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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

#421

Post by sharadov »

manquer wrote: post #411
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…

Maybe vibe coding gets so good that we completely trash what was written and build from zero. I've seen that with badly written code as well, easier to rewrite than fix the un-goldly mess.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#422

Post by croes »

tombert wrote: post #265
cassianoleal wrote: post #218

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.

And look what damage comes from that human generated code.

Now we get hyper mass production of the same quality.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#423

Post by TacticalCoder »

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.

> 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.

It's not a proof vibe-coding doesn't work. It's a proof it's shitty, rube-goldberg, crappy code. It doesn't mean there aren't other shitty products out there (the heavy turds Microsoft produced throughout the years do comes to mind for example).

But when you've got a project upvoted here recently complaining that people do run into issue while quickly cut/pasting from Claude Code CLI to, say, Bash to test something because of Unicode characters in Claude Code CLI's output... And when you realize that it's because what Claude Code CLI shows you in the TUI is not the output of the model because there's an entire headless browser rendering the model's output to a webpage, which is then converted to text (and changing at that moment ASCII chars for Unicode ones), you realize that some serious level of fucktardery is ongoing.

It's normal that at times people aren't going full agentic and shall want to cut/paste what they see. I'm not the one complaining: I saw a project complaining about it and people are affected by that terribly dumb ASCII-to-Unicode conversion of characters.

When you can produce turds by the kilometer, a near infinity of turd is going to be produced.

We're not saying it's not working: I pay an Anthropic subscription and use it daily... We're saying it's a piece-of-shit of a codebase.

Shit that works is still shit.

If anyone from Anthropic is reading: STOP FUCKING CHANGING THE CHARACTERS THAT YOUR MODEL DOES OUTPUT.

(now of course it's just one issue out of thousands, but it'd be a nice one to fix)

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#425

Post by pron »

woeirua wrote: post #341
cassianoleal wrote: post #218

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.

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.

"Code quality" here isn't referring to some aesthetic value. Coding agents write code that doesn't converge, meaning code that they cannot evolve after a while. They get to the point where fixing one bug causes another, and then the codebase is in such a state that no human or agent can salvage.

People who say they don't care about the quality of code produced by agents are those who haven't been evolving non-trivial codebases with agents long enough to see just how catastrophically they implode after a while. At that point, everyone cares, and that point always comes with today's agents given enough lines and enough changes.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#426

Post by fred_is_fred »

The whole idea of someone's code being perfectly handcrafted may have been true in 1998, but any project you start now builds on a tower of open source libraries frameworks, and container images - probably running on someone else's infra. Nobody is really starting from a blank page anymore.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#427

Post by rib3ye »

Knowing this is the wrong crowd, I hesitate to even type this, but come on... The pace of evolution on this topic is hard to ignore:

2024 - Utter Trash

2025 - Merely hotdog water

2026 - Aaaaaaaaaactually pretty good...

Every forward-leaning platform is building out an MCP interface, I think we're past the point of "soulless fad."

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#428

Post by tstrimple »

aerhardt wrote: post #286
jschveibinz wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Here's my take: I think that citizen developers will be a thing--but not in the way you might be thinking. More people will be enabled (and empowered) to "build" quick-and-dirty solutions to personal problems by just talking to their phone: "I need way to track my food by telling you what I ate and then you telling me how much I have left for today. And suggest what my next meal should be." In the current paradigm--w…

Well, your example is timely. Today I asked ChatGPT to make me a weekly calorie plan and it was perfect. But then I still use MyFitnessPal to log my calories because their food database is outstanding, and the UX of scanning food barcodes is unbeatable. They have the most niche items in my country, Spain. How are LLMs going any of that? An app is often much more than a CRUD interface. Maybe I could build a custom app…

The data sources often exist to build these things yourself. For your example there is Open Food Facts and USDA FoodData Central.

https://world.openfoodfacts.org/

https://fdc.nal.usda.gov/

Both would make a great foundation for this sort of app. OFF is crowdsourced and does include barcode information. I have no idea how robust the dataset is for your geography though. If I were to build something like this for personal use, I'd be looking at a PWA that can leverage the camera for barcode scanning. I'd work with the existing crowd sourced database as well as provide a mechanism for "manual" entry which should just be scanning a barcode and taking a picture of the nutrition information. I've personally built systems like this before and all of these things are well within the capability of most SOTA LLM to build out.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#429

Post by shimman »

nh23423fefe wrote: post #181
shimman wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes that plus having tens of billions of gulf money certainly helps you subsidize your moronic failures with money that isn't yours while you continue, and fail to, achieve profitability in any time horizon within a single lifespan.

your prediction is going to be wrong, even with all those caveats

If my prediction is wrong these should be trillion dollar companies yesterday with what their liars proclaim, until then we know that Anthropic has only made $5billion total revenue to data due to the Pentagon lawsuits and that required $20billion.

Can't wait to see how much public money they need going forward! Hopefully our progeny don't die in the subsequent climate crisis before they can unleash true shareholder value.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#430

Post by parineum »

jameson wrote: post #214

Vibe coders' argument* is that quality of code does not matter because LLMs can iterate much much faster then humans do. Consider this overly simplified process of writing a logic to satisfy a requirement: 1. Write code 2. Verify 3. Fix We, humans, know the cost of each step is high, so we come up various way to improve code quality and reduce cognitive burden. We make it easier to understand when we have to revisit.…

> ** Cost of token I believe is relatively cheaper compared to a full-time engineer and it'll get cheaper over time.

I don't know how true this is going to be, at least in the short term. The big providers are likely running at a loss and, as models have gotten better, they've also crept up in price as well.

They/you are counting on them hitting a point where it is actually cheap for the value provided (after they take some off the top) but I don't see that as inevitable before these companies go under or pivot into much more specialized tools for big clients.

It's not clear to me that AI code is cheaper than human code (of equal functionality).

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