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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

#281

Post by larodi »

simonw wrote: post #259

How credible are the claims that the Claude Code source code is bad? AI naysayers are heavily incentivized to find fault with it, but in my experience it's pretty rare to see a codebase of that size where it's not easy to pick out "bad code" examples. Are there any relatively neutral parties who've evaluated the code and found it to be obviously junk?

How credible are the claims code en masse is good? Because I despise nearly every line of unreasonably verbose Java, that is so much waste of time and effort, but still deployed everywhere.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#282

Post by strulovich »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #78
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.

Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have…

And it’s perfectly okay to fix and improve the code later.

Many super talented developers I know will say “Make it work, then make it good”. I think it’s okay to do this on a bigger scale than just the commit cycle.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#284

Post by dcre »

quikoa wrote: post #241
johnfn wrote: post #178

"Laughing" at how bad the code in Claude Code is really seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Anthropic didn't set out to build a bunch of clean code when writing Claude Code. They set out to make a bunch of money, and given CC makes in the low billions of ARR, is growing rapidly, and is the clear market leader, it seems they succeeded. Given this, you would think you'd would want to approach the strategy tha…

If Claude Code truly was worth something they'd sell it instead of forcing its use with a subscription.

Incredible take. They are selling it.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#285

Post by h14h »

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,…

[dead]

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#286

Post by aerhardt »

jschveibinz wrote: post #215
aerhardt wrote: post #134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Distributing an app to 100 users inside an enterprise is already a hellish nightmare and I'm pretty convinced that citizen developers will never be a thing - we'll sooner reach the singularity.

Here's my take: I think that citizen developers will be a thing--but not in the way you might be thinking. More people will be enabled (and empowered) to "build" quick-and-dirty solutions to personal problems by just talking to their phone: "I need way to track my food by telling you what I ate and then you telling me how much I have left for today. And suggest what my next meal should be." In the current paradigm--w…

Well, your example is timely.

Today I asked ChatGPT to make me a weekly calorie plan and it was perfect. But then I still use MyFitnessPal to log my calories because their food database is outstanding, and the UX of scanning food barcodes is unbeatable. They have the most niche items in my country, Spain.

How are LLMs going any of that? An app is often much more than a CRUD interface.

Maybe I could build a custom app that scans the nutrition facts table and with voice I could explain how much I ate or something - I’m technical, but really, I have better things to do and I’d rather pay MFP 10 bucks a month.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#287

Post by KronisLV »

rafaelmn wrote: post #193
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.

TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it. And now they are just tacking on featu…

> TBH Claude Code is surprisingly shit to use given the technical resources and the amount of money behind it. Looking past the bugs and missing features, it's so obvious it's not built by people who care about the product from a developer/craftsman perspective. It's missing all the signs of polish/care, it feels like someone shipped an internal PoC to prod and kept hacking on it.

I don't wholly disagree, but personally it's still the tool I use and it's sort of fine. Perhaps not entirely for the money that's behind it, as you said, but it could be worse.

The CLI experience is pretty okay, although the auth is kinda weird (e.g. when trying to connect to AWS Bedrock). There's a permission system and sandboxing, plan mode and TODOs, decent sub-agent support, instruction files and custom skills, tool calls and LSP support and all the other stuff you'd expect. At least no weird bugs like I had with OpenCode where trying to paste multi-line content inside of a Windows Terminal session lead to the tool closing and every next line getting pasted in an executed in the terminal one by one, that was weird, though I will admit that using Windows feels messed up quite often nowadays even without stuff like that.

The desktop app gives you chat and cowork and code, although it almost feels like Cowork is really close to what Code does (and for some reason Cowork didn't seem to support non-OS drives?). Either way, the desktop app helps me not juggle terminal sessions and keeps a nice history in the sidebar, has a pretty plan display, easy ways of choosing permissions and worktrees, although I will admit that it can be sluggish and for some actions there just aren't progress indicators which feels oddly broken.

I wonder what they spend most of their time working on and why the basics aren't better, though to Anthropic's credit about a month ago the desktop Code section was borderline unusable on Windows when switching between two long conversations, which now seems to take a few seconds (which is still a few seconds too long, but at least usable).

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#288

Post by xienze »

tombert wrote: post #269
xienze wrote: post #258

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. Absolutely. The difference is that the amount of bad code that could be generated had an upper limit on it — how fast a human can type it out. With LLMs bad code can be shat out at warp speed.

Oh I don't disagree with that. I am getting pretty tired of people making multi-thousand-line pull requests with lots of clearly AI-generated code and expecting it to be merged in. I think the better unit to commit and work with is the prompt itself, and I think that the prompt is the thing that should be PR'd at this point, because ultimately the spec is what's important.

> I think that the prompt is the thing that should be PR'd at this point, because ultimately the spec is what's important.

The fundamental problem there is the code generation step is non-deterministic. You might make a two sentence change to the prompt to fix a bug and the generation introduces two more. Generate again and everything is fine. Way too much uncertainty to have confidence in that approach.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#289

Post by saulpw »

kfarr wrote: post #227
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?

Yes, I believe the creator has outright stated that they just YOLO vibe and don't even look at the code.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#290

Post by conductr »

therobots927 wrote: post #140
conductr wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It kind of reminds me of grammar police type personalities. They are so hung up on the fact it reads “ugly” they can’t see the message; this code powers a rapidly growing $400B company. They admit refactoring is easy, but fail to realize they probably know that too and it’s just not a priority yet.

The underlying model powers the valuation. Not the front end

I think that's another point of why this is not a priority to keep clean
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