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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

#371

Post by whatisthiseven »

tombert wrote: post #88
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.

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…

> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code

Somehow, everyone has forgotten the terrible code quality that existed prior to 2020.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA

Like, come on. Software has been shit for decades. AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#372

Post by 0xDEAFBEAD »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #371
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…

> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code Somehow, everyone has forgotten the terrible code quality that existed prior to 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA Like, come on. Software has been shit for decades. AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.

>AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.

I have noticed a spike in web apps exhibiting random failures and glitchy behavior over the past few months.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#373

Post by kfarr »

saulpw wrote: post #289
kfarr wrote: post #227

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To clarify, does this mean that Anthropic employees don't understand Claude Code's code since it's level 7? I've got to believe they have staff capable of understanding the output and they would spend at least some time reviewing code for a product like this?

Yes, I believe the creator has outright stated that they just YOLO vibe and don't even look at the code.

Wow ok mind blown

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#374

Post by roughly »

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.

> if the effort needed to undo it is the same as doing.

That’s the rub, yes - as long as your failures are nice and gradual and proportional to the changes you’re making, everything’s fine.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#375

Post by jfkddkdjdj »

whatisthiseven wrote: post #371
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…

> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code Somehow, everyone has forgotten the terrible code quality that existed prior to 2020. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA Like, come on. Software has been shit for decades. AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.

[dead]

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#376

Post by greedo »

59nadir wrote: post #365
greedo wrote: post #160

I've been a skeptic about LLMs in general since I first heard of them. And I'm a sysadmin type, more comfortable with python scripts than writing "real" software. No formal education in coding at all other than taking Harvard's free online python course a few years ago. So I set out to build an app with CC just to see what it's like. I currently use Copilot (copilot.money) to track my expenditures, but I've become en…

Honestly, I think it's great that you could get the thing you wanted done. Consider this, though: Your anecdote has nothing to do with software engineering (or an engineering mindset). No measurements were done, no technical aspects were taken into consideration (you readily admit that you lack the knowledge to do that), you're not expecting to maintain it or seemingly to further develop it much. The above situation…

I get what you're saying, but imagine a CTO/CIO who's never been very technical. The world is full of them. They vibe up an app, and think it's easy. They don't have the developer experience to know the things they're missing.

While I downplayed my job experience, I'm very in touch with developers and their workflows; the challenges they face. And I'm scared because they won't be making these decisions about LLM usage; their bosses, the guy who vibe coded a dumb app over the weekend will.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#377

Post by 59nadir »

simonw wrote: post #354
59nadir wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you not think that ~400k lines of code for something as trivial as Claude Code is a great indication that there is an immense amount of bloat and stacking of overwrought, poor "choices" by LLMs in there? Do you not encounter this when using LLMs for programming yourself? I routinely write my own solutions in parallel to LLM-implemented features from varying degrees of thorough specs and the bloat has never been le…

> Do you not think that ~400k lines of code for something as trivial as Claude Code is a great indication that there is an immense amount of bloat and stacking of overwrought, poor "choices" by LLMs in there? I certainly wouldn't call Claude Code "trivial" - it's by far the most sophisticated TUI app I've ever interacted with. I can drag images onto it, it runs multiple sub-agents all updating their status rows at th…

> I certainly wouldn't call Claude Code "trivial" - it's by far the most sophisticated TUI app I've ever interacted with.

I'll be honest, I think we just come to this from very different perspectives in that case. Agents are trivial, and I haven't seen anything in Claude Code that indicated to me that it was solving any hard problems, and certainly not solving problems in a particularly good way.

I create custom 3D engines from scratch for work and I honestly think those are pretty simple and straight forward; it's certainly not complicated and it's a lot simpler than people make it out to be... But if Claude Code is "not trivial", and even "sophisticated" I don't even know what to classify 3D engines as.

This is not some "Everything that's not what I do is probably super simple" rant, by the way. I've worked with distributed systems, web backend & frontend and more, and there are many non-trivial things in those sub-industries. I'm also aware of this bias towards thinking what other people do is trivial. The Claude Code TUI (and what it does as an agent) is not such a thing.

> So no, I can't do better that an LLM when I'm writing code by hand.

Again, I just think we come at this from very different positions in software development.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#378

Post by 6thbit »

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 works, it is popular, sure. Claude's code may be barely old enough to have suffered through its true long-term maintainability problems. They probably also haven't had a lot of rotation/attrition in their staff.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#379

Post by blindriver »

physicles wrote: post #350
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 g…

Yes I'm exactly like you as well. I've been coding for 30+ years, I still love coding and system building etc, but sometimes the level of frustration to find the information and then get something working is simply too high.

Over a weekend, I used ChatGPT to set up Prometheus and Grafana and added node exporters to everything I could think of. I even told ChatGPT to create NOC-style dashboards for me, given the metrics I gave it. This is something that would have painstakingly take several weeks if not more to figure out, and it's something I've been wanting to do but the cognitive load and anticipatory frustration was too high for me to start. I love how it enables me to just do things.

My next step is to integrate some programs that I wrote that I still use every day to collect data and then show it on the dashboards as well.

On a side note, I don't know why Grafana hasn't more deeply integrated with AI. Having to sift through all the ridiculous metrics that different node exporters advertise with no hint of naming convention makes using Grafana so much harder. I cut and pasted all the metrics and dumped it into ChatGPT and told it to make the panels I wanted (ex. "Give me a dashboard that shows the status of all my servers" and it's able to pick and choose the correct metrics across my Windows server, Macbooks and studio, my Linux machines, etc), but Grafana should have this integrated themselves directly into themselves.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#380

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

physicles wrote: post #350
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 g…

Good point and I’m exactly at the same point as you with this. Working on letting go of the idea (and to be honest just the habit) that it’s somehow ‘cheating’ at the moment.
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