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Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

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Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#31

Post by faangguyindia »

Basically, at place we've a coding agent in a while loop.

What it does is pretty simple. You give it a problem, setup enviornment with libraries and all.

It continuously makes changes to the program, then checks it output.

And iteratively improves it.

For example, we used it to build a new method to apply diffs generated by LLMs to files.

As different models are good at different things, we managed to run it against models to figure out which method performs best.

Can a human do it? I doubt.

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#32

Post by the_af »

This was interesting.

I still wonder, if (as the author mentions and I've seen in my experience) companies are pivoting to hiring more senior devs and fewer or no junior devs...

... where will the new generations of senior devs come from? If, as the author argues, the role of the knowledgeable senior is still needed to guide the AI and review the occasional subtle errors it produces, where will new generations of seniors be trained? Surely one cannot go from junior-to-senior (in the sense described in TFA) just by talking to the AI? Where will the intuition that something is off come from?

Another thing that worries me, but I'm willing to believe it'll get better: the reckless abandon with which AI solutions consume resources and are completely obvious to it, like TFA describes (3.5 GB of RAM for the easiest, 3 pillar Hanoi configuration). Every veteran computer user (not just programmers but also gamers) has been decrying for ages how software becomes more and more bloated, how hardware doesn't scale with the (mis)use of resources, etc. And I worry this kind of vibe coding will only make it horribly worse. I'm hoping some sense of resource consciousness can be included in new training datasets...

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#33

Post by ofjcihen »

tln wrote: post #29
afro88 wrote: post #21

Great article, though I'm still reading it as it's a mammoth read! A side note: as it's been painfully pointed out to me, "vibe coding" means not reading the code (ever!). We need a term for coding with LLMs exclusively, but also reviewing the code they output at each step.

Prompt coding or just prompting "Lets prompt up a new microservice for this" "What have you been prompting lately?" "Looking at commits, prompt coding is now 50% of your output. Have a raise"

What is the term for getting the ick from reading?

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#34

Post by layer8 »

afro88 wrote: post #21

Great article, though I'm still reading it as it's a mammoth read! A side note: as it's been painfully pointed out to me, "vibe coding" means not reading the code (ever!). We need a term for coding with LLMs exclusively, but also reviewing the code they output at each step.

We could revive the old CASE acronym (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engine...). ;)

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#35

Post by [deleted] »

the_af wrote: post #32

This was interesting. I still wonder, if (as the author mentions and I've seen in my experience) companies are pivoting to hiring more senior devs and fewer or no junior devs... ... where will the new generations of senior devs come from? If, as the author argues, the role of the knowledgeable senior is still needed to guide the AI and review the occasional subtle errors it produces, where will new generations of sen…

[deleted]

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#36

Post by [deleted] »

MangoCoffee wrote: post #16
stavros wrote: post #3

I've come to view LLMs as a consulting firm where, for each request, I have a 50% chance of getting either an expert or an intern writing my code, and there's no way to tell which. Sometimes I accept this, and I vibe-code, when I don't care about the result. When I do care about the result, I have to read every line myself. Since reading code is harder than writing it, this takes longer, but LLMs have made me too laz…

>When I do care about the result, I have to read every line myself. isn't that the same as delegated task to jr developer but you still have to check their work as sr?

[deleted]

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#37

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

cdrini wrote: post #27
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much subjective placebo with “prompt engineering” that anyone pushing any one thing like this just shows me they haven’t used it enough yet. No offense, just seeing it everywhere. Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”… It’s a subjective system without control testing. Humans are definitely going to apply religion, dogma…

The best research I've seen on this is: - Threatening or tipping a model generally has no significant effect on benchmark performance. - Prompt variations can significantly affect performance on a per-question level. However, it is hard to know in advance whether a particular prompting approach will help or harm the LLM's ability to answer any particular question. https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00614

That 100% tracks expectation if your technical knowledge exceeds past “believer”.

Now… for fun. Look up “best prompting” or “the perfect prompt” on YouTube. Thousands of videos “tips” and “expect recommendations” that are bordering the arcane.

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#38

Post by SV_BubbleTime »

diggan wrote: post #19
SV_BubbleTime wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There is so much subjective placebo with “prompt engineering” that anyone pushing any one thing like this just shows me they haven’t used it enough yet. No offense, just seeing it everywhere. Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”… It’s a subjective system without control testing. Humans are definitely going to apply religion, dogma…

> Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”… I'm not saying I've proven it or anything, but it doesn't sound far-fetched that a thing that generates new text based on previous text, would be affected by the previous text, even minor details like using ALL CAPS or just lowercase, since those are different tokens for the LLM. I've notice…

We all agree that prompts are affected by tokens.

The issue is that you can’t know if you are positively or negatively effecting because there is no real control.

And the effect could switch between prompts.

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#39

Post by verelo »

r_lee wrote: post #22
Insanity wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% this. I tried haskelling with LLMs and it’s performance is worse compared to Go. Although in fairness this was a year ago on GPT 3.5 IIRC

I'm not sure I'd say "100% this" if I was talking about GPT 3.5...

Yeah, 3.5 was good when it came out but frankly anyone reviewing AI for coding not using sonnet 4.1, GPT-5 or equivalent is really not aware of what they've missed out on.

Re: Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

#40

Post by furyofantares »

the_af wrote: post #32

This was interesting. I still wonder, if (as the author mentions and I've seen in my experience) companies are pivoting to hiring more senior devs and fewer or no junior devs... ... where will the new generations of senior devs come from? If, as the author argues, the role of the knowledgeable senior is still needed to guide the AI and review the occasional subtle errors it produces, where will new generations of sen…

People keep saying this, but the young folks who start out with stuff are gonna surpass us old folks at some point. Us old folks just get a big head start.

Right now we're comparing seniors who learned the old way to juniors who learned the old way. Soon we'll start having juniors who started out with this stuff.

It also takes time to learn how to teach people to use tools. We're all still figuring out how to use these, and I think again, more experience is a big help here. But at some point we'll start having people who not only start out with this stuff, but they get to learn from people who've figured out how to use it already.

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