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Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

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Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#31

Post by dheera »

SCdF wrote: post #5

So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?la…

I absolutely hate the polarization around "vibe coding".

The whole point of AI agents is to eventually get good enough to do this stuff better than humans do. It's okay to dogfood and test them now and see how well they do, and improve them over time.

Software engineers will eventually become managers of AI agents. Vibe coding is just version 0.1 pre-alpha of that future.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#32

Post by eastbound »

ndepoel wrote: post #18

This all reminds me a lot of the early 2000's, when big corporations thought they could save a lot of money by outsourcing development work to low-income countries and have their expensive in-house engineers only write specifications. Turns out most of those outsourcing parties won't truly understand the core ideas behind the system you're trying to build, won't think outside the box and make corrections where necess…

Oh yes[1]

Then remember when we said tests should be the specs?

Then we said the end users are the specs?

All of them can be construed as a joke in our erratic search for the correct way to write software without those $150k developers that seem to be the only ones getting the job done, assuming they have a competent management hierarchy and stock options incentives.

[1] We have a waterfall software and I wonder whether Crockford’s license “JSON should be used for good, not evil” was meant for me

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#35

Post by musicale »

spaceywilly wrote: post #12
SCdF wrote: post #5

So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?la…

From that tweet: > I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it That sums up vibe coding, imo. The article talks about code quality with vibe coding, but I think that misses the point. The real problem is code knowledge. When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the w…

> When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the way it is, they are not going to have a good time

Kernighan's law still applies.

https://www.laws-of-software.com/laws/kernighan/

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#36

Post by rvz »

spaceywilly wrote: post #12
SCdF wrote: post #5

So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?la…

From that tweet: > I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it That sums up vibe coding, imo. The article talks about code quality with vibe coding, but I think that misses the point. The real problem is code knowledge. When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the w…

> Sure they can copy paste the error into the LLM and hope for the best, but what happens when that doesn’t fix it?

Neither side cares unfortunately.

When users attempt to prompt away their problems without understanding the error and it doesn't solve it, that is still good news for Cursor and Anthropic and it is more money for them.

The influencers encouraging "vibe coding" also don't care. They need to be paid for their Twitter money or YouTube ad revenue.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#37

Post by AlexCoventry »

Not an excuse, but maybe an explanation. I was just talking to someone who was bragging about getting the cost of coding down to a penny a line. Seems like an insane metric to use, to me, since it takes no account of features developed or maintainability/modifiability.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#38

Post by allenu »

alphazard wrote: post #6

Different people clearly mean different things when they talk about software quality. There is quality as perceived by the user: few bugs, accurately models the problem they have, no more complicated than necessary, etc. Then there is this other notion of quality as something to do with how the software is built. How neat and clear it is. How easy it is to extend or change. The first kind of quality is the only kind…

> The first kind of quality is the only kind that matters in the end.

From a business perspective, this is what's exciting to a lot of people. I think we have to recognize that a lot of products fail not because the software was written poorly, but because the business idea wasn't very good.

If a business is able to spin up its product using some aspect of vibe coding to test out its merits, and is able to explore product-market fit more quickly, does it really matter if the code quality is bad? Likewise, a well-crafted product can still fail because either the market shifted (maybe it took too long to produce) or because there really wasn't a market for it to begin with. Obviously, there's a middle ground here, and if you go too far with vibe coding and produce something that constantly fails or is hard to maintain, then maybe you've gone too far, but it's a balance that needs to be weighed against business risk.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#39

Post by forgotTheLast »

>In essence, let the AI handle the grunt work, not the brain work.

And importantly make sure the user doing the brain work has the experience and support to do it properly. The XY problem can cause a lot of damage with AI agents that implement what's asked of them instead of asking why.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#40

Post by fma »

mr_mitm wrote: post #24
spaceywilly wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From that tweet: > I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it That sums up vibe coding, imo. The article talks about code quality with vibe coding, but I think that misses the point. The real problem is code knowledge. When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the w…

Also from the tweet; > It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing You were never supposed to vibe code on serious projects.

It's fine for tooling or weekend project. I did it on an internal tool. It's got so much functionality now though, that Cursor struggles. It was great when I had a blank project, needed x, y, z and it went off and did It's thing. The moment the project got bug and need modifications, it is better that I do it myself.

Also I am a backend engineer. I don't know what kind of code it's producing for my front end. I just hit accept all. But seeing how it does the backend code and having to prompt it to do something better (architectural, performance, code reuse) I have no doubt the front end of my pool is a pile of poop.

I fear that management will see these small quick gains and think it applies to everything.

I'm of the opinion now, that vibe coding is good if you are familiar with the code & stack and can ensure quality. You don't want to give it to a product owner and have them try to be an engineer (or have a backend dev do front end, vice versa).

Just my opinion.

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