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“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

cendyne.dev

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Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#271

Post by Hippocrates »

It makes me feel very secure in my job that so many engineers ITT are downplaying the ability and productivity of AI coding tools. You can pry cursor out of my cold dead hands. If you aren't seeing a 10x boost, then you must not have tried it lately, or haven't got the experience to prompt well.

What it excels at: - Boilerplate code that's been written 1000x, which can saps your time and enthusiasm for the meaty problems beyond that.

- Complex DSA work. It has been demonstrated millions of times in training material.

- Simple and tedious tasks like making dummy data for tests and struct literals.

- Tightly scoped refactors.

Where does it falter?

- Mapping your product/business to the code or abstractions needed. I think this is where junior devs struggle to leverage it.

- Doing large scale multi-file refactors without proper specifics, guidance, and context. It also can't write a huge project from scratch. Humans are still need to fit the pieces all together or provide guidance. I think this gap closes soon.

Code quality simply isn't a problem IME. If it didn't one-shot your dream abstraction, you probably weren't specific enough in the prompt. Most human-written code is also junk, so pointing out a minor gaffes isn't really a dunk on AI. It's still a massive productivity booster if wielded by even a half-competent engineer.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#272

Post by _factor »

DonHopkins wrote: post #243
_factor wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or I’m in a different industry and it’s ridiculous to require years of schooling for a skill that’s not my primary interest? Or maybe the numbers looked jumbled and they really didn’t enjoy STEM classes? You sound arrogant. Have you ever paid for artwork? You may not have said “I’m not artistic,” but the same criticisms apply in reverse.

Doing something that's not your primary interest is one thing. Not wanting to learn new things or understand how things work or put in any effort to succeed because you think you can just cheat your way through life is a totally different thing. And that's what the difference between using AI programming tools responsibly and "vibe coding" is.

Agreed, but you’re your bunching a lot of people into the category of slacker that don’t belong there.

A new tool released that basically lets you design a GUI through guided voice prompts. The 50yr old school teacher can “vibe code” all she wants.

The real problem arises when someone makes false claims they’re a developer when they’re just managing AI generated code. Making it your primary interest and then cheating to make it seem true.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#273

Post by bobxmax »

c0redump wrote: post #231
bobxmax wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Whatever helps you sleep at night, while the rest of the world zips past you.

How ironic. I have literally made my career and fortune building the very systems that you’re yapping about. Edit: see the other comment where you are called out for the lying fake that you are. How delightfully pathetic of you.

lol "fortune" whatever you say. that's why you're desperately snooping my other comments including that lame "gotcha" to find some confirmation I'm lying?

it's ok, all craftsmen who got automated away once thought they were special. you're not the first you won't be the last. you will likely be unemployed soon though.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#274

Post by bobxmax »

jimsmart wrote: post #215
bobxmax wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm a developer. LLMs allow engineers to become product people themselves.

> Yes, I'm a developer. It's interesting that you describe yourself as a developer now. Because just three months ago, in your first post [1] to HN, you said: > I'm somewhat non-technical but I've been using Claude to hack MVPs together for months now. Sure: you might feel as though you have now 10x'ed yourself. But, quite honestly, when the reality is that just a few months back you self-described as "somewhat non-t…

Yeah I was a jr developer for a year before I became a PM. That's the definition of being "somewhat non-technical" as I put it.

you've been a developer for some decades which is why your reality is threatened that your craft is increasingly becoming irrelevant so you had to snoop my profile to find some confirmation that your reality doesn't get shattered

this is nothing new of course. obnoxious neckbeard engineers who don't understand where the world is going have existed since the unix debates on irc. you'll find plenty of people who agree with you on mastodon lol.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#275

Post by Apocryphon »

TeMPOraL wrote: post #265
Apocryphon wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Generating tons of throwaway code that is swapped out every time a bug occurs does not sound like engineering for the long-term.

Since when does any business care about "engineering for the long-term"? We, the software engineers, care. The business doesn't. In fact, the industry has systematically been trying to beat the care out of engineers - it's unprofessional to care about the work beyond the point it stops making money for the business. I'm not saying this is right or wrong - but this is how companies roll; if they can fix product issues…

What happens when this leads to high-profile disasters?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43449642

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#276

Post by thunky »

Hippocrates wrote: post #271

It makes me feel very secure in my job that so many engineers ITT are downplaying the ability and productivity of AI coding tools. You can pry cursor out of my cold dead hands. If you aren't seeing a 10x boost, then you must not have tried it lately, or haven't got the experience to prompt well. What it excels at: - Boilerplate code that's been written 1000x, which can saps your time and enthusiasm for the meaty prob…

The things you mentioned it does well on are things that help you avoid tedium, but I don't think that's what's most important to businesses. The things you mentioned it does poorly at are the things that matter most.

To pile on: if a large part of our job is purely mechanical, then there is a bigger problem with our engineering processes and AI can't fix that.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#277

Post by Hippocrates »

thunky wrote: post #276
Hippocrates wrote: post #271

It makes me feel very secure in my job that so many engineers ITT are downplaying the ability and productivity of AI coding tools. You can pry cursor out of my cold dead hands. If you aren't seeing a 10x boost, then you must not have tried it lately, or haven't got the experience to prompt well. What it excels at: - Boilerplate code that's been written 1000x, which can saps your time and enthusiasm for the meaty prob…

The things you mentioned it does well on are things that help you avoid tedium, but I don't think that's what's most important to businesses. The things you mentioned it does poorly at are the things that matter most. To pile on: if a large part of our job is purely mechanical, then there is a bigger problem with our engineering processes and AI can't fix that.

> if a large part of our job is purely mechanical, then there is a bigger problem with our engineering processes and AI can't fix that.

It is! And AI is fixing precisely that. What businesses actually care about (well, 99% of them where code is written) is shipping fast and solving the immediate problem, NOT code quality and craft. It goes against what I want to believe as an engineer. Most problems are not new, they are not hard, they are not sensitive. You will need to start with a good understanding of the business need. It's not that the AI can't code to this. I will often stub out an abstraction, explain inputs/outputs in detail, provide sample data etc. That's all. There are frighteningly few showstopper problems with AI coding at this point, and it's moving so quickly.

We're not at the point where non-engineers are capable engineers with AI, but if you are an engineer not using AI extensively, you are being lapped.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#279

Post by tliltocatl »

consumer451 wrote: post #257
thiht wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language)

> So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language) Not OP, but yes. But that means you don't need a dev, just someone who knows how to spec correctly in English/Jira, right? Is that likely a dev who moved on to PM? Very likely in 2025. For better or worse, the future I imagine is a Jira plugin or MCP server that can read a project, the LLM IDE client then asks questions…

Trying to provide a programming tool for non-programmers has been a wet dream of some for a while. See SQL, 4GL, DRAKON (lol), VBA, no-code platforms (btw what happend with the hype? How are we not all replaced already) and the most recent but certainly not the last is LLMs. All while sometimes yielding something useful past attempts have consistently and spectacularly failed this objective. Fundamentally because non-programmers don't want to deal with this, otherwise they would have learned some damn proper PL long time ago, it's not THAT hard. And LLMs adds quite some special spice to that. How a vibe coder going to fix LLM output that fails? Without understanding the code, that is.

Regarding "the latest frontend framework" the whole situation is a bit mysterious to me, because somehow everyone keep spending millions of man-hours on yet another react contraption where a static HTML would be enough. From the user perspective all this stuff brings no value, 80% of frontend stuff could have been automated long time ago or just not done at all, yet we keep reinventing the wheel. I don't see how LLMs can change the situation because there was clearly no demand for improved productivity there before.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#280

Post by cendyne »

mentalgear wrote: post #86

This should be called "vape coding". Strongly agree with the article, and happy to see so many lucid people, comments and articles on HN that thoroughly deconstruct the "vibe coding" illusion. Also, Andrej Karpathy really disappointed pushing such brittle BS as a revolution.

I love this. Vape coding should catch on.
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