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The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

bramcohen.com

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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#181
post #20

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.

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.

your prediction is going to be wrong, even with all those caveats

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#182

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…

> And in the worst case, just ask AI to rewrite the code.

"And in the worst case just pay for it twice."

That leads to a dead end.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#183
post #8

> That wouldn’t even be a big violation of the vibe coding concept. You’re reading the innards a little but you’re only giving high-level, conceptual, abstract ideas about how problems should be solved. The machine is doing the vast majority, if not literally all, of the actual writing. Claude Code is being produced at AI Level 7 (Human specced, bots coded), whereas the author is arguing that AI Level 6 (Bots coded,…

It's also a context-specific scale. I work in computer vision. Building the surrounding app, UI, checkout flow, etcetera is easily Level 6/7(sorry...) on this scale. Building the rendering pipeline, algorithms, maths, I've turned off even level 2. It is just more of a distraction than it's worth for that deep state of focus. So I imagine at least some of the disconnect comes from the area people work in and its novel…

am layman. is CV "solved" at this point, or is there more work to be done?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#184
post #49
post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is non-deterministic. Can it still be considered an abstraction over a deterministic layer?

The argument against this is that human coders are also non-deterministic, so does it really matter if it's a human or an AI agent producing the code – assuming the AI agent is capable of producing human-quality code or better? I agree it's not a layer of abstraction in the traditional sense though. AI isn't an abstraction of existing code, it's a new way to produce code. It's an "abstraction layer" in the same way a…

> The argument against this is that human coders are also non-deterministic, so does it really matter if it's a human or an AI agent producing the code

Actually yes, because Humans can be held accountable for the code they produce

Holding humans accountable for code that LLMs produce would be entirely unreasonable

And no, shifting the full burden of responsibility to the human reviewing the LLM output is not reasonable either

Edit: I'm of the opinion that businesses are going to start trying to use LLMs as accountability sinks. It's no different than the driver who blames Google Maps when they drive into a river following its directions. Humans love to blame their tools.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#186
post #147

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.

Specifically, VHS had both longer recording times and cheaper VCRs (due to Matsushita’s liberal licensing) than Betamax did. Beta only had slightly better picture quality if you were willing to sacrifice recording length per tape. Most Betamax users adopted the βII format which lowered picture quality to VHS levels in order to squeeze more recording time onto the tape. At that point Betamax’s only advantage was a slightly more compact cassette.

Also to correct another common myth, porn was widely available on both formats and was not the cause of VHS’s success over Betamax.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#188

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

Not only true but I would guess it's the normal case. Most software is a huge pile of tech debt held together by zip-ties. Even greenfield projects quickly trend this way, as "just make it work" pressure overrides any posturing about a clean codebase.

long ago, wordpress plugins were often a proper mess

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#189

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…

The fix time horizon changes too, don't discard that.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, many of the complaints seem more like giddy joy than anything. The negative emotion regex, for example, is only used for a log/telemetry metric. Sampling "wtf?" along would probably be enough. Why would you use an agent for that? I don't see how a vibe-coded app is freed from the same trade-offs that apply to a fast-moving human-coded one. Especially since a human is still driving it, thus they will take the sa…

I think the thing is that people expect one of the largest companies in the world to have well written code. Claude’s source code is fine for a 1-3 person team. It’s atrocious for a flagship product from a company valued over $380 BILLION. Like if that’s the best ai coding can do given infinite money? Yeah, the emperor has no clothes. If it’s not the best that can be done, then what kinda clowns are running the show…

The difference here is that everyone else in this product category are also sprinting full steam ahead trying to get as many users as they can

If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind. Speed of implementation short term might beat out long-term maintenance and iteration they'd get from quality code

They're just taking on massive tech debt

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