[deleted]
Perverse incentives of vibe coding
171–180 of 239 posts
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#172Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
Right, no, I figured that! Like the idea of preloading a bunch of things into a model that I don't have the bandwidth to sort through, but having them on tap when I come up for air from whatever I'm currently working on, sounds like a super good trick.
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#173These perverse incentives run at the heart of almost all Developer Software as a Service tooling. Using someone else's hosted model incentivizes increasing token usage, but it's nothing special about AI. Consider Database-as-a-service companies: They're not incentivized to optimize on CPU usage, they charge per cpu. They're not incentivized to improve disk compression, they charge for disk-usage. There are several DB…
> When you run the software yourself, or the model yourself, the incentives aligned: use less power, use less memory, use less disk, etc.
But my team's time is soooo valuable. It's sooo sooo sooo valuable. Oh and we can't afford to hire anyone else either. But our time its sooo valuable. We need these tools!
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#174I 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…
Some people do really repetitive or really boilerplate things, others do not. Also you have to learn to talk to it and how to ask it things.
"The interface is natural language"
"The programming language of the future will be English"
---
"Well are you using it right? You have to know how to use it"
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#175Earlier 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…
Agree. My favorite workflow has been chatting with the LLM in the assistant panel of Zed, then making inline edits by prompting the AI with the context of that chat. That way, I can align with the AI on how the problem should be solved before letting it loose. What's great about this depending on how easy or hard the problem is for the LLM, I can shift between handholding / manual coding and vibe coding.
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#176I 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’ve had good experiences using it, but with the caveat that only Gemini Pro 2.5 has been at all useful, and only for “spot” tasks. I typically use it to whip up a CLI tool or script to do something that would have been too fiddly otherwise. While sitting in a Teams meeting I got it to use the Roslyn compiler SDK in a CLI tool that stripped a very repetitive pattern from a code base. Some OCD person had repeated the…
>Some OCD person had repeated the same nonsense many thousands of times. The tool cleaned up the mess in seconds.
What were they doing?
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#177I understand your point. The Vibe approach is IMO only effective when you adopt a software engineering mindset. Here's how it works (at least for me with Copilote agent mode): 1. Develop a Minimum Viable Product (MVP) or prototype that functions. 2. Write tests, either before or after the initial development. 3. Implement coding guidelines, style guides, linter etc. Do code reviews. 4. Continuously adjust, add featur…
I have doubts that testing is going to be the key to make vibe coding work for non-trivial projects. I'd focus on developing great well documented interfaces between components and keeping the scope of your agent under control.
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#178Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 m…
Right, no, I figured that! Like the idea of preloading a bunch of things into a model that I don't have the bandwidth to sort through, but having them on tap when I come up for air from whatever I'm currently working on, sounds like a super good trick.
That’s kind of where Devin excels. The agent itself is good enough, I don’t even know what model it uses. But it’s hosted and well integrated with GitHub, so you just give it a prompt and out shoots a pr sometime later. You comment on the pr and it refines it. It has a concept of “sessions” so you can start many of those tasks at once. You can login to each of its tasks and see what it is doing or interdict, but I rarely do.
Like most of the code agents it works best with tight testable loops. But it has a concept of short vs long tests and will give you plans as nd confidence values to help you refine your prompt if you want.
I tend to just let it go. If it gets to a 75% done spot that isn’t worth more back and forth I grab the pr and finish it off.
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#179I 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…
You are not alone! I strongly agree and I feel like I am losing my mind reading some of the comments people have about these services.
I swear the people posting this stuff are just building todo list tier apps from scratch. On even the most moderately large codebase it completely breaks down.
Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding
#180Earlier 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?
Try https://aider.chat + OpenRouter.ai, pay-as-you-go, use any model you want, I use Claude Sonnet.
It has a very good system prompt so the code is pretty good without a lot of fluff.