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Breaking the spell of vibe coding

fast.ai

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Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#241

Post by ChrisMarshallNY »

ekidd wrote: post #239
ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A good analogy might be synthesized music. In the early days, the interfaces were so complex and technical, that only engineers could use them. Some of these early musicians were truly amazing individuals; real renaissance people. They understood the theory, and had true artistic vision. The knew how to ride the tiger, and could develop great music, fairly efficiently. A lot of others, not so much. They twiddled knob…

I have been a lead engineer for a few decades now, responsible for training teams and architecting projects. And I've been working heavily with AI. I know how to get Claude multi-agent mode to write 2,500 lines of deeply gnarly code in 40 minutes, and I know how to get that code solid . But doing this absolutely pulls on decades on engineering skill. I read all the core code. I design key architectural constraints. I…

That's been my experience, too.

I have been able to write some pretty damn ambitious code, quickly, with the help of LLMs, but I am still really only using it for developing functions, as opposed to architectures.

But just this morning, I had it break up an obese class into components. It did really well. I still need to finish testing everything, but it looks like it nailed it.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#242

Post by michaelcampbell »

skydhash wrote: post #235
rafaelmn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vibe coding would be catastrophic here. Not because the AI can't write the code - it usually can - but because the failure mode is invisible. A hallucinated edge case in a tax calculation doesn't throw an error. It just produces a slightly wrong number that gets posted to a real accounting platform and nobody notices until the accountant does their review. How is that different from handwritten code ? Sounds like s…

With handwritten code, the humans know what they don’t know. If you want some constants or some formula, you don’t invent or guess it, you ask the domain expert.

> With handwritten code, the humans know what they don’t know.

I find this often not to be the case at all.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#244

Post by ryan_n »

rafaelmn wrote: post #221
jackfranklyn wrote: post #219

[flagged]

> Vibe coding would be catastrophic here. Not because the AI can't write the code - it usually can - but because the failure mode is invisible. A hallucinated edge case in a tax calculation doesn't throw an error. It just produces a slightly wrong number that gets posted to a real accounting platform and nobody notices until the accountant does their review. How is that different from handwritten code ? Sounds like s…

It’s shocking to me that people even ask this type of question. How do you not see the difference between a machine that will hallucinate something random if it doesn’t know the answer vs a human that will logic through things and find the correct answer.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#245

Post by gbnwl »

reppap wrote: post #49
atleastoptimal wrote: post #44

That AI would be writing 90% of the code at Anthropic was not a "failed prediction". If we take Anthropic's word for it, now their agents are writing 100% of the code: https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro... Of course you can choose to believe that this is a lie and that Anthropic is hyping their own models, but it's impossible to deny the enormous revenue that the company is generating via th…

One thing I like to think about is: If these models were so powerful why would they ever sell access? They could just build endless products to sell, likely outcompeting anyone else who needs to employ humans. And if not building their own products they could be the highest value contractor ever. If you had midas touch would you rent it out?

They need to generate revenue to continue to raise money to continue to invest in compute. Even if they have the Midas Touch it needs to be continously improved because there are three other competing Midas Touch companies working on new and improved Midas Touch's that will make their's obsolete and worthless if they stay still even for a second.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#247

Post by pharrington »

ChrisMarshallNY wrote: post #212
mprast wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very interesting to me how many people presume that if you don't learn how to vibecode now you'll never ever be able to catch up. If the models are constantly getting better, won't these tools be easier to use a year from now? Will model improvements not obviate all the byzantine prompting strategies we have to use today?

A good analogy might be synthesized music. In the early days, the interfaces were so complex and technical, that only engineers could use them. Some of these early musicians were truly amazing individuals; real renaissance people. They understood the theory, and had true artistic vision. The knew how to ride the tiger, and could develop great music, fairly efficiently. A lot of others, not so much. They twiddled knob…

Synths don't generate music, they generate tones. The analogy would be a program that generates really good programming languages.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#249

Post by d-j-k »

ryan_n wrote: post #244
rafaelmn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vibe coding would be catastrophic here. Not because the AI can't write the code - it usually can - but because the failure mode is invisible. A hallucinated edge case in a tax calculation doesn't throw an error. It just produces a slightly wrong number that gets posted to a real accounting platform and nobody notices until the accountant does their review. How is that different from handwritten code ? Sounds like s…

It’s shocking to me that people even ask this type of question. How do you not see the difference between a machine that will hallucinate something random if it doesn’t know the answer vs a human that will logic through things and find the correct answer.

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