: post #14

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…

This is also why they had to release it quickly. They got the first mover advantage but if they delayed to make its code better, a competitor could have taken the wave instead of them.
Post reply on HN