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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

#221

Post by alephnerd »

tombert wrote: post #191
ahepp wrote: post #133

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is actually a pretty good callout.

Observability into how a foundation model generated product arrived to that state is significantly more important than the underlying codebase, as it's the prompt context that is the architecture.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#222

Post by zozbot234 »

freediddy wrote: post #62

No, I completely disagree with this entire article. Bad code or good code is no longer relevant anymore. What matters is whether or not AI fulfills the contract as to how the application is supposed to work. If the code sucks, you just rerun the prompt again and the next iteration will be better. But better doesn't matter because humans aren't reading the code anymore. I haven't written a line of code since January a…

> Bad code or good code is no longer relevant anymore.

It's extremely relevant inasmuch as garbage code pollutes the AI's context and misleads it into writing more crap. "How the sausage is made" still matters.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#223

Post by chucklenorris »

pron wrote: post #122
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.

1. "Vibe coding" is a spectrum of how much human supervision (and/or scaffolding in the form of human-written tests and/or specs) is involved. 2. The problem with "bad code" has nothing to do with the short-term success of the product but with the ability to evolve it successfully over time. In other words, it's about long-term success, not short-term success. 3. Perhaps most importantly, Claude Code is a fairly simp…

1 is definitely false right now. I gave specs, tests, full datasets, reference code to translate to an llm and still produce garbage code/fall flat on it's face. I just spent one week translating a codebase from go to cpp and i had to throw the whole thing out because it put in some horrible bugs that it could not fix even burning 500$ worth of tokens and me babysitting it. As i said it had everything at it's disposal: tests, reference impl, lots of data to work with. I finally got my lazy ass to inplement it and lo and behold i did it in 2 days with no bugs (that i know of) and the code quality is miles better than that undigested vomit. The codebase was a protocol library for decoding network traffic that used a lot of bit twiddling, flow control, huffman table compression, mildly complicated stuff. So no - if you want working non-trivial code that you can rely on then definitely don't use a llm to do it. Use it for autocomplete, small bits of code but never let the damn thing do the thinking for you.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#224

Post by dheera »

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.

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

That was always the case. Landlords still want rent, the IRS still has figurative guns. Shipping shit code to please these folks and keep the company alive will always win over code quality, unless the system can be edited to financially incentivize code quality. The current loss function on society is literally "ship shit now and pay your taxes and rent".

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#225

Post by _whiteCaps_ »

throw949449 wrote: post #13

> I’ll start a conversation by saying “Let’s audit this codebase for unreachable code,” or “This function makes my eyes bleed,” and we’ll have a conversation about it until something actionable comes up. Then I explain what I think should be done and we’ll keep discussing it until I stop having more thoughts This is painful to read. It feels like rant from person who does not use version control, testing and CI. It i…

Bram Cohen doesn't just use version control, he invented one.

https://bramcohen.livejournal.com/17319.html

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#226

Post by doubleorseven »

I vibe code. but I also remember the days I had ZERO KNOWLEDGE of what needs to be done, and I would hammer the keyboard with garbage code from stack overflow and half baked documentations plus some native guessing of human nature. the end result was me understanding what the hell was going on. those days are over.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#227

Post by kfarr »

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,…

To clarify, does this mean that Anthropic employees don't understand Claude Code's code since it's level 7? I've got to believe they have staff capable of understanding the output and they would spend at least some time reviewing code for a product like this?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#228

Post by tombert »

alephnerd wrote: post #221
tombert wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is actually a pretty good callout. Observability into how a foundation model generated product arrived to that state is significantly more important than the underlying codebase, as it's the prompt context that is the architecture.

Yeah, I'm just a little tired of seeing these pull requests of multi-thousand-line pull requests where no one has actually looked at the code.

The solution people are coming up with now is using AI for code reviews and I have to ask "why involve Git at all then?". If AI is writing the code, testing the code, reviewing the code, and merging the code, then it seems to me that we can just remove these steps and simply PR the prompts themselves.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#229

Post by dijit »

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.

I found that to be true years ago when I spooled the source of the Twitch leaks.

To me it said, clearly: nobody cares about your code quality other than your ability to ship interesting features.

It was incredibly eye-opening to me, I went in expecting different lessons honestly.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#230

Post by BearOso »

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.

It's also crazy more expensive to run than we thought. That doesn't bode well when their loss-leader period is over and they need to start making money.
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