This is the guy that created bittorrent, btw. I know that was a long time ago, but he's not just some random blogger.
Glad to see Bram getting into things lately. Second appearance on HN
The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#32AI is just another layer of abstraction. I'm sure the assembly language folks were grumbling about functions as being too abstracted at one point
> AI is just another layer of abstraction.
A fundamentally unreliable one: even an AI system that is entirely correctly implemented as far as any human can see can yield wrong answers and nobody can tell why.
That’s not entirely the fault of the technology, as natural language just doesn’t make for reliable specs, especially in inexperienced hands, so in a sense we finally got the natural-language that some among our ancestors dreamed of and it turned out to be as unreliable as some others of our ancestors said all along.
It partly is the fault of the technology, however, because while you can level all the same complaints against a human programmer, a (motivated) human will generally be much better at learning from their mistakes than the current generation of LLM-based systems.
(This even if we ignore other issues, such as the fact that it leaves everybody entirely reliant on the continued support and willingness to transact of a handful of vendors in a market with a very high barrier to entry.)
Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#33It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
I don't think anyone who used Claude code on the terminal had anything good to say about it. It was people using it through vs code that had a good time.
Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#34It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI. Obviously it does some fairly smart stuff under the hood, but it's not exactly comparable to a large software project. But to your point, that doesn't mean you can't vibe code some poorly built product and sell it. But people have always been able to sell poorly built software projects. They can just do it a bit quicker now.
>Hardly. Claude Code is basically just a wrapper around an LLM with a CLI.
I don't know why people keep acting like harnesses are all the same but we know they aren't because people have swapped them out with the same models and receive vastly different results in code quality and token use.
Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#35AI is just another layer of abstraction. I'm sure the assembly language folks were grumbling about functions as being too abstracted at one point
AI is non-deterministic. Can it still be considered an abstraction over a deterministic layer?
It can loop and probabilistically converge to a set of standards verified against a standard set of eval inputs
Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#36Earlier quoted context omitted.
I totally see what you're saying, but to me this feels different. Compilation is a fairly mechanical and well understood process. The large language models aren't just compiling English to assembler via your chosen language, they try and guess what you want, they add extra bits you didn't ask for, they're doing some of your solution thinking for you. That feels like more than just abstraction to me.
I think it's still abstraction by definition, but you're right in that it's a much larger single leap than in the past.
> it's still abstraction by definition
I dislike arguing semantics but I bet it's not an abstraction by most engineers' definition of the word.
Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#37> That wouldn’t even be a big violation of the vibe coding concept. You’re reading the innards a little but you’re only giving high-level, conceptual, abstract ideas about how problems should be solved. The machine is doing the vast majority, if not literally all, of the actual writing. Claude Code is being produced at AI Level 7 (Human specced, bots coded), whereas the author is arguing that AI Level 6 (Bots coded,…
I'm at a 5, and only because I've implemented a lot of guardrails, am using a typed functional language with no nulls, TDD red/green, and a good amount of time spent spec'ing. No way I'd be comfortable enough this high with a dynamic language.
I could probably get to a 7 with some additional tooling and a second max 20 account, but I care too much about the product I'm building right now. Maybe for something I cared less about.
IMO if you're going 7+, you might as well just pick a statically typed and very safe (small surface area) language anyways, since you won't be coding yourself.
Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#38This is the guy that created bittorrent, btw. I know that was a long time ago, but he's not just some random blogger.
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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#39It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work. If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true
Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it
Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
#40This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases and redis cache layer... and won't scale beyond 50k users". As if 97% of web apps aren't just basic CRUD with some integration to another system if you are lucky. 99% of companies won't even have 50k users.
Well, users or _paying_ users?
It's an important distinction