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If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

stephenramsay.net

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Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#411

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

IAmLiterallyAB wrote: post #387
peteforde wrote: post #168

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm working on a serious embedded app written in C, and Opus has been invaluable to me. I don't consider myself a C developer, but by carefully reviewing the changes and making lots of my own contributions, I'm finding that I've progressed from junior to intermediate C comprehension. A lot of the idioms are still fuzzy, but I no longer find it intimidating. That's wonderful, because learning C has been something I'd…

Opus?

Anthropic's model, Claude, comes in three sizes: Haiku, Sonnet, and Opus. Opus 4.5 is the newest.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#412

Post by akst »

It sounds like his main gripe of vibe coding is it robs you of the satisfaction as a programmer in solving the problem. I don't disagree, but the preferences of programmers are not necessarily the main driving force here behind these changes. In many cases it's their boss and their boss doesn't really care.

It's one thing to program as a hobby or to do programming in an institutional environment free of economic pressures like academia (like this educator), it's another thing to exist as a programmer outside that.

My partner was telling me her company is now making all their software engineers use ChatGPT Codex. This isn't a company with a great software engineer culture, but it's probably representative of the median enterprise/non SV/non tech start employer than people realise.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#413

Post by casey2 »

The author makes 2 fundamental errors in reasoning. The first is saying that the language model can program, it can't, it can generate code, maybe researchers at top labs can get it to create some trivial programs but I digress.

The second and more important point is that what makes coding simpler for humans is the ability of the language to facilitate communication so you don't have to translate, now LLMs are good at translation, but it's still work. Imagine you have an implementation of a program and you want to see what it does, for any non-trival program you must scan millions of tokens, are current LLMs even physcially capable of attending to that? nonono we need names.

Besides how can you even vibecode if you aren't (just) using names.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#414

Post by jimbokun »

whimsicalism wrote: post #243
pron wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is that some imagined AI that can reliably produce reliable software will also likely be able to be smart enough to come up with the requirements on its own. If vibe coding is that capable, then even vibe coding itself is redundant. In other words, vibe coding cannot possibly be "the future", because the moment vibe coding can do all that, vibe coding doesn't need to exist. The converse is that if vibe codi…

I agree with the first part which is basically 'being able to do a software engineers full job' is basically ASI/AGI complete. But I think it is certainly possible that we reach a point/plateau where everything is just 'english -> code' compilation but that 'vibe coding' compilation step is really really good.

The only reason to imagine that plateau is because it’s painful to imagine a near future where humans have zero economic value.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#416

Post by nylonstrung »

sroerick wrote: post #394

Does anybody else feel that vibe coding only works in Python JavaScript, and maybe Go? It seems like once you get more esoteric than that everything goes out the window. Zig code is laughable. I can't get LLMs to write a single cogent function in OCAML, things break catastrophically at 10 LOC. I haven't seen anybody else describe this experience.

Yeah it struggles with long tail languages. Zig in particular since even within the small training set there have been many versions with breaking changes

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#417

Post by tjr »

jimbokun wrote: post #414
whimsicalism wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree with the first part which is basically 'being able to do a software engineers full job' is basically ASI/AGI complete. But I think it is certainly possible that we reach a point/plateau where everything is just 'english -> code' compilation but that 'vibe coding' compilation step is really really good.

The only reason to imagine that plateau is because it’s painful to imagine a near future where humans have zero economic value.

Why is this desirable?

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#418

Post by jimbokun »

tjr wrote: post #417
jimbokun wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only reason to imagine that plateau is because it’s painful to imagine a near future where humans have zero economic value.

Why is this desirable?

It’s not, it’s horrifying.

But there doesn’t seem to be any off ramp, given the incentives of our current economic system.

Re: If you're going to vibe code, why not do it in C?

#420

Post by colechristensen »

PaulHoule wrote: post #197
colechristensen wrote: post #91

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A significant part of my LLM workflow involves having the LLM write and update tickets for me. It can make a vague ticket precise and that can be an easy platform to have discussions with stakeholders.

A significant part of my workflow is getting a ticket that is ill-defined or confused and rewriting it so that it is something I can do or not do. From time to time I have talked over a ticket with an LLM and gotten back what I think is a useful analysis of the problem and put it into the text or comments and I find my peeps tend to think these are TLDR.

Yeah, most people won't read things. At the beginning of my career I wrote emails that nobody read and then they'd be upset about not knowing this or that which I had already explained. Such is life, I stopped writing emails.

An LLM will be just as verbose as you ask it to be. The default response can be very chatty, but you can figure out how to ask it to give results in various lengths.

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