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“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

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Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#201

Post by lubujackson »

redleggedfrog wrote: post #58

I'll share a new wrinkle that casts more shade on the coding LLMs. We have a fair number of offshore resources that are used for dev. They developers are fully integrated into the team, are in all the stand-ups, and substitute for the usual role of junior programmers. They don't get the grunt-work shoveled on them, they get the same work as everyone else, they're just expected to not be as fast. In 6 months 2 out of…

I think people miss that "vibe coding" is a senior engineering tool. You still have to architect the project. You still have to ensure security and performance are handled (if relevant for the task). You still have to envision edge cases and usage patterns. You just don't have to type it out.

Now non-programmers can fumble forward to a working demo. But junior engineers are walking around with a loaded weapon - if they are not learning from how AI solves a problem or using it like StackOverflow to answer specific questions, they are blowing up their own careers.

The future is we are all product engineers or domain experts. No one is going to want an army of React engineers in 2 years.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#202

Post by raffael_de »

ikiris wrote: post #197
bglazer wrote: post #193

Over 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.

i'm not sure if you can compare run of the mill micro services with "uncommented academic modeling code from Matlab".

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#203

Post by [deleted] »

id00 wrote: post #132
jxjnskkzxxhx wrote: post #95

Making the arguing that these tools have flaws seem like a losing battle. Soon those flaws will be fixed[1] and youll have to find new flaws to complain about. Eventually hopefully you'll realize that you just don't like feeling displaced. [1] it's unbelievable what a difference in quality 1 year made for chat gpt

Why are you so certain that flaws will be fixed? Seems like there is a giant leap between a machine spewing words based on probability and actual deep understanding of the code it's suppose to write

[deleted]

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#204

Post by PlunderBunny »

lelandbatey wrote: post #186
TeMPOraL wrote: post #146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nah, the article is generalizing from a single sample of current state, ignoring the larger trajectory (that, for AI coding, went from sci-fi to reality in two years ). Sure, the tools aren't perfect, so there's some art to using them now - which the author of TFA seems to be unaware of. Take for example: > You cannot ask these tools today to develop a performant React application. You cannot ask these tools to imple…

Ah yes, the classic "we didn't have this at all 2 years ago, so we can expect a linear increase in capability 2 years from now! Trends will of course continue!" I think you're wrong. I think AI is going to stagnate and only the surrounding tooling will improve, but not enough to get us to the promised land. Arguably we already are seeing that happen. To see the supposed "this is how all code is written now" world AI…

Remember 2016/17 when we all thought we would have self-driving cars by now? People were modelling intersections without traffic lights, and talking about not needing parking space because the cars would just drive around when you weren’t in them.

So much technology these days seems to be “get it to 80% so we can demo and cash out” but 80% isn’t just an arbitrary number - it seems to be the point and which the remainder of the work to finish is either very hard or (I suspect) impossible.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#205

Post by varenc »

simonw wrote: post #66
varenc wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Speeding up your work does lead to job loss. If some developers can suddenly be 3x as productive than a company doesn't need as many engineers.

Alternatively: if LLMs make devs 3x productive that means companies can get 3x the value out of an engineering hire, so they should hire more. (Unless that company somehow has no substantial engineering backlog, which I've yet to encounter anywhere I've ever worked.)

This definitely feels true for tech companies where the prospect of more more productive engineers improves their bottom line. The same sort of companies that have a near infinite appetite for talented engineers.

But there's a lot of coders in industries whose core business isn't technology. Knapheide for example, a truck outfitting company where my brother codes. I'd imagine in those companies, being able to do the same work with fewer engineers and less cost would lead to fewer hires. Technology isn't their core product and they aren't being held back by software.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#206

Post by ekidd »

toogan wrote: post #59
cmdli wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The job loss depends on the average speed up, however. If the AI is only effective in 10% of tasks (the basic stuff), then that 3x improvement goes down to 1.3x.

> The job loss depends on the average speed up, That's such a economical fallacy that I'd expect the HN crowd to have understood this ages ago. Compare the average productivity of somebody working in a car factory 80 years ago with somebody today. How many person-hours did it take then and how many does it take today to manufacture a car? Did the number of jobs between then and now shrink by that factor? To the contr…

This is all broadly true, historically. Automating jobs mostly results in creating more jobs elsewhere.

But let's assume you have true, fully general AI. Further assume that it can do human-level cognition for $2/hour, and it's roughly as smart as a Stanford grad.

So once the AI takes your job, it goes on to take your new job, and the job after that, and the job after that. It is smarter and cheaper than the average human, after all.

This scenario goes one of three ways, depending on who controls the AI:

1. We all become fabulously wealthy and no longer need to work at all. (I have trouble visualizing exactly how we get this outcome.)

2. A handful of billionaires and politicians control the AI. They don't need the rest of us.

3. The AI controls itself, in which case most economic benefits and power go to the AI.

The last historical analog of this was the Neanderthals, who were unable (for whatever reason) to compete with humans.

So the most important question is, how close actually are we to this scenario? Is impossible? A century away? Or something that will happen in the next decade?

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#207

Post by kccqzy »

MarkMarine wrote: post #92

This 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…

Your example of a model finding more performant sorts did not involve the use of LLMs. I've said multiple times on HN that I believe we need to look past LLMs for the next breakthrough in AI assisted coding. I don't believe LLMs can exceed humans in quality; they can only match humans in quality and beat humans in speed.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#208

Post by skeledrew »

Jensson wrote: post #178
TeMPOraL wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of webdev has been done 1000000x before. Though to be fair, Wix and Squarespace already bit a huge chunk out of that market.

> Most of webdev has been done 1000000x before Not according to your very specific stakeholder demands / environment/naming/data tables/data protection requirements, otherwise you would just use a library. Those might seem like trivial differences but plenty of things go wrong there, plenty enough that you can't just use a library instead of a programmer, and then they are plenty enough of such errors that vibe codin…

I think the point being made is that even though the specific set of requirements may be unique in a stakeholder basis, all the components already exist, and have been combined in many ways. So it really boils down to prompting in such a way that the right set of components are brought together in the right way. That's where the skill now lies.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#209

Post by MarkMarine »

kccqzy wrote: post #207
MarkMarine wrote: post #92

This 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…

Your example of a model finding more performant sorts did not involve the use of LLMs. I've said multiple times on HN that I believe we need to look past LLMs for the next breakthrough in AI assisted coding. I don't believe LLMs can exceed humans in quality; they can only match humans in quality and beat humans in speed.

Yes exactly:

>and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#210

Post by brulard »

MR4D wrote: post #113
MarkMarine wrote: post #92

This 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…

I think it’s partially there: For creating website (not apps) it absolutely is there. This is just the first rung on the ladder though. It’s not doing Linux kernel development yet, but that time will come eventually. In between are all the other rungs. AI will climb them one by one.

For me it is very much hit or miss. I use claude sonnet with Cline. Sometimes I'm blown away that it can create a new page with CRUD functionality, nice UI etc. in one go. Another time it struggles to create a simple web page. Yesterday I needed a very simple landing page. My prompt was something along `Very dark grainy background with centered "name of the page" text.`. It couldn't get neither the background, nor the centering right. Later when it got one right, it screwed up the second. I had to give up after consuming ~$1.5 because we were not getting closer to the result.
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