The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok • Hacker News Board

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#291

Post by tombert » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:04 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #263

tombert wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I actually think that might actually be a good path forward. I hate self-promotion but I posted my opinions on this last night https://blog.tombert.com/Posts/Technical/2026/04-April/Stop-... The tl;dr of this is that I don't think that the code itself is what needs to be preserved, the prompt and chat is the actual important and useful thing here. At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to…

> At some point I think it makes more sense to fine tune the prompts to get increasingly more specific and just regenerate the the code based on that spec, and store that in Git. Generating code using a non-deterministic code generator is a bold strategy. Just gotta hope that your next pull of the code slot machine doesn’t introduce a bug or ten.

We're already merging code that has generated bugs from the slot machine. People aren't actually reading through 10,000 line pull requests most of the time, and people aren't really reviewing every line of code.

Given that, we should instead tune the prompts well enough to not leave things to chance. Write automated tests to make sure that inputs and outputs are ok, write your specs so specifically that there's no room for ambiguity. Test these things multiple times locally to make sure you're getting consistent results.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#292

Post by 0x457 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

AstroBen wrote: post #272

0x457 wrote: post #244

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Code quality never really mattered to users of the software. You can have the most code and still have zero users or have high user frustration from users that you do have. Code quality only matters in maintainability to developers. IMO it's a very subjective metric

It's not subjective at all. It's not art. Code quality = less bugs long term. Code quality = faster iteration and easier maintenance. If things are bad enough it becomes borderline impossible to add features. Users absolutely care about these things.

Okay, but I meant how you measure is subjective.

How do you measure code quality?

> Users absolutely care about these things.

No, users care about you adding new features, not in your ability to add new features or how much it cost you to add features.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#293

Post by esafak » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

remus wrote: post #130

acedTrex wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its a buggy pos though, "popular and successful" have never been indicators of quality in any sense.

I think this is a pretty interesting comment because it gets to the heart of differing views on what quality means. For you, non-buggy software is important. You could also reasonably take a more business centered approach, where having some number of paying customers is an indicator of quality (you've built something people are willing to pay for!) Personally I lean towards the second camp, the bugs are annoying but…

What do I care if Anthropic makes money? Do you think Oracle makes money because they have a quality product?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#294

Post by peder » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:05 PM UTC

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…

But tech debt with vibe coding is fixed by just throwing more magic at it. The cost of tech debt has never been lower.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#295

Post by fragmede » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

hypeatei wrote: post #55

spoiler wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it

Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it ac…

Call me naive, but I don't believe that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and ChatGPT.com and Claude.ai are going to be hard down and never come back. Same as Gmail, which is an entirely different corporation. I mean, they could, but it doesn't seem insane to use Gmail for my email, and that's way more important to my life functioning than this new AI thing.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#296

Post by pavel_lishin » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

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.

> It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

A lot of dollars fix a lot of mistakes.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#297

Post by tombert » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:06 PM UTC

xienze wrote: post #288

tombert wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

If you make the prompts specific enough and provide tests that it has to run before it passes, then it should be fairly close to deterministic.

Also, people aren't actually reading through most of the code that is generated or merged, so if there's a fear of deploying buggy code generated by AI, then I assure you that's already happening. A lot.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#298

Post by kennywinker » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:08 PM UTC

AstroBen wrote: post #190

kennywinker wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the thing is that people expect one of the largest companies in the world to have well written code. Claude’s source code is fine for a 1-3 person team. It’s atrocious for a flagship product from a company valued over $380 BILLION. Like if that’s the best ai coding can do given infinite money? Yeah, the emperor has no clothes. If it’s not the best that can be done, then what kinda clowns are running the show…

The difference here is that everyone else in this product category are also sprinting full steam ahead trying to get as many users as they can If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind. Speed of implementation short term might beat out long-term maintenance and iteration they'd get from quality code They're just taking on massive tech debt

> If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind

For you and I, sure - sprint as fast as we can using whatever means we can find. But when you have infinite money, hiring a solid team of traditional/acoustic/human devs is a negligible cost in money and time.

Especially if you give those devs enough agency that they can build on the product in interesting and novel ways that the ai isn’t going to suggest.

Everything is becoming slop now, and it almost always shows. I get why when you’re resource constrained. I don’t get why when you’re not.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#299

Post by HarHarVeryFunny » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

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.

It helps if the product is so revolutionary that people are willing to overlook bugs. Could you imagine a more mundane product with a TUI that flickered all the time where this wouldn't be a showstopper? I believe the bug is fixed now, but it seems crazy that it persisted so long given how obvious the cause was (clear before update). How many more bugs are in CC? As of a few weeks ago there were 5000 or so open issues against it on github.

The success is undeniable, but whether this vibe-coded level of quality is acceptable for more general use cases isn't something you can infer from that.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#300

Post by cineticdaffodil » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:09 PM UTC

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.

While beeing in the center of a hype vortex which basically suspends market physics. But all that bad code eats serverfarms that are going to cost double when the bubble starts deflating.