I know when you're vibe coding

I personally treat the LLM as a very junior programmer. He's willing to work, will take instructions, but his knowledge of the codebase, and patterns we use is lacking strongly. So it needs a LOT of handholding, very clear instructions, description of potential pitfalls, and smaller, scoped tasks, and reviewed carefully to catch any straying off pattern.

Also, I make it work the same way I do: I first come up with the data model until it "works" in my head, before writing any "code" to deal with it. Again, clear instructions.

Oh another thing, one of my "golden rule" is that it needs to keep a block comment at the top of the file to describe what's going on in that file. It acts as a second "prompt" when I restart a session.

It works pretty well, it doesn't appear as "magic" as the "make it so!" approach people think they can get away with, but it works for me.

But yes, I still also spend maybe 30% of the time cleaning up, renaming stuff and do more general rework of the code before it comes "presentable" but it still allows to work pretty quickly, a lot quicker than if I were to do it all by hand.

This matches my experience. And I do mind the unnecessary comments. I always tell juniors that every line is important and the presence of a comment is a powerful tool for communicating with future developers. Think of it like labelling circuits on a fusebox. Now these garbage code generators are putting comments on everything because they don't understand anything and can't tell what it's redundant.

But this is only scratching the surface of what's wrong, as the article elaborates.

The thing is people claim these things are making them faster. I don't believe it. What I believe is they are faster at generating shit. I know that because a baby can coax an LLM into producing shit too.

I do not believe you can spend that much time writing the correct prompt - use this exact function, follow this pattern, add a comment here, don't add one there, no, not like that - and still be quicker than just writing it yourself directly in the language.

It's like if I speak French fluently but only communicate through a translator that I instruct in English but constantly have to correct when they miss the nuance in my speech. I'd just speak French!

So, no, I don't believe it.

What I believe is that many, many software developers have been manually writing boilerplate, repetitive and boring code over and over again up until this point. I believe it because I've seen it. LLMs will obviously speed this up. But some of us already learnt how to use the computer to do that for us.

What I also believe is developers exist who don't understand, or care to understand, what they are doing. They will code using a trial and error approach and find solutions based purely on perceived behaviour of the software. I believe it because I've seen it. Of course LLMs will speed up this process. But some of us actually think about what we're writing, just like we don't just randomly string together words in a restaurant and then just keep trying until we get the dish we want.

This. Reinventing the wheel at every opportunity, forgetting about or ignoring the expected way to do something, mixing patterns, you name it. The author may call it "vibe coding", that's fine but it has little to do with LLMs. The tool has the same amount of care anyone rushing to get something done, or that hasn't build the project themselves, or maybe doesn't have enough experience would. I can only assume it's a not-very-subtle complaint about a specific person in their team, "written in a way no developer on the team would" is telling.

I'd be extremely careful about applying this thinking anywhere else. There's enough baseless finger-pointing in academia and arts already.

I have worked on such teams. Mostly, even. I would not accept any PRs with code doing any of those things (human or machine made). Small(er) teams on small to medium sized projects.

Critical solutions, but small(er) projects with 2-4 devs, that’s where it’s at. I feel like it’s because then it’s actually possible to build a devteam culture and consensus that has the wanted balance of quality and deliveryspeed.

> If the agent has a clean, relevant context explaining what global functions are available it tends to use them properly.

STOP! The agent does not exist. There are no agents; only mathematical functions that have an input and produce an output.

Stop anthropomorphizing LLMs, they are not human, they don’t do anything.

It might seem like it does not matter; my take is it’s primordial. Humans are not machines and vice-versa.