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If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

stephenramsay.net

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Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#371

Post by epsteingpt »

"If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in assembly?"

Many people I've seen have taken existing software and 'ported' it to more performant languages like C, Rust, etc.

LLMs are extremely efficient and good at translation.

The biggest question is maintainability and legibility. If you want it for your own proprietary software, this can (and probably is, generally) a good pattern if you can get the LLM to nail language specific challenges (e.g. memory allocation in C)

However, fewer people can write C code generally, and even fewer can use it to build things like UI's. So you're by definition moving the software away from a collaborative mechanism.

The abstraction layers were built for human maintenance. LLMs don't need that.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#372

Post by AceJohnny2 »

godelski wrote: post #350
omnicognate wrote: post #312

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Depends what you mean by "old". If you mean elderly then obviously you're not. If you mean "past it" then it might reassure you to know the average expecting mother is in her 30s now (in the UK). Even if you just mean "grown up", recent research [1] on brain development identifies adolescence as typically extending into the early thirties, with (brain) adulthood running from there to the mid sixties before even then…

FWIW I doubt I'd consider you old were I to know your actual age. I still think I'm quite young

"inside every old person there is a young one wondering what happened."

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#373

Post by freeopinion »

mikewarot wrote: post #302
godelski wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hard to say but to back his claim that he was programming since the 90's his CV shows he was working on stuff that's clearly more than your basic undergraduate skill level since the early 2000's. I'd be willing to bet he has more years under his belt than most HN users. I mean I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's, and this guy has been programming most my life. Though that doesn't explicitly imply experience, or m…

>I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's I'm 62, and I'm not old yet, you're just a kid. ;-) Seriously, there are some folks here who started on punch cards and/or paper tape in the 1960s.

30 years ago my coworkers called me Grandpa, so I get it both ways.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#374

Post by gerdesj »

antisthenes wrote: post #241
SoftTalker wrote: post #137

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait until you learn that the people on the other side of your ticket updates are also using LLMs to respond. It's LLMs talking to LLMs now.

Wait until you learn that most people's writing skills are that of below LLMs, so it's an actual tangible improvement (as long as you review the output for details not being missed, of course)

Hoisted by your own petard ("me old fruit"):

"Wait until you learn that most people's writing skills are that of below LLMs"

... went askew at "that of below LLMs".

I'm an arse: soz!

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#375

Post by threethirtytwo »

> Vibe coding actually works. It creates robust, complex systems that work. You can tell yourself (as I did) that it can’t possibly do that, but you are wrong. You can then tell yourself (as I did) that it’s good as a kind of alternative search engine for coding problems, but not much else. You are also wrong about that. Because when you start giving it little programming problems that you can’t be arsed to work out yourself (as I did), you discover (as I did) that it’s awfully good at those. And then one day you muse out loud (as I did) to an AI model something like, “I have an idea for a program…” And you are astounded. If you aren’t astounded, you either haven’t actually done it or you are at some stage of grief prior to acceptance. Perfect? Hardly. But then neither are human coders. The future? I think the questions answers itself.

Tons of people make the above claim and tons of other people make the exact opposite claim that it’s just a search engine and it can’t actually code. I’m utterly shocked at how two people can look at ground truth reality and derive two different factual conclusions. Make no doubt one of these two people is utterly wrong.

The only thing I can conclude is many people are either in denial or outdated. A year ago none of what this man said was true.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#376

Post by threethirtytwo »

mavamaarten wrote: post #40
gitremote wrote: post #33

Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive. In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, th…

Yup. I would never be able to give my Jira tickets to an LLM because they're too damn vague or incomplete. Getting the requirements first needs 4 rounds of lobbying with all stakeholders.

Who says an LLM can’t be taught or given a system prompt that enables them to do this?

Agentic AI can now do 20 rounds of lobbying with all stake holders as long as it’s over something like slack.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#380

Post by farhanhubble »

> all the way to the borderlands of active anxiety—not quite understanding what Claude just wrote.

This is a big issue, personally. I write Python and bash these days and I love that we're not bottlenecked by IDE-based autocomplete anymore, especially for dynamic languages and a huge amount of fixing and incremental feature work can be done in minutes instead of days thanks to AI being able to spot patterns. Simultaneously I'm frustrated when these agents fail to deliver small changes and I have to jump in and change something I don't have a good mental model of or, worse still, something that's all Greek to me, like Javascript.

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