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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?

#451

Post by anthk »

godelski wrote: post #225
omnicognate wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive. As a Professor of English who teaches programming to humanities students, the writer has had an extremely interesting and unusual academic career [1]. He sounds awesome, but I think it's fair to suggest he may not have much experience of large scale commercial software devel…

Hard to say but to back his claim that he was programming since the 90's his CV shows he was working on stuff that's clearly more than your basic undergraduate skill level since the early 2000's. I'd be willing to bet he has more years under his belt than most HN users. I mean I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's, and this guy has been programming most my life. Though that doesn't explicitly imply experience, or m…

38 there. If you didn't suffer Win9x's 'stability', then editing X11 config files by hand, getting mad with ALSA/Dmix, writing new ad-hoc drivers for weird BTTV tuners reusing old known ones for $WEIRDBRAND, you didn't live.

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

#452

Post by goatlover »

anon84873628 wrote: post #391
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…

My bet is that it will be good enough to devise the requirements. They already can brainstorm new features and make roadmaps. If you give them more context about the business strategy/goals then they will make better guesses. If you give them more details about the user personas / feedback / etc they will prioritize better. We're still just working our way up the ladder of systematizing that context, building better…

If it gets to that point, why is the customer even talking to a software company? Just have the AI build whatever. And if an AI assistant can synthesize every piece of business information, why is there a need for a new company? The end user can just ask it to do whatever.

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

#453

Post by anthk »

LgWoodenBadger wrote: post #316
jjgreen wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I got a coat older than that (and in decent nick).

I used to tell the “kids” that I worked with that I have a bowling ball older than them.

I own 90's comic books and video games older than most Gen-Z users in HN.

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

#454

Post by choeger »

The answer is type-safety. LLMs produce errors, as do humans. A language with carefully designed semantics and a well-implemented safety checker (or maybe even a proof assistant) will help express much more correct code.

I've had the most success running Claude iteratively with mypy and pytest. But it regularly wants to just delete the tests or get rid of static typing. A language like Haskell augmented with contracts over tests wouldn't allow that. (Except for diverging into a trivial ad-hoc dynamic solution, of course.)

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

#455

Post by goatlover »

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.

It's not the only reason, technologies do plateau. We're not living in orbiting cities flying fusion powered vehicles around, even though we built rockets and nuclear power more than half a century ago.

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

#457

Post by mrweasel »

rixed wrote: post #408
mrweasel wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We had a client who'd create incredibly detailed Jira tickets. Their lead developer (also their only developer) would write exactly how he'd want us to implement a given feature, and what the expected output would be. The guy is also a complete tool. I'd point out that what he described wasn't actually what they needed, and that there functionality was ... strange and didn't actually do anything useful. We'd be told…

Are you working at OpenAI?

No, but now I'm curious about the inner workings of OpenAI.

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

#458

Post by immibis »

MetaWhirledPeas wrote: post #311
gitremote wrote: post #33

Software development jobs must be very diverse if even this anti-vibe-coding guy thinks AI coding definitely makes developers more productive. In my work, the bigger bottleneck to productivity is that very few people can correctly articulate requirements. I work in backend, API development, which is completely different from fullstack development with backend development. If you ask PMs about backend requirements, th…

> very few people can correctly articulate requirements This is the new programming. Programming and requirements are both a form of semantics. One conveys meaning to a computer at a lower level, the other conveys it to a human at a higher level. Well now we need to convey it at a higher level to an LLM so it can take care of the lower-level translation. I wonder if the LLM will eventually skip the programming part a…

We have a machine that turns requirements into code. It's called a compiler. What happened to programming after the invention of the compiler?

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

#459

Post by INTPenis »

peteforde wrote: post #168
INTPenis wrote: post #154

Because I don't know C well enough. My philosophy regarding AI is that you should never have it do something you couldn't do yourself. Of course people break this rule, or the concept of vibe coding wouldn't exist. But some of us actually get a lot of value from AI without succumbing to it. It just doesn't make sense to me to trust a machine's hallucinations for something like programming code. It fabricates things w…

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…

I wish you the best of luck, truly.

But I have written C in the past, it was almost 20 years ago, and everything seemed to work fine, until the memory leaks.

Of course today I would ask the AI, why is my program leaking memory. I think you have a point, AI would be sort of like having a mentor help you find bad practices in your C code.

You've inspired me to maybe try my hand at Rust, something I've been wanting to do since I heard of it.

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

#460

Post by yoz-y »

Eh. Vibe Coding is best when your “writing code to eyeballing results” is the smallest. It works well when you can “test” that your code works with purely looking at the result and clicking around.

For this it’s the web deployment target and fast compile times rather than the language itself that is useful.

Routinely I am sent code that works, but obviously nobody has looked at. Because they don’t even actually know what the code does.

For prototyping this is quite great. I think it’s the biggest competitor to tools like figma, because writing actually functional program with access to real APIs beats mocks. Now, how often will these end up in production and blow everything up…

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