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The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

kanfa.macbudkowski.com

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Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#281

Post by PyWoody »

roncesvalles wrote: post #239
Aurornis wrote: post #98

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There’s a big gap between reality and the influencer posts about LLMs. I agree with you that LLMs do provide some significant acceleration, but the influencers have tried to exaggerate this into unbelievable numbers. Even non-influencers are trying to exaggerate their LLM skills as a way to get hired or raise their status on LinkedIn. I rarely read the LinkedIn social feed but when I check mine it’s now filled with c…

>Many of these posts come from people who were all in on crypto companies a few years ago. This is ditto my observation. There seems to be a certain "type" of people like this. And it's not just people looking for work. My guess is either they have super low critical thinking, a very cynical view of the world where lies and exaggeration are the only way to make it, or something more pathological (narcissism etc).

The "type" is simply the get-rich-quick schemers.

I have a relative who was late to crypto, late to drop shipping, late to carbon credits, but is now absolutely all-in on AI as his ticket out. It honestly depresses the hell out of me trying to talk to him because everything is about money and getting rich.

People like this don't care about underlying technologies or learning past the most basic surface level of understanding.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#282

Post by cvhc »

alexpotato wrote: post #10

I work as a DevOps/SRE and have been doing it FinTech (bank, hedge funds, startups) and Crypto (L1 chain) for almost 20 years. My thoughts on vibe coding vs production code: - vibe coding can 100% get you to a PoC/MVP probably 10x faster than pre LLMs - This is partly b/c it is good at things I'm not good at (e.g. front end design) - But then I need to go in and double check performance, correctness, information flow…

> Testing workloads that take hours to run still take hours to run with either a human or LLM testing them out (aka that is still the bottleneck)

Actually I had some terrible experiences when asking the agent to do something simple in our codebase (like, rename these files and fix build scripts and dependencies) but it spent much longer time than a human, because it kept running the full CI pipelines to check the problems after every attempted change.

A human would, for example, rely on the linter to detect basic issues, run a partial build on affected targets, etc. to save the time. But the agent probably doesn't have a sense of time elapsed.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#283

Post by alexpotato »

steveBK123 wrote: post #201
amelius wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, now you're reading someone else's code and not everybody likes that. In fact, most self-proclaimed 10x coders I know hate it. So instead of the 10x coder doing it, the 1x coder does it, but then that factor of 3x becomes 0.3x.

Absolutely. In my experience there are more “good coders” than people who are good at code review/PR/iterative feedback with another dev. A lot of people are OCD pedants about stuff that can be solved with a linter (but can’t be bothered to implement one) or just “LGTM” everything. Neither provide value or feedback to help develop other devs.

> A lot of people are OCD pedants about stuff that can be solved with a linter (but can’t be bothered to implement one) or just “LGTM” everything. Neither provide value or feedback to help develop other devs.

This many be one of the best quotes on HN in a while.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#284

Post by Gareth321 »

qsera wrote: post #218
WarmWash wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, because the current software paradigm (a shed/barn/warehouse full of tools to suite every possible users every possible need) doesn't make sense when LLMs can turn plain English into a software tool in the matter of minutes.

>LLMs can turn plain English into a software tool in the matter of minutes. Unless LLMs can read minds, no one will bother to specify, even in plain english with the required level of detail. And that is assuming the user has the details in mind, which is also something pretty improbable...

You need to think outside the box a little. They're not going to need to write a requirements doc from scratch. They'll tell it to copy a piece of software which is already established and make some customisations or improvements based on their needs. This is a few sentences.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#285

Post by pmdr »

qsera wrote: post #125
lelanthran wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've got a few projects I've generated, along with a wholly handwritten project started in Dec. The difference I've noticed is that the act of actually typing out code made me backtrack a few times refining the possible solutions before even starting the integration tests, sometimes before even doing a compile. When generating, the LLM never backtracked, even in the face of broken tests. It would proceed to continue…

> It would add special exceptions to general code instead of determining that the general rule should be refined or changed. That is pretty bad..

What little vibe coding I've done has been consistent with that experience.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#286

Post by Gareth321 »

lacedeconstruct wrote: post #9
niemandhier wrote: post #4

With sufficiently advanced vibe coding the need for certain type of product just vanishes. I needed it, I quickly build it myself for myself, and for myself only.

I dont want that though, I want someone to spend much more time than I can afford thinking about and perfecting a product that I can pay for and dont worry about it

In the next few years it's going to be quicker to tell an AI to make something than it will take to hunt down software which fits all your uses perfectly. If you're honest, all software is imperfect for you. It's not customised exactly how you like it. Imagine if it could be exactly what you want with zero effort.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#287

Post by alexpotato »

cvhc wrote: post #282
alexpotato wrote: post #10

I work as a DevOps/SRE and have been doing it FinTech (bank, hedge funds, startups) and Crypto (L1 chain) for almost 20 years. My thoughts on vibe coding vs production code: - vibe coding can 100% get you to a PoC/MVP probably 10x faster than pre LLMs - This is partly b/c it is good at things I'm not good at (e.g. front end design) - But then I need to go in and double check performance, correctness, information flow…

> Testing workloads that take hours to run still take hours to run with either a human or LLM testing them out (aka that is still the bottleneck) Actually I had some terrible experiences when asking the agent to do something simple in our codebase (like, rename these files and fix build scripts and dependencies) but it spent much longer time than a human, because it kept running the full CI pipelines to check the pro…

Went through something similar recently with database calls.

Co-pilot said something about having too many rows returned and had some complex answer on how to reduce row count.

I just added a "LIMIT 100" which was more than adequate.

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#288

Post by jcgrillo »

piersj225 wrote: post #210
ryandrake wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I rarely read the LinkedIn social feed but when I check mine it’s now filled with claims from people about going from idea to shipped product in N days (with a note at the bottom that they’re looking for a new job or available to consult with your company). This always seems to be the pattern. "I vibe coded my product and shipped it in 96 hours!" OK, what's the product? Why haven't I heard of it? Why can't it repla…

I found one example of this going very wrong on reddit the other day - https://www.reddit.com/r/selfhosted/comments/1rckopd/huntarr... One redditor security reviews a vibe coded project

holy fuck this is awesome.. I haven't laughed this hard in a while

Re: The 100 hour gap between a vibecoded prototype and a working product

#290

Post by robocat »

skyberrys wrote: post #23

If you ask for something complicated this headline is more than true. But why complicate things, keep it simple and keep it fast. Also this article uses 'pfp' like it's a word, I can't figure out what it means. I'm able to vibe code simple apps in 30 minutes, polish it in four hours and now I've been enjoying it for 2 months.

AI is usually better than traditional search for working out acronyms and jargon.

My prompt "What does PFP mean on this page: https://kanfa.macbudkowski.com/vibecoding-cryptosaurus" gave a good answer and it described extra relevant context within crypto.

I had less luck with "What does sharp tails mean in «HFT. You want low deterministic latency with sharp tails»". But I suspect the source sentence is the problem.

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