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Perverse incentives of vibe coding

fredbenenson.medium.com

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Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#41

Post by Loughla »

mnky9800n wrote: post #6
comex wrote: post #2

> There was no standardization of parts in the probe. Two widgets intended to do almost the same job could be subtly different or wildly different. Braces and mountings seemed hand carved. The probe was as much a sculpture as a machine. > Blaine read that, shook his head, and called Sally. Presently she joined him in his cabin. > “Yes, I wrote that," she said. "It seems to be true. Every nut and bolt in that probe wa…

That book is very much fun and also I never understood why Larry Niven is so obsessed with techno feudalism and gender roles. I think this is my favourite book but I think his best book is maybe Ringworld.

Ringworld is a great book. The later books have great concepts, but could do without so much. . . rishing. Niven plainly inserted his furry porn fetish into those books, for reasons unclear to any human alive.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#42

Post by squeaky-clean »

dingnuts wrote: post #17
vanschelven wrote: post #14

> Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine respon…

it's not like gambling, it is gambling. you exchange dollars for chips (tokens -- some casinos even call the chips tokens) and insert it into the machine in exchange for the chance of a prize. if it doesn't work the first time you pull the lever, it might the second time, and it might not. Either way, the house wins. It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor, the only difference from a sl…

So how exactly does that work for the $25/mo flat fee that I pay OpenAI for chatgpt. They want me to keep getting the wrong output and burning money on their backend without any additional payment from me?

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#44

Post by mystified5016 »

dingnuts wrote: post #17
vanschelven wrote: post #14

> Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine respon…

it's not like gambling, it is gambling. you exchange dollars for chips (tokens -- some casinos even call the chips tokens) and insert it into the machine in exchange for the chance of a prize. if it doesn't work the first time you pull the lever, it might the second time, and it might not. Either way, the house wins. It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor, the only difference from a sl…

I run genAI models on my own hardware for free. How does that fit into your argument?

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#45

Post by dwringer »

squeaky-clean wrote: post #42
dingnuts wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not like gambling, it is gambling. you exchange dollars for chips (tokens -- some casinos even call the chips tokens) and insert it into the machine in exchange for the chance of a prize. if it doesn't work the first time you pull the lever, it might the second time, and it might not. Either way, the house wins. It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor, the only difference from a sl…

So how exactly does that work for the $25/mo flat fee that I pay OpenAI for chatgpt. They want me to keep getting the wrong output and burning money on their backend without any additional payment from me?

Something of an aside, but this is sort of equivalent to asking "how does that work for the $50 dollars the casino gave me to gamble with for free"? I once made 50 dollars exactly in that way by taking the casino's free tokens and putting them all on black in a single roulette spin. People like that are not the ones companies like that make money off of.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#46

Post by panstromek »

xianshou wrote: post #26

Amusingly, about 90% of my rat's-nest problems with Sonnet 3.7 are solved by simply appending a few words to the end of the prompt: "write minimum code required" It's not even that sensitive to the wording - "be terse" or "make minimal changes" amount to the same thing - but the resulting code will often be at least 50% shorter than the un-guided version.

Well, the article mentions that this reduces accuracy. Do you hit that problem often then?

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#47

Post by neilv »

I would seriously consider banning "vibe coding" right now, because:

1. Poor solutions.

2. Solutions not understood by the person who prompted them.

3. Development team being made dumber.

4. Legal and ethical concerns about laundering open source copyrights.

5. I'm suspicious of the name "vibe coding", like someone is intentionally marketing it to people who don't care to be good at their jobs.

6. I only want to hire people who can do holistically better work than current "AI". (Not churn code for a growth startup's Potemkin Village, nor to only nominally satisfy a client's requirements while shipping them piles of counterproductive garbage.)

7. Publicizing that you are a no-AI-slop company might scare away the majority of the bad prospective employees, while disproportionately attracting the especially good ones. (Not that everyone who uses "AI" is bad, but they've put themselves in the bucket with all the people who are bad, and that's a vastly better filter for the art of hiring than whether someone has spent months memorizing LeetCode answers solely for interviews.)

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#48

Post by codr7 »

mystified5016 wrote: post #44
dingnuts wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

it's not like gambling, it is gambling. you exchange dollars for chips (tokens -- some casinos even call the chips tokens) and insert it into the machine in exchange for the chance of a prize. if it doesn't work the first time you pull the lever, it might the second time, and it might not. Either way, the house wins. It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor, the only difference from a sl…

I run genAI models on my own hardware for free. How does that fit into your argument?

The fact that you can get your drugs for free doesn't exactly make you less of an addict.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#49

Post by NathanKP »

dingnuts wrote: post #17
vanschelven wrote: post #14

> Its “almost there” quality — the feeling we’re just one prompt away from the perfect solution — is what makes it so addicting. Vibe coding operates on the principle of variable-ratio reinforcement, a powerful form of operant conditioning where rewards come unpredictably. Unlike fixed rewards, this intermittent success pattern (“the code works! it’s brilliant! it just broke! wtf!”), triggers stronger dopamine respon…

it's not like gambling, it is gambling. you exchange dollars for chips (tokens -- some casinos even call the chips tokens) and insert it into the machine in exchange for the chance of a prize. if it doesn't work the first time you pull the lever, it might the second time, and it might not. Either way, the house wins. It should be regulated as gambling, because it is. There's no metaphor, the only difference from a sl…

This only makes sense if you have an all or nothing concept of the value of output from AI.

Every prompt and answer is contributing value toward your progress toward the final solution, even if that value is just narrowing the latent space of potential outputs by keeping track of failed paths in the context window, so that it can avoid that path in a future answer after you provide followup feedback.

The vast majority of slot machine pulls produce no value to the player. Every single prompt into an LLM tool produces some form of value. I have never once had an entirely wasted prompt unless you count the AI service literally crashing and returning a "Service Unavailable" type error.

One of the stupidest takes about AI is that a partial hallucination or a single bug destroys the value of the tool. If a response is 90% of the way there and I have to fix the 10% of it that doesn't meet my expectations, then I still got 90% value from that answer.

Re: Perverse incentives of vibe coding

#50

Post by [deleted] »

andy99 wrote: post #36
samtp wrote: post #20

I've pretty clearly seen the critical thinking ability of coworkers who depend on AI too much sharply decline over the past year. Instead of taking 30 seconds to break down the problem and work through assumptions, they immediately copy/paste into an LLM and spit back what it tells them. This has lead to their abilities stalling while their output seemingly goes up. But when you look at the quality of their output, a…

I think lack of critical thinking is the root cause, not a symptom. I think pretty much everyone uses LLMs these days, but you can tell who sees the output and considers it "done" vs who uses LLM output as an input to their own process.

[deleted]
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