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The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#311

Post by tombert »

xienze wrote: post #301
tombert wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We're already merging code that has generated bugs from the slot machine. People aren't actually reading through 10,000 line pull requests most of the time, and people aren't really reviewing every line of code. Given that, we should instead tune the prompts well enough to not leave things to chance. Write automated tests to make sure that inputs and outputs are ok, write your specs so specifically that there's no ro…

> Write automated tests to make sure that inputs and outputs are ok Write them by hand or generate them and check them in? You can’t escape the non-determinism inherent in LLMs. Eventually something has to be locked in place, be it the application code or the test code. So you can’t just have the LLM generate tests from a spec dynamically either. > write your specs so specifically that there's no room for ambiguity U…

> Write them by hand or generate them and check them in?

Yes, written by hand. I think that ultimately you should know what valid inputs and outputs are and as such the tests should be written by a human in accordance with the spec.

> Less flawed than checking in vibe-coded feature changes, but still flawed.

This is what I'm trying to get at. I agree it's not perfect, but I'm arguing it's less evil than what is currently happening.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#312

Post by Forgeties79 »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #181
shimman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.

your prediction is going to be wrong, even with all those caveats

Investors are getting antsy and are going to start demanding AI companies start producing real returns.

Anthropic et al. better figure it out sooner rather than later because this game they’re all playing where they want all of us to use basically beta-release tools (very generous in some cases) to discover the “real value” of these tools while they attempt to reduce their burn with unsustainable subscription prices can’t go on forever.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#313

Post by CyberDildonics »

semicolon_storm wrote: post #14

It’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.

There is already lots of popular software that is violates any concept of good software. Facebook messenger, instagram, twitter, minecraft, balena etcher, the original ethereum wallet, almost anything that uses electron...

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#314

Post by reese_john »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #78
semicolon_storm wrote: post #14

It’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.

Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have…

If you are a company founder, what scenario would you rather find yourself in?

a) a pristine, good codebase that follows the best coding practices, but it is built on top of bad specs, wrong data/domain model

b) a bad codebase but it correctly models and nails the domain model for your business case

Real life example, a fintech with:

a) a great codebase but stuck with a single-entry ledger

b) a bad codebase that perfectly implements a double-entry ledger

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#315

Post by monocasa »

f-serif wrote: post #246
dd8601fn wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Meta has four different implementations of the same page to create a “page” for your business… which is required to be able to advertise on any of their services. Each one is broken, doesn’t have working error handling, and prevents you from giving them money. They all exist to insert the same record somewhere. Lost revenue, and they seem to have no idea. Amazons flagship ios app has had at least three highly visible…

It's just lazy engineering. They get assigned a task, they must implement it or fix it to keep their job. Proper implantation takes more knowledge, more research and more brain pressure. AI could play a big rule here. Husky (git hook) but AI. It will score lazy engineering. You lazy implement enough times, you loose your job.

I mean, the core issue here is that proper engineering just isn't valued.

Social capital just isn't given out to people that fix things in a lot of these companies, but instead those who ship a 1.0a.

On the management/product side, the inevitable issues are problem for another quarter. On the engineering side, it's a problem for the poor shmucks who didn't get to jump to the next big thing.

Neither of those groups instructionally care about the mess they leave in their wake, and such guardrails they'd perceive as antithetical to releasing the next broken but new, fancy feature.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#316

Post by a96 »

strulovich wrote: post #282
bcrosby95 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have…

And it’s perfectly okay to fix and improve the code later. Many super talented developers I know will say “Make it work, then make it good”. I think it’s okay to do this on a bigger scale than just the commit cycle.

https://wiki.c2.com/?MakeItWorkMakeItRightMakeItFast

Make it work, make it work right, make it work fast. In that order.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#317

Post by bluefirebrand »

kennywinker wrote: post #298
AstroBen wrote: post #190

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The difference here is that everyone else in this product category are also sprinting full steam ahead trying to get as many users as they can If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind. Speed of implementation short term might beat out long-term maintenance and iteration they'd get from quality code They're just taking on massive tech debt

> If they DIDN'T heavily vibe-code it they might fall behind For you and I, sure - sprint as fast as we can using whatever means we can find. But when you have infinite money, hiring a solid team of traditional/acoustic/human devs is a negligible cost in money and time. Especially if you give those devs enough agency that they can build on the product in interesting and novel ways that the ai isn’t going to suggest.…

> Everything is becoming slop now, and it almost always shows. I get why when you’re resource constrained. I don’t get why when you’re not

Every dollar spent is a dollar that shareholders can't have and executives can't hope for in their bonuses

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#318

Post by 59nadir »

freediddy wrote: post #83
saulpw wrote: post #8

> 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,…

That's an interesting list. I think that the humans that will make the most progress in the next few years are the ones that push themselves up to the highest level of that list. Right now is a period of intense disruption and there are many coders that don't like the idea that their way of life is dead. There are still blacksmiths around today but for the most part it's made by factories and cheap 3rd world labor. I…

> I think the same is currently happening with coding, except it will allow single builders and designers to do the same thing as an entire team 5 years ago.

This part of your post I think signals that you are either very new or haven't been paying attention; single developers were outperforming entire teams on the regular long before LLMs were a thing in software development, and they still are. This isn't because they're geniuses, but rather because you don't get any meaningful speedup out of adding team members.

I've always personally thought there is a sweet spot at about 3 programmers where you still might see development velocity increase, but that's probably wrong and I just prefer it to not feel too lonely.

In any case teams are not there to speed anything up, and anyone who thinks they are is a moron. Many, many people in management are morons.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#319

Post by fragmede »

tovej wrote: post #239
eloisant wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The very definition of "vibe coding" is using AI to write software and not even look at the code it produces.

People use two definitions. There's this definition of LLM generation + "no thorough review or testing" And there's the more normative one: just LLM generation.[1][2][3] "Not even looking at it" is very difficult as part of a definition. What if you look at it once? Or just glance at it? Is it now no longer vibe coding? What if I read a diff every ten commits? Or look at the code when something breaks? At which point…

If you do not know the code at all, and are going off of "vibes", it's vibecoding. If you can get a deep sense of what is going on in the code based off of looking at a diff every ten commits, then that's not vibe coding (I, myself, are unable to get a sense from that little of a look).

If you actually look at the code and understand it and you'd stand by it, then it's not vibecode. If you had an LLM shit it out in 20 minutes and you don't really know what going on, it's vibecode. Which, to me, is not derogatory. I have a bunch of stuff I've vibecoded and a bunch of stuff that I've actually read the code and fixed it, either by hand or with LLM assistance. And ofc, all the code that was written by me prior to ChatGPT's launch.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#320

Post by fragmede »

edschofield wrote: post #206
nkohari wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't disagree with your general premise that eventually it'll just be rewritten, but I have to push back on the idea that Anthropic will be acquired. Their most recent valuation was $380B, and even if they wanted to be acquired (which I doubt) essentially no company has the necessary capital.

Any company worth more could (in principle) acquire it with a share swap [1]. Even a smaller company could buy it with an LBO [2]. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stock_swap [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leveraged_buyout

Or debt financed, or any other financal black magic schemes.
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