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Breaking the spell of vibe coding

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Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#271

Post by oblio »

aspenmartin wrote: post #269
ryan_n wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

It's shocking to me that people make this claim as if humans, especially in some legacy accounting system, would somehow be much better at (1) recognizing their mistakes, and (2) even when they don't, not fudge-fingering their implementation. Like the criticisms of agents are valid, but the incredulity that they will ever be used in production or high risk systems to me is just as incredible. Of course they will -- w…

Your point is the speculative one, though. We know humans can and have built incredibly complex and reliable systems. We do not have the same level of proof for LLMs.

Claims like your should wait at least 2-3 years, if not 5.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#272

Post by aspenmartin »

oblio wrote: post #271
aspenmartin wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's shocking to me that people make this claim as if humans, especially in some legacy accounting system, would somehow be much better at (1) recognizing their mistakes, and (2) even when they don't, not fudge-fingering their implementation. Like the criticisms of agents are valid, but the incredulity that they will ever be used in production or high risk systems to me is just as incredible. Of course they will -- w…

Your point is the speculative one, though. We know humans can and have built incredibly complex and reliable systems. We do not have the same level of proof for LLMs. Claims like your should wait at least 2-3 years, if not 5.

That is also speculative. Well let's just wait and see :) but the writing is on the wall. If your criticism is where we're at _now_ and whether or not _today_ you should be vibe coding in highly complex systems I would say: why not? as long as you hold that code to the same standard as human written code, what is the problem? If you say "well reviews don't catch everything" ok but the same is true for humans. Yes large teams of people (and maybe smaller teams of highly skilled people) have built wonderfully complex systems far out of reach of today's coding agents. But your median programmer is not going to be able to do that.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#273

Post by oblio »

rienbdj wrote: post #179
getnormality wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's another dumb thing that unfortunately some people can be led to believe. There have been parents who genuinely thought that screen time would make their kids digitally savvy and prepared for the future.

Leave them with an old Toshiba and an Ubuntu cd. Good luck kid.

Nah, a pile of PC parts and DOS and Doom floppies.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#274

Post by ideamotor »

fatherwavelet wrote: post #259
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 like the analogy but I think you are underestimating how much random knob twiddling there is in all art. Francis Bacon and The Brutality of Fact is a wonderful documentary that goes over this. Bacon's process was that he painted every day for a long time, kept the stuff he liked and destroyed the crap. You are just not seeing the bad random knob twiddling he did. Picasso is even better. Picasso had some 100,000 wor…

I think this is very well stated. I’m gonna say something that’s far more trite, but what I’ve noticed is that in an effort to get a better result while assisting AI coding, I have to throw away any concept I previously held about good code hygiene and style. I want it to be incredibly verbose. I want to have everything explicitly asserted. I want to have tests and hooks for every single thing. I want it to be incredibly hard for the human to work directly on it …

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#275

Post by mystraline »

roxolotl wrote: post #268
slekker wrote: post #263

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know right, had this discussion last week and it's difficult to argue when people are blinded by the "magic" and hype of the slot machine.

Which interestingly is the meat of this article. The key points aren’t that “vibe coding is bad” but that the design and experience of these tools is actively blinding and seductive in a way that impairs ability to judge effectiveness.

Basically, instead of developers developing, they've been half-elevated to the management class where they manage really dumb but really fast interns (LLM's).

But they dont get the management pay, and they are 100% responsible for the LLMs under them. Whereas real managers get paid more and can lay blame and fire people under them.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#276

Post by kalaksi »

matwood wrote: post #162
logicprog wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't struggling to get enough sleep or shower enough and so on because you're so involved with the process of, you know, programming, especially interactive, exploratory programming with an immediate feedback loop, kind of a known phenomenon for programmers since essentially the dawn of interactive computing?

Sort of, but the speed at which I can see results and the ability to quickly get unstuck does pull me in more than just coding. While I find both enjoyable, I'm more of a 'end result' person than a 'likes to the type in the code' person. There was a conversation about this a month or so ago referencing what types of people like LLMs and which do not.

I saw a conversation like that but, like here, I didn't always understand what they meant with "end result". Was it only the app GUI and they don't care about the code at all, or do they still care about the code quality, the architecture and planning.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#277

Post by wtetzner »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #154
imiric wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> knowing how to use ai coding assistants productively is a skill like any other No, it's different from other skills in several ways. For one, the difficulty of this skill is largely overstated. All it requires is basic natural language reading and writing, the ability to organize work and issue clear instructions, and some relatively simple technical knowledge about managing context effectively, knowing which tool…

> In the meantime, your own skills will continue to atrophy the more you rely on this tech, instead of on your own intellect You’re right. I’m going back to writing assembly. These compilers have totally atrophied my ability to write machine code!

This is a very flawed analogy.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#279

Post by e12e »

fatata123 wrote: post #169
zozbot234 wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> LLMs are good at writing individual functions but terrible at deciding which functions should exist. Have you tried explicitly asking them about the latter? If you just tell them to code, they aren't going to work on figuring out the software engineering part: it's not part of the goal that was directly reinforced by the prompt. They aren't really all that smart.

Injecting bias into an already biased model doesn’t make decision smarter, it just makes them faster.

I think this continued anthropomorphism "Have you tried asking about..." is a real problem.

I get it. It quacks like a duck, so seems like if you feed it peas it should get bigger ". But it's not a duck.

There's a distinction between "I need to tell my LLM friend what I want" and "I need to adjust the context for my statistical LLM tool and provide guardrails in the form of linting etc".

It's not that adding prose description doesn't shift the context - but it assume a wrong model about what is going on, that I think is ultimately limiting.

The LLM doesn't really have that kind of agency.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#280

Post by EagnaIonat »

2017 GPT could generate text that looked factual and well written but was total garbage. Compare that to 2023.

The technology is accelerating. Hard projects from early last year are now trivial for me. Even AI related tools we are using internally are being made redundant from open source models and new frameworks (eg. OpenClaw).

It feels like we are in the AI version of "Don't look up". Everyone is on borrowed time, you should be looking at how to position yourself in an AI world before everyone realises.

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