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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

#21

Post by operatingthetan »

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.

What I'm missing so far is how they produced such awful code with the same product I'm using, which definitely would have called out some of those issues.

Perhaps the problem is getting multiple vibe-coders synced up when working on a large repo.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#22

Post by tedd4u »

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.

Still, it's probably true that Claude Code (etc) will be more successful working on clean, well-structured code, just like human coders are. So short-term, maybe not such a big deal, but long-term I think it's still an unresolved issue.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#23

Post by bearjaws »

This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases and redis cache layer... and won't scale beyond 50k users".

As if 97% of web apps aren't just basic CRUD with some integration to another system if you are lucky.

99% of companies won't even have 50k users.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#24

Post by seanosaur »

makerofthings wrote: post #9
infinitewars wrote: post #3

AI is just another layer of abstraction. I'm sure the assembly language folks were grumbling about functions as being too abstracted at one point

I totally see what you're saying, but to me this feels different. Compilation is a fairly mechanical and well understood process. The large language models aren't just compiling English to assembler via your chosen language, they try and guess what you want, they add extra bits you didn't ask for, they're doing some of your solution thinking for you. That feels like more than just abstraction to me.

I think it's still abstraction by definition, but you're right in that it's a much larger single leap than in the past.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#25

Post by sbysb »

saulpw wrote: 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,…

> some people say that the max AI Level should be 5

> of course some people think that you lose touch with the ground if you go above AI Level 2

I really think that this framing sometimes causes a loss of granularity. As with most things in life, there is nuance in these approaches.

I find that nowadays for my main project I where I am really leaning into the 'autonomous engineering' concept, AI Level 7 is perfect - as long as it is qualified through rigorous QA processes on the output (ie it is not important what the code does if the output looks correct). But even in this project that I am really leaning into the AI 'hands-off' methodology, there are a few areas that dip into Level 5 or 4 depending on how well AI does them (Frontend Design especially) or on the criticality of the feature (in my case E2EE).

The most important thing is recognizing when you need to move 'up' or 'down' the scale and having an understanding of the system you are building

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#26

Post by operatingthetan »

Rover222 wrote: post #19

[flagged]

I think it is a 'cult' but also at the same time the inevitable future of engineering. The cult part are a subset of people who are not thinking about LLM code generation critically and blindly follow whatever trend is popular at this exact second.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#27

Post by kaoD »

kmaitreys wrote: post #6
infinitewars wrote: post #3

AI is just another layer of abstraction. I'm sure the assembly language folks were grumbling about functions as being too abstracted at one point

High level languages that replaced assembly are not black boxes.

And they're as deterministic as as the underlying thing they're abstracting... which is kinda what makes an abstraction an abstraction.

I get that people love saying LLMs are just compilers from human language to $OUTPUT_FORMAT but... they simply are not except in a stretchy metaphorical sense.

That's only true if you reduce the definition of "compiler" to a narrow `f = In -> Out`. But that is _not_ a compiler. We have a word for that: function. And in LLM's case an impure one.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#28

Post by andrenotgiant »

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 build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code

which has always been true

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#29

Post by kypro »

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.

Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI.

Obviously it does some fairly smart stuff under the hood, but it's not exactly comparable to a large software project.

But to your point, that doesn't mean you can't vibe code some poorly built product and sell it. But people have always been able to sell poorly built software projects. They can just do it a bit quicker now.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#30

Post by [deleted] »

disposition2 wrote: post #16
reconnecting wrote: post #2

> Then I explain what I think should be done and we’ll keep discussing it until I stop having more thoughts to give and the machine stops saying stupid things which need correcting. Users like the author must be the most valuable Claude asset, because AI itself isn't a product — people's feedback that shapes output is.

> Users like the author He’s a pretty interesting fella, I imagine his work influenced a lot of people over the years https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bram_Cohen

[deleted]
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