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The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#411

Post by manquer »

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.

Vibe coding in my opinion is analogous to say borrowing on a credit card to gamble on a startup.

Occasionally, in IRL you hear the feel good story how Fred smith gambled the last $5,000 to save FedEx and so on, but most people with that mindset end up crashing out.

Vibe coding a product runs the risk of acquiring too much tech debt before project is successful.

Product Market Fit is very hard, you need to keep enough room for pivots. Changes in direction will always accumulate debt, even when tech is well written. It is far more difficult when you accumulate debt quickly.

The counterpoint being that procrastinating and over-engineering prematurely or building lot of unrelated tooling and loosing focus can also bring the product down quickly or never let it start .

Being able to vibe code POCs etc is a great tool if done in a controlled limited well defined way.

Just as borrowing cash on your credit card is not always bad, it just usually is.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#413

Post by andrekandre »

cassianoleal wrote: post #405
H8crilA wrote: post #345

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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?

i once scolded an ai for being too late when i figured out an issue before it could come back with an answer: it made an excuse that it took too long to start up, lol

i would guess telling it to "hurry up" would produce even worse code than already does without hand-holding or maybe it would make an excuse again...

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#414

Post by benjiro3000 »

tombert wrote: post #88
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.

I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started. This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a…

[dead]

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#415

Post by andrekandre »

SpicyLemonZest wrote: post #386
woeirua wrote: post #344

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

  > often tries to change behavior
yes, and (in my experience) at the same time re-write the unit tests that are supposed to guarantee behavior doesn't change...

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#416

Post by parineum »

awesome_dude wrote: post #248
tombert wrote: post #88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started. This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a…

> and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens Yeah, we even have an idiom for this - "Temporary is always permanent"

"There's nothing more permanent than a temporary solution."

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#417

Post by greedo »

59nadir wrote: post #381
greedo wrote: post #376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 for…

I (like many on HN I'm sure) have been continually pestered by management to use AI like it's some cure for polio. They just want to tell their VP that "my team is accelerating its use of AI!" so that the VP can pass that up the food chain. Same with when we started to migrate (unnecessarily imho) to the cloud. Just another checkbox and an attaboy from senior management.

There's really not much of a place for AI in my work. We're not cutting edge, we're just a large, safe business protected by a regulatory moat. We don't want to be on the cutting edge, since the bleeding is bad for profits and reputation. But the incentives our IT execs operate under is all about resume/credential building and moving on to bigger things. Our C level officers are not even slightly technical, so they defer to the CIO. Nothing new at all in this company, it's a story told a thousand times.

So I was just very curious how it would be to approach vibe coding as if I was my VP. You don't know what you don't know, right? And the ease at creating a simple app that would be beyond 99% of the people in my company gives way too much confidence. And with misplaced confidence comes poor decision-making.

I can see where someone who currently is an Excel jockey would benefit from some of this stuff. As long as they can compare and test the outputs. But the danger from false confidence has to be an institutional risk that's being ignored.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#418

Post by Izkata »

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.

The impression I got from that thread is its quality is dropping, with weird bugs popping up. And I'm pretty sure I remember they announced at one point they switched to that, so the vibe coding had a human-written codebase to start with.

So that sounds to me like it is evidence vibe coding doesn't work well long term.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#419

Post by youknownothing »

I don't think this has anything to do with dogfooding. As the author says, dogfooding is about consuming your own product. You can consume Claude Code and still be a reasonable engineer. It's difficult to tell what's actually happening without an insider view but, IMHO, this is just the typical go-fever of start-up thinking: produce loads of functionality as quickly as possible and don't think about quality. It was try before AI, and it will be true after AI.

Also, to those who say "this is proof that code quality doesn't matter any more", let's have this chat 5 years from now when they're crumbling under the weight of their own technical debt :)

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#420

Post by croes »

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.

That’s nothing new.

Countless Excel-Solutions are popular and successful but the Macro behind bad.

Bad code doesn’t not work, unfortunately it works.

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