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The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#191

Post by tombert »

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.

I actually think that might actually be a good path forward.

I hate self-promotion but I posted my opinions on this last night https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-...

The tl;dr of this is that I don't think that the code itself is what needs to be preserved, the prompt and chat is the actual important and useful thing here. At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#192

Post by Yokohiii »

hintymad wrote: post #107

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…

Assuming that AI challenges all that is in my perception a bit simple.

> Brooks' No Silver Bullet

Just because a person can create code or "results" much faster now, it doesn't say anything about productivity. Don't mistake dev productivity for economic productivity.

> Kernighan's Law, which says debugging is twice as hard as writing the code

Debugging is such a vague term in these matters. An AI may be decent to figure out their error they introduced into their code after it runs its own tests. But a production bug, i.e. reported from a user, can be very hard for AIs due to their utter lack of context.

> Dijkstra on the foolishness of programming in natural language. > ... > Lehman’s Law, which states that as a system's complexity increases as it evolves, unless work is done to maintain or reduce it.

No clue what the argument is here, "people believe otherwise" isn't.

> Also, ultimately Jevons Paradox

Actually relevant tech people confirm the paradox in the long run. Companies slash jobs now because they tend consolidate in chaotic times.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#193

Post by rafaelmn »

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.

TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it. And now they are just tacking on features to sell more buzzwords and internal prototypes. Classic user facing/commercial software story.

But we (the dev community) are kind of spoiled, because we have a lot of great developer tools that come from people passionate about their work, skilled at what they do and take pride in what they put out. I don't count myself among one of those people but I have benefited from their work throughout my career and have gotten used to it in my tooling.

All that being said Opus is hands down the best coding model for me (and I'm actively trying all of them) and I'll tolerate it as long as I can get it to do what I need, even with the warts and annoyances.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#194

Post by saulpw »

eikenberry wrote: post #65
rapind wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm at a 5, and only because I've implemented a lot of guardrails, am using a typed functional language with no nulls, TDD red/green, and a good amount of time spent spec'ing. No way I'd be comfortable enough this high with a dynamic language. I could probably get to a 7 with some additional tooling and a second max 20 account, but I care too much about the product I'm building right now. Maybe for something I cared…

You aren't leveling up here... these levels are simple measures of how you use the tools to do something. You can regularly do things from any level or multiple levels at the same time.

I don't know why you're being downvoted, I agree that "more != better" with these levels. It's just a descriptor of how much human vs AI attention was given to a task/PR.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#195

Post by tristramb »

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.

Yes, that is how Facebook, Yahoo and many other companies started out. But they rewrote their code when it became to big to be maintainable. The problem with shoddy code is not necessarily that it doesn't work but that it becomes impossible to change.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#196

Post by jnpnj »

aenis wrote: post #119
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, 100x. I do M&As at my company - as a cto. I have seen lots of successful companies' codebases, and literally none of them elegant. Including very profitable companies with good, loved products. The only good code I know is in the open source domain and in the demoscene. The commercial code is mostly crap - and still makes money.

This kinda puts it in words, most of us naturally expected 2025- LLMs to be able to generate OSS / demo / high craft code. Not messy commercial one.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#197

Post by prmph »

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.

You can, but:

- Good code is what enables you to be able to build very complex software without an unreasonable number of bugs.

- Good code is what enables you to be responsive to changing customer needs and times. Whether you view that as valuable is another matter though. I guess it is a business decision. There have been plenty of business that have gone bust though by neglecting that.

Good code is for your own sanity, the machine does not care.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#198

Post by taurath »

somewhatjustin wrote: post #46

This reminds me of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. Disruption happens when firms are disincentivized to switch to the new thing or address the new customer because the current state of it is bad, the margins are low. Intel missed out on mobile because their existing business was so excellent and making phone chips seemed beneath them. The funny thing is that these firms are being completely rational. Why…

This isn’t the narrative, at least in any circle I speak to. The narrative is currently that everyone needs to strive to be using hundreds of dollars of tokens a day or you aren’t being effective enough. Executives are mulling getting rid of code review and tests. I’ve never seen such blind optimism and so little appreciation for how things can go wrong.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#200

Post by f-serif »

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.

Not AI but perfect example is Cloudflare. They have implemented public suffix list (to check if a domain is valid) 10 different times in 10 different ways. In one place, they have even embedded the list in frontend (pages custom domain). You report issues, they fix that one service, their own stuff isn't even aware that it exists in other places.
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