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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

#401

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 is always amazing at how crap some code can be and yet still function, usually to the total bemusement of the coder. "It shouldn't work but it does?!"

When I used to contract code for some game engine stuff back in the 2000's early 2010's, that was essentially my working standard. Essentially gave a boiler plate terms of my work. I will make it work, I will get it done quickly, it will run fast BUT you will incur a lot of technical debt in doing so. In a games engine it isn't a big deal, you are essentially just pushing pixels around a screen in a sand-boxed system. "Yeah, the decompression system does some odd things with memory addresses but it is quick and plays nice with your streaming system. Just don't change the overall mapping too much and it should ship ok.". "In this level of your game, I have this explicit exception code that prevents that streaming system from booting out too much necessary data. Don't change this unless you want a headache"

I shudder to think of what that style of code would do in a work environment with serious consequences.

I suspect we will find out a lot more of this in the decades to come.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#402

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

"No one cares about code quality" - disagree. As a dev, I care about code quality in that shitty code makes my life suck. As a user of terrible products, I only care about code quality in as much as the product is crap (Spotify I'm looking at you), or it takes forever for it to evolve/improve. Biz people don't care about quality, but they're notoriously short sighted. Whoever nerfed Google's search is angering millio…

> Whoever nerfed Google's search is angering millions of people as we speak

This guy, supposedly:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40133976

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#403

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.

Sure, but as I stated, even "professional" code is pretty bad a lot of the time. If it's able to generate code that's as good as professional code, then maybe it is solved. I don't actually think it's a solved problem, I'm saying that the fact that it generates terrible code doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have parity with humans.

Hard to argue with that.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#405

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.

Does the pressure affect the LLM's judgement in the same way it does a developer whose job is on the line?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#406

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.

Sure, but as I stated, even "professional" code is pretty bad a lot of the time. If it's able to generate code that's as good as professional code, then maybe it is solved. I don't actually think it's a solved problem, I'm saying that the fact that it generates terrible code doesn't necessarily mean that it doesn't have parity with humans.

You can get AI to generate the best code you have ever seen. It just takes time and direction. I can write "poetic" code, but it takes orders of magnitude more time. I can also write beautiful code with AI, but it is also time and brain intensive.

It generates terrible code when used in a nearly open loop manner, which all coding agents are currently doing.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it ac…

Call me naive, but I don't believe that I'm going to wake up tomorrow and ChatGPT.com and Claude.ai are going to be hard down and never come back. Same as Gmail, which is an entirely different corporation. I mean, they could, but it doesn't seem insane to use Gmail for my email, and that's way more important to my life functioning than this new AI thing.

Email is deterministic and portable. Export to a standard format and import somewhere else.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#408

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.

In the end what really matters to most people is does it work. How it is built or works means nothing to them nor should it.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#409
post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s also possible to sell chairs that are uncomfortable and food that tastes terrible. Yet somehow we still have carpenters and chefs; Herman Miller and The French Laundry. Some business models will require “good” code, and some won’t. That’s how it is right now as well. But pretending that all business models will no longer require “good” code is like pretending that Michelin should’ve retired its list after the mi…

Are you saying Herman Miller chairs are uncomfortable?

I'll say it. They are for people of my small proportions

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#410

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I still run into plenty of situations where the LLM-agent wrote the code really inexpensively, but is totally unable to debug it, and you can sink tons of time trying to get it to do so before giving up with nothing to show for it, and trying to figure it out yourself.

What kind of code do you work on, and what model & harness do you use? Genuinely curious so I can calibrate my understanding. I work on enterprise web apps for a few dozen people with Codex CLI and GPT-5.4, and haven't really run in to those issues.

I make a lot of very small casual games. I've used both Claude Code and Codex CLI extensively, I pretty much always use whatever is the best model + highest thinking level, although I have been off Codex since just before 5.4 came out.
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