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The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

bramcohen.com

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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#381

Post by 59nadir »

greedo wrote: post #376
59nadir wrote: post #365

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 usag…

Maybe I misunderstood the purpose of your post...? It seemed to me like you were arguing "Hey, what about me? Why shouldn't I vibecode since it enables me to do things that I couldn't before?" and that's what I wrote my comment addressing.

I completely agree that people are going to be forced into using things that basically do not really work for anything non-trivial without massive handholding, and they will be forced to use those things by people who are out of touch and are mostly setting up to eventually get rid of as many people as they possibly can.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#382

Post by Fr0styMatt88 »

mattmanser wrote: post #360
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 think it's easy to dismiss that group, but the truth is there was a lot of flux in our industry in the last decade before AI, and I would say almost none of it was beneficial in any way whatsoever. If I had more time I could write an essay arguing that the 2010s in software development was the rise of the complexi…

That in itself feels like second-system syndrome but instead of playing out over a single software project it’s the large-scale version playing out over the entire industry.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#383

Post by hiq »

woeirua wrote: post #341
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.

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.

Nobody cares about costs until they pay them themselves.

Regarding code quality and tech debt, it's sensible not to care if it doesn't lead to anything observable. Do you really care of some "bad" code somewhere that hasn't changed for 5 years but keeps working fine, and has no new requirements?

On the other hand, if you work on an active codebase where fixing one bug inevitably leads to another, maybe it's worth asking whether the code quality is simply too low to deliver on the product expectations.

It's not even obvious to me in which direction coding agents move the needle. Do you want higher quality, at least at a higher (design) level, when you heavily use agents, so that you know know the mess will at least compartmentalized, and easier to deal with later if needed? Or do you just assume the agent will always do the work and you won't need to dig into the code yourself? So far I've mostly done the former, but I understand that for some projects, the latter can make sense.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#384

Post by mhh__ »

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.

Because or in spite of? Claude code works because of Claude being good and network effects. Agentic coding tools are maybe the dumbest code ever for the level of popularity they have.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#385

Post by a96 »

mbreese wrote: post #180
toomuchtodo wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Betamax was arguably better. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Videotape_format_war

Arguably better quality, but at the cost of being shorter. In the great trade off of time, size, and quality, I think VHS chose a better combination.

Importantly, it was so short that it was inadequate. Go beats no go every time.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#386

Post by SpicyLemonZest »

woeirua wrote: post #344
SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Down the road AI is smarter than all of us. Today (including one time literally today), my experience is that it’s occasionally helpful at cleaning up its own mess but often tries to change behavior in a way that’s unacceptable for a production project.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#387

Post by Eufrat »

H8crilA wrote: post #345
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.

> 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.

I thought the sales pitch of all of this is that the AI was supposed to relieve people from having to do a bunch of annoying bootstrap coding and to do it in a way that we could extended easily.

I have a subscription to Claude Code and despite my skepticism, it has been pretty good at just getting a goofy PoC thing going. When I look at the code, it’s usually insane unless the prompt was so narrow and specific like about writing a function that does one thing and only one thing.

Outside of small, personal projects, I am still really uncomfortable at having agents run wild. I see the result, and then I spend a bunch of time having to gain the context of what is going on, especially if I ask it to implement features in spaces I have general knowledge, but not expertise. So, the problem remains the same. These things still need handholding by people who understand the domain, but having people become glorified PR reviewers is not an acceptable path forward.

Arguing that there is lots of bad production code kinda avoids the actual issue that is going on here. Yes, a lot of sloppy code can and has been written by people. I’ve seen it myself, but it feels like the actual thing is that, we are now enabling that at scale and calling it “abundance” when instead we are really generating an abundance of completely avoidable security holes and logic errors.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#388

Post by tombert »

_moof wrote: post #163
hungryhobbit wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Given his background, you'd think he'd know that he should provide some evidence for his position (instead of making this completely unsupported rant).

It's a blog post, not an academic paper. Do you cite every source when you're conversing with colleagues?

I wasn't too upset with Bram's article, but I do think people should be citing specific claims, even in blog posts.

If you make an assertion in a blog post, I have no idea if you got the information from a respected scientific journal, or Reddit, or InfoWars, or the writing of a bathroom stall. It's hard to know if the assertion is grounded in reality or just something you made up.

The response I get to this is universally "LOL just look it up yourself man!", but that feels like a cop out. When I write blog posts, I put inline links all over the place to try and justify my assertions to show where I'm getting this information. If I sourced some bad information from a bad source, it's clear to know where I got it from and you can either notify me or disregard the assertion.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#389

Post by bearjaws »

mattmanser wrote: post #162
bearjaws wrote: post #23

This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases and redis cache layer... and won't scale beyond 50k users". As if 97% of web apps aren't just basic CRUD with some integration to another system if you are lucky. 99% of companies won't even have 50k users.

That's not actually true. When you move to the enterprise layer, suddenly you get the opposite problem, you have a low amount of "users" but you often need a load of CPU intensive or DB intensive processing to happen quickly. One company I worked for had their system built by, ummmm, not the greatest engineers and were literally running out of time in the day to run their program. Every client was scheduled over 24 h…

Without seeing more this seems like it could be solved by not recomputing the entire history to add on data. Depends what kind of math you are doing however.

Some sort of check point system could likely save significant IO.

What am I missing that requires you to recompute all data every day?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#390

Post by neonstatic »

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.

My understanding of OP was not a claim that "vibe coding doesn't work", but that the way Anthropic does it doesn't work. He seems to be specifically criticizing the "hands off the actual code, human" approach and advocating for keeping the human in the loop.
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