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

Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

addyo.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

191–200 of 213 posts

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#191

Post by johnnyanmac »

bee_rider wrote: post #180
ken47 wrote: post #134

The hype levels are so overwhelming that AI coding could never hope to meet them. I've tried having a highly-ranked AI coding app write unit tests for a relatively complex codebase. 80% of the generated test cases failed. But an experienced human such as myself could use those as a starting point since it took care of some of the tedious boilerplate. It genuinely saved me some time and annoyance, but could never hope…

I do somewhat worry that AI will harm language development. Boilerplate… is bad, right? If our languages were more elegant, we’d need less of it. It is necessary because things don’t have sane defaults or sufficient abstraction. In particular, if the AI is able to “guess” what boilerplate you wanted, that boilerplate ought to be knowable beforehand (because the AI is not actually guessing, it is a deterministic set o…

>Boilerplate… is bad, right?

It's tough to say in a vacuum. Generally, the lower level you go, the more "boilerplate" you'll need. That cost of iteration is to give such programmers more control over the task.

So python may sneer at such boilerplate. Whereas Rust would prefer being more verbose.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#192

Post by johnnyanmac »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #136
ken47 wrote: post #134

The hype levels are so overwhelming that AI coding could never hope to meet them. I've tried having a highly-ranked AI coding app write unit tests for a relatively complex codebase. 80% of the generated test cases failed. But an experienced human such as myself could use those as a starting point since it took care of some of the tedious boilerplate. It genuinely saved me some time and annoyance, but could never hope…

AI is to SWEs what self-driving cars (or like features on new cars) are to taxi drivers. A neat thing that may make some basic things a little easier. But it's the wrong perspective. Think instead what a self driving car is to someone who cannot drive. It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in or can only handle basic local trips. It's a total game changer. AI is unlocking computers for…

>It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in

I'd say that breaks the entire concept of "self driving" at that point. If people are fine with some of those "actually Indian" stories where supposedly AI powered tools turned out to have a significant human element to it, why not just go back to the taxi? You clearly don't care about the tech, you care about being driven to a destination.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#193

Post by johnnyanmac »

threeseed wrote: post #137
Workaccount2 wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

AI is to SWEs what self-driving cars (or like features on new cars) are to taxi drivers. A neat thing that may make some basic things a little easier. But it's the wrong perspective. Think instead what a self driving car is to someone who cannot drive. It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in or can only handle basic local trips. It's a total game changer. AI is unlocking computers for…

Your analogy makes no sense. There is no equivalent of an operator who will fix your code if it fails. You're asking someone with zero coding experience to jump in and fix bugs so niche or complex that the LLM is incapable of doing it.

Sure. Who's gonna do it though? This whole year's theme is in fact about de-regulation.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#194

Post by davidguetta »

jhbadger wrote: post #182
SCdF wrote: post #5

So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?la…

It's like doomscrolling. Originally it meant compulsively reading depressing content about the state of the world, wars, etc., explaining the "doom" part, but eventually it evolved (or perhaps devolved) into just meaning obsessively checking any sort of online content whether or not it was depressing.

I honestly though the doom part was about you being stuck in an horrible loop / situation, not the essence of the news

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#195

Post by skydhash »

spamizbad wrote: post #185
skydhash wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Software architecture was never about code elegance, it’s about making it easier to get reliable results. And that’s mostly about using automated tooling to check correctness and easy to understand and to modify modules. That’s the easiest way to get both definitions of quality as it’s way esier to test isolated modules and their integration than testing the whole system as a whole. And way easier to correct wrong co…

> Software architecture was never about code elegance, it’s about making it easier to get reliable results. And that’s mostly about using automated tooling to check correctness and easy to understand and to modify modules. The first isn't entirely true, and automating tooling is actually quite poor at doing any sort of architecture analysis since the "right" architecture is heavily dependent on factors you cannot see…

Isn’t that system design? And automated tooling is for correctness, not performance or availability. So things like linting, tests runner, static analysis and the like.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#196

Post by dornan »

dkersten wrote: post #166
musicale wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the way it is, they are not going to have a good time Kernighan's law still applies. https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/kernighan/

I strongly believe it also applies to the AI itself. If the AI wrote the code to the top of its ability, it doesn’t have the capability to debug said code, because its ability to detect and correct issues has already been factored in. You end up with a constant stream of “I see the issue, it’s: ” , which is consistent with my experience of trying to have LLM’s debug their own code without basically doing the work mys…

[dead]

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#197

Post by dragonwriter »

maccard wrote: post #74
spaceywilly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that tweet: > I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it That sums up vibe coding, imo. The article talks about code quality with vibe coding, but I think that misses the point. The real problem is code knowledge. When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the w…

> I’ve already had to spend hours at work tracking down bugs that ending up being in there because someone just blindly accepted the code an LLM wrote, I fear it’s only going to get worse And I’ve also had to spend hours at work tracking down badly copy pasted stack overflow code, or from other places in the codebase that didn’t do what the programmer thought it did. A shitty carpenter will build a shitty staircase w…

One difference is that orgs are tracking AI coding assistant usage as a (positive) metric, soemthing they never did with SO. Given finite time, being pushed to AI code whether or not it makes sense or is efficient in either quality or delivery time, and with no relief of time constraints, means other things will fall by the wayside.

A good carpenter will build a shitty staircase if he is forced to use the wrong tool, given a timeline that doesn't accommodate it, and paid for delivering something that superficially resembles a staricase on time regardless of quality.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#198

Post by Tokumei-no-hito »

camdenreslink wrote: post #189
bee_rider wrote: post #180

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I do somewhat worry that AI will harm language development. Boilerplate… is bad, right? If our languages were more elegant, we’d need less of it. It is necessary because things don’t have sane defaults or sufficient abstraction. In particular, if the AI is able to “guess” what boilerplate you wanted, that boilerplate ought to be knowable beforehand (because the AI is not actually guessing, it is a deterministic set o…

I think there will be an ossification of current languages/frameworks/libraries. The technologies that already have a large amount of documentation, tutorials, example code, etc. will have a huge advantage over a brand new language because all of that content will be in the pretraining for all LLMs. Would you rather use JavaScript/TypeScript and Python (which will work relatively well with LLMs), or some brand new th…

tbf that applies pre-AI as well.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#199

Post by droidist2 »

simonw wrote: post #79
rvz wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Saying that Andrej Karpathy is "an AI researcher, but not a software engineer" isn't a very credible statement. I think it is. He is certainly a great AI researcher / scientist, but not really a software engineer. > It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and…

Where did Andrej say it was "the future of software engineering"? He very clearly described vibe coding as an entertaining way to hack on throwaway weekend projects. Try reading the whole tweet! https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 "Would you yourself want vibe-coded software that is in highly critical systems such as in aeroplanes, hospitals, or in energy infrastructure?" Of course not. That's why…

He might not have but some industry insiders, for instance YC are releasing videos like this:

"Vibe Coding Is The Future" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#200

Post by simonw »

droidist2 wrote: post #199
simonw wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Where did Andrej say it was "the future of software engineering"? He very clearly described vibe coding as an entertaining way to hack on throwaway weekend projects. Try reading the whole tweet! https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 "Would you yourself want vibe-coded software that is in highly critical systems such as in aeroplanes, hospitals, or in energy infrastructure?" Of course not. That's why…

He might not have but some industry insiders, for instance YC are releasing videos like this: "Vibe Coding Is The Future" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8

Urgh, I had not seen that one.
Post reply on HN