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Vibe coding creates fatigue?

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Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#31

Post by viccis »

loloquwowndueo wrote: post #11
happytoexplain wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I'm getting increasingly confused as to why some people are broadening the use of "vibe" coding to just mean any AI coding, no matter how thorough/thoughtful.

Like people using “bricked” to signal recoverable situations. “Oh the latest update bricked my phone and I had to factory-reset it, but it’s ok now”. Bricked used to mean it turned into something as useful as a brick, permanently.

I'm not sure how common this is in other countries, but Americans would rather add another definition to the dictionary for the misuse before they'd ever tolerate being corrected or (god forbid) learning the real meaning of a word. I got dogpiled for saying this about "factoid" the other day here, but sometimes when people misuse words like "bricked" or "electrocuted", the ambiguity does actually make a difference, meaning you have to follow up with "actually bricked permanently?" or "did the shock kill him?", meaning that semantic information has been lost.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#32

Post by colechristensen »

vidarh wrote: post #25
colechristensen wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Build tools to keep it in check.

Really, this. You still need to check its work, but it is also pretty good at checking its work if told to look at specific things. Make it stop. Tell it to review whether the code is cohesive. Tell it to review it for security issues. Tell it to review it for common problems you've seen in just your codebase . Tell it to write a todo list for everything it finds, and tell it fix it. And only review the code once it'…

Tell it to grade its work in various categories and that you'll only accept B+ or greater work. Focusing on how good it's doing is an important distinction.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#33

Post by louthy »

Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

> But not having to spend hours here and there getting up to speed on some mundane but unfamiliar aspect of the implementation

Red flag. In other words you don’t understand the implementation well enough to know if the AI has done a good job. So the work you have committed may work or it may have subtle artefacts/bugs that you’re not aware of, because doing the job properly isn’t of interest to you.

This is ‘phoning it in’, not professional software engineering.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#34

Post by observationist »

Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it might take longer to do it like that than just by doing it right the first time.

I'm not a professional SWE, I just know enough to understand what the right processes look like, and vibe coding is awesome but chaotic and messy.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#36

Post by tehjoker »

This is what loom workers experienced after the introduction of the power loom, what factory workers experienced under Taylorism, what Amazon workers experience today in many cases. Just working at a pace that is unsustainable. This is why unions exist.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#37

Post by iLoveOncall »

happytoexplain wrote: post #7
JohnMakin wrote: post #3

There probably needs to be some settled discussion on what constitutes "vibe coding." I interpret this term as "I input text into $AI_MODEL, I look at the app to see my change was implemented. I iterate via text prompts alone, rarely or never looking at the code generated." vs. what this author is doing, which seems more like agent assisted coding than "vibe" coding. With regard to the subject matter, it of course ma…

Yes, I'm getting increasingly confused as to why some people are broadening the use of "vibe" coding to just mean any AI coding, no matter how thorough/thoughtful.

Words don't have meaning in 2025.

A negative but courteous remark is "slamming", a tweet is an "attack", etc.

So yeah I'm not surprised that people conflate any use of AI with vibe-coding.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#38

Post by johnsmith1840 »

LocalH wrote: post #5

Downtime for the conscious brain is paramount in life, as that allows the sub-conscious to absorb and act on new information. I have no science to point to, but I believe wholeheartedly that the conscious and sub-conscious minds cannot access the same neurons at the same time, it's like single-ported RAM. More than one thing in my life has been improved by taking a conscious break and letting the subconscious churn

I did alot of AI research around this (memory/finetuning)

Coolest bit of research I cam across was what the brain does during sleep. It basically reduces connection during this. But it also makes you hallucinate (sleep). This was found in researching fish and also training LLMs there's great value in "forgetting" for generalization.

After studying it in LLMs for awhile I also came to your same conclusion about my own brain. Problems are often so complex you must let your brain forget in order to handle the complexity in the same sense I also believe this is the path to AGI.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#39

Post by danielbln »

Jeff_Brown wrote: post #8
zephyrthenoble wrote: post #4

I've felt this too as a person with ADHD, specifically difficulty processing information. Caveat: I don't vibe code much, partially because of the mental fatigue symptoms. I've found that if an LLM writes too much code, even if I specified what it should be doing, I still have to do a lot of validation myself that would have been done while writing the code by hand. This turns the process from "generative" (haha) to…

Agreed. Some strategies that seem to help exist, though. Write extensive tests before writing the code. They serve as guidance. Commit tests separately from library code, so you can tell the AI didn't change the test. Specify the task with copious examples. Explain why yo so things, not just what to do.

Also: detailed planning phase, cross-LLM reviews via subagents, tests, functional QA etc. There at more (and complimentary) ways to ensure the code does what it should then to comb through ever line.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#40

Post by joseda-hg »

ares623 wrote: post #21
Avicebron wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Can you share why it was non-trivial? I'm curious about how folks are evaluating the quality of their solutions when the project space is non trivial and unfamiliar

A little bit of Dunning-Kruger maybe?

Non triviality is relative anyway, if anything admiting complexity beyond your skills on your expertise field reads like the inverse
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