The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok • Hacker News Board

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#341

Post by woeirua » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #218

tombert wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started. This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a…

This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though. I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.

No one cares about code quality. No one has ever cared about code quality. It’s only been tolerated in businesses because no one could objectively say that ignoring code quality can result in high velocity. With coding agents, velocity is now extremely high if you get humans out of the way.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#342

Post by tedmiston » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:49 PM UTC

datameta wrote: post #146

roughly wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can send a submarine down to crushing depths while violating all the traditional rules about "good" engineering, too.

Right, and often the tested depth isnt maximum. So you slowly acclimate to worse and worse code practices if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing.

sure, but undo isn't the only path to a newer better version of the code

it's easy to see how the product (claude code) could be abstracted to spec form and then a future version built from that without inheriting previous iterations tech debt

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#343

Post by pylua » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:50 PM UTC

babelfish wrote: post #70

spoiler wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward

I think someday it will be completely unreadable for humans. Ai will have its optimized form.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#344

Post by woeirua » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #331

cassianoleal wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though. I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.

The bet is that it will be trivial for them to invest in cleaning up Claude Code whenever they face real competitive pressure to do so. My best guess is that it's a bad bet - I don't think LLM agents have solved any of the fundamental problems that make it hard to convert janky bad code to polished good code. But Claude Code is capable in my experience of producing clean code when appropriately guided, so it's not th…

Have you tried just asking CC to make a codebase more elegant? It’s surprisingly effective up to a point. No reason to think that won’t work better down the road.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#345

Post by H8crilA » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

cassianoleal wrote: post #218

tombert wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started. This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a…

This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though. I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.

> crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder

Why not? It is subject to the same pressures, in fact it is subject to more time pressure than most corp code out there. Also, it's the model that's doing the coding, not the frontend tool.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#346

Post by tedmiston » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:51 PM UTC

conductr wrote: post #112

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.

It kind of reminds me of grammar police type personalities. They are so hung up on the fact it reads “ugly” they can’t see the message; this code powers a rapidly growing $400B company. They admit refactoring is easy, but fail to realize they probably know that too and it’s just not a priority yet.

> And as for the critics, tell me I don't get it

> Everybody can tell you how to do it, they never did it

> —jay-z

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#347

Post by esafak » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:52 PM UTC

woeirua wrote: post #339

esafak wrote: post #304

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, they are not. People just want the model. Let people bring their own harness to their Anthropic subscription and see who's still using CC.

You can literally do this right now if you want. The masses have spoken, they want CC.

You literally can't use your Anthropic subscription that you paid for with any agent other than CC; you have to pay by the token. We've talked about this a lot; check the history.

Saying "you can use any other agent, just pay 20x more through the API!" does not demonstrate a realistic choice.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#348

Post by ath3nd » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

codybontecou wrote: post #61

somewhatjustin wrote: post #46

This reminds me of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. Disruption happens when firms are disincentivized to switch to the new thing or address the new customer because the current state of it is bad, the margins are low. Intel missed out on mobile because their existing business was so excellent and making phone chips seemed beneath them. The funny thing is that these firms are being completely rational. Why…

Even if AI progress plateaus, I'm confident we would build tooling and patterns around the current models that would surpass hand crafted equivalents.

[dead]

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#349

Post by empath75 » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:53 PM UTC

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #256

It’s so strange. I think there’s a few different groups: - Shills or people with a financial incentive - Software devs that either never really liked the craft to begin with or who have become jaded over time and are kind of sick of it. - New people that are actually experiencing real, maybe over-excitement about being able to build stuff for the first time. Forgetting the first group as that one is obvious. I’ve enc…

> I’ve encountered a heap of group 2. They’re the ones sick of learning new things, for whatever reason.

I say this kindly, but are you sure that _you_ aren't the one in group 2, and _they_ aren't the ones learning new things?

A lot of the discourse around ai coding reminds me of when I went to work for a 90s tech company around 2010 and all the linux guys _absolutely refused_ to learn devops or cloud stuff. It sucks when a lifetime of learned skills becomes devalued over night.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#350

Post by physicles » Mon, Apr 06, 2026, 9:55 PM UTC

Fr0styMatt88 wrote: post #256

It’s so strange. I think there’s a few different groups: - Shills or people with a financial incentive - Software devs that either never really liked the craft to begin with or who have become jaded over time and are kind of sick of it. - New people that are actually experiencing real, maybe over-excitement about being able to build stuff for the first time. Forgetting the first group as that one is obvious. I’ve enc…

You’re missing the group of high performers who love coding, who just want to bring more stuff in the world than their limited human brains have the energy or time to build.

I love coding. I taught myself from a book (no internet yet) when I was 10, and haven’t stopped for 30 years. Turned down becoming a manager several times. I loved it so much that I went through an existential crisis in February as I had to let go of that part of my identity. I seriously thought about quitting.

But for years, it has been so frustrating that the time it took me to imagine roughly how to build something (10-30 minutes depending on complexity) was always dwarfed by the amount of time it took to grind it out (days or sometimes weeks). That’s no longer true, and that’s incredibly freeing.

So the game now is to learn to use this stuff in a way that I enjoy, while going faster and maintaining quality where it matters. There are some gray beards out there who I trust who say it’s possible, so I’m gonna try.