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Perverse incentives of vibe coding

fredbenenson.medium.com

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Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#31

Post by Pxtl »

I can feel how the extreme autocomplete of AI is a drug.

Half of my job is fighting the "copy/paste/change one thing" garbage that developers generate. Keeping code DRY. The autocompletes do an amazing job of automating the repeated boilerplate. "Oh you're doing this little snippet for the first and second property? Obviously you want to do that for every property! Let me just expand that out for you!"

And I'm like "oooh, that's nice and convenient".

...

But I also should be looking at that with the stink-eye... part of that code is now duplicated a dozen times. Is there any way to reduce that duplication to the bare minimum? At least so it's only one duplicated declaration or call and all of the rest is per-thingy?

Or any way to directly/automatically wrap the thing without going property-by-property?

Normally I'd be asking myself these questions by the 3rd line. But this just made a dozen of those in an instant. And it's so tempting and addictive to just say "this is fine" and move on.

That kind of code is not fine.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#32

Post by Ancapistani »

biker142541 wrote: post #18

Can we please stop using 'vibe coding' to mean 'ai assisted coding'?? (best breakdown, imo: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ ) Is it really vibe coding if you are building a detailed coding plan, conducting "git-based experimentation with ruthless pruning", and essentially reviewing the code incrementally for correctness and conciseness? Sure, it's a process dependent on AI, but it's very far from n…

There should be a distinction, but I don't think it's really clear where it is yet.

In my own usage, I tend to alternate between tiny, well-defined tasks and larger-scale, planned architectural changes or new features. Things in between those levels are hit and miss.

It also depends on what I'm building and why. If it's a quick-and-dirty script for my own use, I'll often write up - or speak - a prompt and let it do its thing in the background while I work on other things. I care much less about code quality in those instances.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#33

Post by GuinansEyebrows »

kagevf wrote: post #23
princealiiiii wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. That's wild. Anything with non-deterministic output will have this.

> "Anything with non-deterministic output will have this. Anything with non-deterministic output that charges money ... Edit Added words to clarify what I meant.

i think at least a lot of things (if not most things) that i pay for have an agreed-upon result in exchange for payment, and a mitigation system that'll help me get what i paid for in the event that something else prevents that from happening. if you pay for something and you don't know what you're going to get, and you have to keep paying for it in the hopes that you get what you want out of it... that sounds a lot like gambling. not exactly, but like.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#34

Post by jimbokun »

Etheryte wrote: post #27
samtp wrote: post #20

I've pretty clearly seen the critical thinking ability of coworkers who depend on AI too much sharply decline over the past year. Instead of taking 30 seconds to break down the problem and work through assumptions, they immediately copy/paste into an LLM and spit back what it tells them. This has lead to their abilities stalling while their output seemingly goes up. But when you look at the quality of their output, a…

My observations align with this pretty closely. I have a number of colleagues who I wager are largely using LLM-s, both by changes in coding style and how much they suddenly add comments, and I can't help but feel a noticeable drop in the quality of the output. Issues that should clearly have no business making it to code review are now regularly left for others to catch, it often feels like they don't even look at t…

Just replace your colleagues with the LLMs they are using. You will reduce costs with no decrease in the quality of work.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#36

Post by andy99 »

samtp wrote: post #20

I've pretty clearly seen the critical thinking ability of coworkers who depend on AI too much sharply decline over the past year. Instead of taking 30 seconds to break down the problem and work through assumptions, they immediately copy/paste into an LLM and spit back what it tells them. This has lead to their abilities stalling while their output seemingly goes up. But when you look at the quality of their output, a…

I think lack of critical thinking is the root cause, not a symptom. I think pretty much everyone uses LLMs these days, but you can tell who sees the output and considers it "done" vs who uses LLM output as an input to their own process.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#37

Post by yewW0tm8 »

vanschelven wrote: post #14

> Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine respon…

Same with anything though? Startups, marriages, kids.

All those laid off coders gambled on a career that didn’t pan out.

Want more certainty in life, gonna have to get political.

And even then there is no guarantee the future give a crap. Society may well collapse in 30 years, or 100…

This is all just role play to satisfy the prior generations story driven illusions.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#38

Post by grufkork »

tippytippytango wrote: post #7

This article captures a lot of the problem. It’s often frustrating how it tries to work around really simple issues with complex workarounds that don’t work at all. I tell it the secret simple thing it’s missing and it gets it. It always makes me think, god help the vibe coders that can’t read code. I actually feel bad for them.

Working as an instructor for a project course for first-year university students, I have run in to this a couple of times. The code required for the project is pretty simple, but there are a couple of subtle details that can go wrong. Had one group today with bit shifts and other "advanced" operators everywhere, but the code was not working as expected. I asked them to just `Serial.println()` so they could check what was going on, and they were stumped. LLMs are already great tools, but if you don't know basic troubleshooting/debugging you're in for a bad time when the brick wall arrives.

On the other hand, it shows how much coding is just repetition. You don't need to be a good coder to perform serviceable work, but you won't create anything new and amazing either, if you don't learn to think and reason - but that might for some purposes be fine. (Worrying for the ability of the general population however)

You could ask whether these students would have gotten anything done without generated code? Probably, it's just a momentarily easier alternative to actual understanding. They did however realise the problem and decided by themselves to write their own code in a simpler, more repetitive and "stupid" style, but one that they could reason about. So hopefully a good lesson and all well in the end!

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#39

Post by Ancapistani »

Pxtl wrote: post #31

I can feel how the extreme autocomplete of AI is a drug. Half of my job is fighting the "copy/paste/change one thing" garbage that developers generate. Keeping code DRY. The autocompletes do an amazing job of automating the repeated boilerplate. "Oh you're doing this little snippet for the first and second property? Obviously you want to do that for every property! Let me just expand that out for you!" And I'm like "…

> That kind of code is not fine.

I agree, but I'm also challenging that position within myself.

Why isn't it OK? If your primary concern is readability, then perhaps LLMs can better understand generated code relative to clean, human-readable code. Also, if you're not directly interacting with it, who cares?

As for duplication introducing inconsistencies, that's another issue entirely :)

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#40

Post by martin-t »

tippytippytango wrote: post #7

This article captures a lot of the problem. It’s often frustrating how it tries to work around really simple issues with complex workarounds that don’t work at all. I tell it the secret simple thing it’s missing and it gets it. It always makes me think, god help the vibe coders that can’t read code. I actually feel bad for them.

> I tell it the secret simple thing it’s missing and it gets it.

Anthropomorphizing LLMs is not helpful. It doesn't get anything, you just gave it new tokens, ones which are more closely correlated with the correct answer. It also generates responses similar to what a human would say in the same situation.

Note i first wrote "it also mimicks what a human would say", then I realized I am anthropomorphizing a statistical algorithm and had to correct myself. It's hard sometimes but language shapes how we think (which is ironically why LLMs are a thing at all) and using terms which better describe how it really works is important.

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