I have to say I am extremely sick of this term.
Vibe coding is the new HODL Similar energy
Vibe posting
“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
191–200 of 312 posts
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#192Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Yes, five years ago they were likely using different frameworks and tools. What does that have to do with improvements, either in AI or otherwise?
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#193Over the last week I tried to use a combination of Claude and OpenAI o3-mini to do a direct conversion of about 500 lines of uncommented academic modeling code from Matlab to Python. I can’t stress enough how badly these models performed. Nearly every consequential line had some variety of off by one or logic error, often very subtle. I didn’t try cursor or the more agentic systems, but I would be astounded if they properly rigged up a test harness, inspected the output and were able to respond to the runtime errors. I’d be happy to share the code if anyone wants to surprise me.
This is exactly the kind of semi-mechanical, low added value work that would greatly benefit from automation, and they really fell on their faces. I really benefit from these models on greenfield tasks where I can delegate minor drudge work, but in this case I honestly think they actually increased the difficulty.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#194> Cursor has some sort of "concise mode" (archived) that they'll turn on when there is high load where the model will still be rated at the normal price but behaves in a useless manner. This mode will omit details, drop important findings, and corrupt the output that is being produced. This is a real problem that I have experienced on and off. It's getting to the point where everyone on my team is actively looking fo…
> Generally, I've found Cursor works correctly after business hours. Interestingly the times I've experienced the most weirdness were during extremely not normal business hours (from the California perspective). For 3 nights in a row last week, I found myself coding at/after 2:30am during what were apparently periods of excessive load on Claude Sonnet. When asking Cursor to do things, it would fail, tell me about the…
Oh, that’s interesting. I’ve recently been doing a block of work between 10pm and 2am (entirely my personal preference).
It’s consistently better during that time.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#195This brilliant piece of satire from Steve Yegge got buried for some reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43446695 Judging by the comments, most people couldn't even tell it was satire, which goes to show how absurd the hype is right now (and probably why it was buried).
He works for a company who tries to sell coding agents. He's absolutely trying to pump it up and induce FOMO. If you can't see that because he hides it behind a layer of humor, that's on you.
For the long-time HN crowd this must be like finding out, say, Richard Garriott is a blockchain bro now.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#196Earlier 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.
This one guy made, in bolt.new, a system that would generate song lyrics for a song and sync the text to speech to different parts of the song. Creative and interesting.
Someone else made an “exquisite corpse” drawing game.
And another, a way to annotate medical images.
I think of all these things as functional prototypes. It’s obviously not engineering. But it is pretty magical —
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#197Over the last week I tried to use a combination of Claude and OpenAI o3-mini to do a direct conversion of about 500 lines of uncommented academic modeling code from Matlab to Python. I can’t stress enough how badly these models performed. Nearly every consequential line had some variety of off by one or logic error, often very subtle. I didn’t try cursor or the more agentic systems, but I would be astounded if they p…
As a counter to this, I had grok build an entire set of micro services and all I had to clean up was some format strings. It blew me away. Did in an hour what should have taken a week.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#198This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. We already have examples of a model finding more performant sorts [0], given the right incentives and time, and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it) the computer will best us at creating things for the computer. Is “vibe coding” real today? Not in my experience, with even Claude code. My hand ha…
> This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players.
I don’t see this. Board games are fundamentally different from software development problems. The latter have imperfect information, unknown requirements and constraints, fuzzy success criteria, and more.
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#199Over the last week I tried to use a combination of Claude and OpenAI o3-mini to do a direct conversion of about 500 lines of uncommented academic modeling code from Matlab to Python. I can’t stress enough how badly these models performed. Nearly every consequential line had some variety of off by one or logic error, often very subtle. I didn’t try cursor or the more agentic systems, but I would be astounded if they p…
As a counter to this, I had grok build an entire set of micro services and all I had to clean up was some format strings. It blew me away. Did in an hour what should have taken a week.
nice.
did you use grok web interface or some ide + grok?
Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality
#200Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Maybe just like with self-driving cars, trying to hook mechanical precision up to messy human society is going to be fraught and lead to blowback. Meaning that once planes start falling out of the sky from vibe coding Boeing contractors there will be PR and regulatory panics that soften the hype somewhat. Or, the next time Equifax gets mass leaked and they blame their security setup on generative AI. You can’t vibe code your way out of human stupidity and the consequences of production environments.