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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

#201

Post by tombert »

hollowcelery wrote: post #152
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…

There are a number of things that make code hard to reason about for humans, and combinatorial complexity is just one of them. Another one is, say, size of working memory, or having to navigate across a large number of files to understand a piece of logic. These two examples are not necessarily expensive for computers. I don't entirely disagree that there is code that's objectively difficult to work with, but I suspe…

Certainly with current models I have found that the Venn diagram of "code that's hard for humans" and "code that's hard for computers" has actually been remarkably similar, I suspect because it's trained on a lot of terrible code on Github.

I'm sure that these models will get better, and I agree that the overlap will be lower at that point, but I still think what I said will be true.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#202

Post by anthk »

cladopa wrote: post #56

"Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos" The ship has sailed. Vibe coding works. It will only work better in the future. I have been programming for decades now, I have managed teams of developers. Vibe coding is great, specially in the hands of experts that know what they are doing. Deal with it because it is not going to stop. In the near future it will be local and 100x faster.

"Aunque la mona se vista de seda mona se queda".

A pig with lipstick it's still a pig.

Or, aptly, as you quoted "Don Quixote":

'Con la iglesia hemos topado'.

(indeed Sancho), we just met the Church...

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#203

Post by adrian_b »

tock wrote: post #80
shimman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.

Huh what moronic failure did Anthropic do? Every Claude Code user I know loves it.

There is right now another HN thread where a lot of users hate Claude Code.

To be fair, their complaints are about very recent changes that break their workflow, while previously they were quite content with it.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#204

Post by robbiewxyz »

jaccola wrote: post #104
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,…

It's also a context-specific scale. I work in computer vision. Building the surrounding app, UI, checkout flow, etcetera is easily Level 6/7(sorry...) on this scale. Building the rendering pipeline, algorithms, maths, I've turned off even level 2. It is just more of a distraction than it's worth for that deep state of focus. So I imagine at least some of the disconnect comes from the area people work in and its novel…

This is exactly true in my experience! The usefulness of AI varies wildly depending on the complexity, correctness-requirements, & especially novelty of the domain.

This attribute plus a bit of human tribalism, social echo-chambering, & some motivated reasoning by people with a horse in the race, easily explains the discord I see in rhetoric around AI.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#205

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

tayo42 wrote: post #168
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also possible to sell chairs that are uncomfortable and food that tastes terrible. Yet somehow we still have carpenters and chefs; Herman Miller and The French Laundry. Some business models will require “good” code, and some won’t. That’s how it is right now as well. But pretending that all business models will no longer require “good” code is like pretending that Michelin should’ve retired its list after the mi…

Those high end restaurants are more like art and exploration of food then something practical like code. The only similarity is maybe research in academia. There's not real industry uses of code that's like art.

I used the extreme of the spectrum, I can’t imagine you’re arguing that food is binary good / bad? There’s a litany of food options and quality, matching different business models of convenience and experience.

Research in academia seems less appropriate because that’s famously not really a business model, except maybe in the extractive sense

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#206

Post by edschofield »

nkohari wrote: post #153
thesz wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This product rides a hype wave. This is why it is crazy popular and successful. The situation there is akin to Viaweb - Viaweb also rode hype wave and code situation was awful as well (see PG's stories about fixing bugs during customer's issue reproduction theater). What did Viaweb's buyer do? They rewrote thing in C++. If history rhymes, then buyer of Anthropic would do something close to "rewrite it in C++" to the…

I don't disagree with your general premise that eventually it'll just be rewritten, but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.

Any company worth more could (in principle) acquire it with a share swap [1]. Even a smaller company could buy it with an LBO [2].

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#207

Post by saulpw »

forrestthewoods wrote: post #69
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,…

Interesting breakdown of levels. I like it. I’m not sure I believe that Level 7 exists for most projects. It is utterly *impossible* for most non-trivial programs to have a spec that doesn’t not have deep, carnal knowledge of the implementation. It can not be done. For most interesting problems the spec HAS to include implementation details and architecture and critical data structures. At some point you’re still wri…

I agree, I'm venturing into Level 6 myself and it often feels like being one step too high on a ladder. Level 7 feels like just standing on the very top of the ladder, which is terrifying (to me anyway as an experienced software engineer).

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#208

Post by [deleted] »

il-b wrote: post #139
bs7280 wrote: post #57

In my opinion there are two main groups on the spectrum of "vibe coding". The non technical users that love it but don't understand software engineering enough to know what it takes to make a production grade product. The opposite are the AI haters that used chatgpt 3.5 and decided LLM code is garbage. Both of these camps are the loudest voices on the internet, but there is a quiet but extremely productive camp somew…

> extremely productive camp somewhere in the middle How do you quantify and measure this productivity gain?

[deleted]

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#210

Post by cobbzilla »

freediddy wrote: post #83
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,…

That's an interesting list. I think that the humans that will make the most progress in the next few years are the ones that push themselves up to the highest level of that list. Right now is a period of intense disruption and there are many coders that don't like the idea that their way of life is dead. There are still blacksmiths around today but for the most part it's made by factories and cheap 3rd world labor. I…

For certain kinds of software (financial systems, safety-critical systems) it may be very unwise to go beyond level 5.

There may be certain fields where you can't even get to 5.

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