It's astonishing to me that real software developers have considered it a good idea to generate code... and not even look at the code.
I would have thought sanity checking the output to be the most elementary next step.
Breaking the spell of vibe coding
41–50 of 375 posts
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#42The addiction aspect of this is real. I was skeptical at first, but this past week I built three apps and experienced issues with stepping away or getting enough sleep. Eventually my discipline kicked in to make this a more healthy habit, but I was surprised by how compelling it is to turn ideas into working prototypes instantly. Ironically, the rate limits on my Claude and Codex subscriptions helped me to pace mysel…
Isn't struggling to get enough sleep or shower enough and so on because you're so involved with the process of, you know, programming, especially interactive, exploratory programming with an immediate feedback loop, kind of a known phenomenon for programmers since essentially the dawn of interactive computing?
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#43> However, it is important to ask if you want to stop investing in your own skills because of a speculative prediction made by an AI researcher or tech CEO. I don't think these are exclusive. Almost a year ago, I wrote a blog post about this [0]. I spent the time since then both learning better software design and learning to vibe code. I've worked through Domain-Driven Design Distilled , Domain-Driven Design , Imple…
As someone with 20 years experience, DDD is a stupid idea, skip it and do yourself a favour. You'll probably be forming some counter-arguments in your head. Skip them, throw the DDD books in the bin, and do your co-workers a favour.
DDD is quite nice as a philosophy. Like concatenate state based on behavioral similarity and keep mutation and query function close, model data structures from domain concepts and not the inverse, pay attention to domain boundary (an entity may be read only in some domain and have fewer state transition than in another).
But it should be a philosophy, not a directive. There are always tradeoffs to be made, and DDD may be the one to be sacrificed in order to get things done.
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#44That AI would be writing 90% of the code at Anthropic was not a "failed prediction". If we take Anthropic's word for it, now their agents are writing 100% of the code:
https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro...
Of course you can choose to believe that this is a lie and that Anthropic is hyping their own models, but it's impossible to deny the enormous revenue that the company is generating via the products they are now giving almost entirely to coding agents.
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#45I think it all boils down to, which is higher risk, using AI too much, or using AI too little? Right now I see the former as being hugely risky. Hallucinated bugs, coaxed into dead-end architectures, security concerns, not being familiar with the code when a bug shows up in production, less sense of ownership, less hands-on learning, etc. This is true both at the personal level and at the business level. (And astound…
Even if you believe that many are too far on one side now, you have to account for the fact that AI will get better rapidly. If you're not using it now you may end up lacking preparation when it becomes more valuable
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#46[flagged]
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Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#47> A study from METR found that when developers used AI tools, they estimated that they were working 20% faster, yet in reality they worked 19% slower. That is nearly a 40% difference between perceived and actual times! It’s not. It’s either 33% slower than perceived or perception overestimates speed by 50%. I don’t know how to trust the author if stuff like this is wrong.
Can you elaborate? This seems like a simple mistake if they are incorrect, I'm not sure where 33% or 50% come from here.
Their math is 120%-80%=40% while the correct math is (80-120)/120=-33% or (120-80)/80=+50%
It’s more obvious if you take more extreme numbers, say: they estimated to take 99% less time with AI, but it took 99% more time - the difference is not 198%, but 19900%. Suddenly you’re off by two orders of magnitude.
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#48I think a big part of this discussion lost for a lot is a lot of people are trying to copy/paste how we’ve been developing software over the past twenty years into this new world which simply doesn’t work effectively.
The differences are subtle but those of us who are fully bought in (like myself) are working and thinking in a new way to develop effectively with LLMs. Is it perfect? Of course not - but is it dramatically more efficient than the previous era? 1000%. Some of the things I’ve done in the past month I really didn’t think were possible. I was skeptical but I think a new era is upon us and everyone should be hustling to adapt.
My favorite analogy at the moment is that for awhile now we’ve been bowling and been responsible for knocking down the pins ourselves. In this new world we are no longer the bowlers, rather we are the builders of bumper rails that keep the new bowlers from landing in the gutter.
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#49That AI would be writing 90% of the code at Anthropic was not a "failed prediction". If we take Anthropic's word for it, now their agents are writing 100% of the code: https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro... Of course you can choose to believe that this is a lie and that Anthropic is hyping their own models, but it's impossible to deny the enormous revenue that the company is generating via th…
One thing I like to think about is: If these models were so powerful why would they ever sell access? They could just build endless products to sell, likely outcompeting anyone else who needs to employ humans. And if not building their own products they could be the highest value contractor ever.
If you had midas touch would you rent it out?
Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding
#50I think most of the issues with "vibe coding" is trusting the current level of LLM's with too much, as writing a hacky demo of a specific functionality is 1/10 as difficult as making a fully-fledged, dependable, scalable version of it.
Back in 2020, GPT-3 could code functional HTML from a text description, however it's only around now that AI can one-shot functional websites. Likewise, AI can one-shot a functional demo of a saas product, but they are far from being able to one-shot the entire engineering effort of a company like slack.
However, I don't see why the rate of improvement will not continue as it has. The current generation of LLM's haven't been event trained yet on NVidia's latest Blackwell chips.
I do agree that vibe-coding is like gambling, however that is besides the point that AI coding models are getting smarter at a rate that is not slowing down. Many people believe they will hit a sigmoid somewhere before they reach human intelligence, but there is no reason to believe that besides wishful thinking.