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Breaking the spell of vibe coding

fast.ai

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Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#321

Post by anthonypasq96 »

wiseowise wrote: post #197
mgraczyk wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think so. That's a good point but the capability has been outpacing people's ability to use it for a while and that will continue. Put another way, the ability to use AI became an important factor in overall software engineering ability this year, and as the year goes on the gap between the best and worst users or AI will widen faster because the models will outpace the harnesses

> Put another way, the ability to use AI became an important factor in overall software engineering ability this year, and as the year goes on the gap between the best and worst users or AI will widen faster because the models will outpace the harnesses Is it, lol? Know any case where those “the best users of AI” get salary bumps or promotions? Outside of switching to the dedicated AI role that is? So far I see clown…

have fun keeping a job doing 1/3 the work of people getting paid the same as you :)

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#322

Post by anthonypasq96 »

rsynnott wrote: post #226
abcde666777 wrote: post #41

It's astonishing to me that real software developers have considered it a good idea to generate code... and not even look at the code . I would have thought sanity checking the output to be the most elementary next step.

Those people aren't real software developers.

is your job to write code or develop software that works?

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#323

Post by buzzerbetrayed »

chrisjj wrote: post #296
jt2190 wrote: post #290

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How do you not see the difference between a machine that will hallucinate something random if it doesn’t know the answer vs a human... Your claim here is that humans can't hallucinate something random. Clearly they can and do. > ... that will logic through things and find the correct answer. But humans do not find the correct answer 100% of the time. The way that we address human fallibility is to create a system t…

> The way that we address human fallibility is to create a system that does not accept the input of a single human as "truth". I think you just rejected all user requirement and design specs.

Not sure how things work at your company, but I’ve never seen a design spec that doesn’t have input from many humans on some form or another

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#324

Post by eddythompson80 »

anthonypasq96 wrote: post #320
eddythompson80 wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s the comical understanding being pushed by management in software companies yes. The people who never actually use the tools themselves, but the concept of it. It’s the same AGI nonesense, but dumped down to something they think they can control.

why does every AI skeptic assume that everyone is lying to them. theres millions of developers using AI to be more productive and you just keep plugging your ears and screaming, claiming its only dumb managers, meanwhile Linus Torvalds is vibe coding stuff.

Who said anything about that? The argument was "if you're not using AI RIGHT NOW, you will fall behind forever"

This is the nonsense management and CTOs are pushing. Use it now if you want, I do. Wait for things to cool down if you want. You'll be fine either way. The comical view that it'll be a "winner takes all" subset of developers who some how would have figured out secret AI techniques that make them 10Kx more productive and every other developer will be SOL is laughable.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#325

Post by linsomniac »

written-beyond wrote: post #303
linsomniac wrote: post #299

>Should you gamble your career? [...] Consider the case where [you let your skills stagnate and AI falls flat]. Sure. But the converse is true as well: consider the case where you don't learn the AI tooling and AI does improve apace. That is also gambling your career. Are you ready for pointed questions being asked about why you spent 2 days working on something that AI can do in 15 minutes, so be prepared with some…

"Learn AI tooling" What is there to learn, honestly? People act like it's learning to write a Linux driver. The maximum knowledge you need how to write a plan or text file. Maybe throw in a "Plz no mistakes" There's no specific model, a better one comes out every month, everything is stochastic.

>What is there to learn, honestly?

With all due respect, that answer shows that you don't know enough about agentic coding to form an opinion on this.

Things to learn:

    - What agent are you going to use?
    - What skills are you going to use?
    - What MCPs are you going to use?
    - What artifacts are you going to provide beyond the prompt?
    - How are you going to structure it so the tooling can succeed without human interaction?
    - Are you going to use agent orchestration and if so which?
    - Are you going to have it "ultrathink" or not?
    - Are you going to use a PRD or a checklist or the toolings own planning?
    - Which model or combination of models are you going to use today?  (Yes, that changes)
    - Do you have the basic English (or whatever) skills to communicate with the model, or do you need to develop them?   (I'm seeing some correlations between people with poor communication skills and those struggling with AI)
Those are a few off the top of my head. "Plz no mistakes" is not even a thing.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#326

Post by xnx »

mprast wrote: post #53
daxfohl wrote: post #7

I think it all boils down to, which is higher risk, using AI too much, or using AI too little? Right now I see the former as being hugely risky. Hallucinated bugs, coaxed into dead-end architectures, security concerns, not being familiar with the code when a bug shows up in production, less sense of ownership, less hands-on learning, etc. This is true both at the personal level and at the business level. (And astound…

It's very interesting to me how many people presume that if you don't learn how to vibecode now you'll never ever be able to catch up. If the models are constantly getting better, won't these tools be easier to use a year from now? Will model improvements not obviate all the byzantine prompting strategies we have to use today?

There is a huge amount of superstition around prompting. I've copied and pasted elaborate paragraph long results and then gotten. Same or better results with only a few words.

People write long prompts primarily to convince themselves that they're casting some advanced spell. As long as the system prompt is good you should start very simply and only expand if results are unsatisfactory.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#328

Post by wiseowise »

anthonypasq96 wrote: post #321
wiseowise wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Put another way, the ability to use AI became an important factor in overall software engineering ability this year, and as the year goes on the gap between the best and worst users or AI will widen faster because the models will outpace the harnesses Is it, lol? Know any case where those “the best users of AI” get salary bumps or promotions? Outside of switching to the dedicated AI role that is? So far I see clown…

have fun keeping a job doing 1/3 the work of people getting paid the same as you :)

I’m from Europe, so I’ll do just that. Thankfully labor laws are strong enough here to withstand this absurdity.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#329

Post by tomjen3 »

ryan_n wrote: post #244
rafaelmn wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Vibe coding would be catastrophic here. Not because the AI can't write the code - it usually can - but because the failure mode is invisible. A hallucinated edge case in a tax calculation doesn't throw an error. It just produces a slightly wrong number that gets posted to a real accounting platform and nobody notices until the accountant does their review. How is that different from handwritten code ? Sounds like s…

It’s shocking to me that people even ask this type of question. How do you not see the difference between a machine that will hallucinate something random if it doesn’t know the answer vs a human that will logic through things and find the correct answer.

Your comment is shocking to me. AI coding works. I have seen it with my own eyes last week and today.

I can therefore only assume that you have not coded with the latest models. If you experiences are with GPT 4o or earlier all you have only used the mini or light models, then I can totally understand where you’re coming from. Those models can do a lot, but they aren’t good enough to run on their own.

The latest models absolutely are I have seen it with my own eyes. Ai moves fast.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#330

Post by daveguy »

anthonypasq96 wrote: post #316
vidarh wrote: post #295

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If the failure mode is invisible, that is a huge risk with human developers too. Where vibecoding is a risk, it generally is a risk because it exposes a systemic risk that was always there but has so far been successfully hidden, and reveals failing risk management.

i agree, and its strange that this failure mode continually gets lumped onto AI. The whole point of longer term software engineering was to make it so that the context within a particular persons head should not impact the ability of a new employee to contribute to a codebase. turns out everything we do to make sure that is the case for a human also works for an agent. As far as i can tell, the only reason AI agents…

The failure mode is getting lumped into AI because AI is a lot more likely to fail.

We've done this with Neural Networks v1, Expert Systems, Neural Networks v2, SVM, etc, etc. only a matter of time before we figured it out with deep neural networks. Clearly getting closer with every cycle, but no telling how many cycles we have left because there is no sound theoretical framework.

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