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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

#491

Post by tovej »

sefbuyo wrote: post #487
tovej wrote: post #478

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You're repeating the broader definition, great. But your post leaves me with the same question about degrees. You say there's two cases: no review and full review, "deep sense of the code", and that one is vibe coding and one is not. What about the degrees in between? At what point does vibe coding become something else? For example, I would not say "looking at the diffs" to ever be enough review to get a deep sense…

You're right that it's a spectrum. Just like anything else, you can be 'mostly' vibe coding or 'somewhat' vibe coding. But the threshold where it stops being vibe coding isn't entirely subjective. If you are trusting the AI's logic and primarily verifying the output (the app runs, the button works), you are vibe coding. If you are reading the diffs, verifying the architecture, you are transitioning back toward engine…

You say the threshold is not entirely subjective, but then you describe a subjective (you just know it) and ambiguous (transitioning back toward engineering) threshold.

Sure seems to me like it's subjective.

Also, I've nedlver ever heard so much talk about "verifying architecture" as when people talk about vibe coding.

That's not something you usually do. The architecture is the overall structure of a design, and has to be elaborated into functional designs and interface contracts before you have something you can verify in actual code. The architecture itself is very much an intangible thing. "Verifying architecture" in diffs is nonsense, and is definitely not engineering.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#492

Post by duskdozer »

bombcar wrote: post #458
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…

This is not just true of code; it is true of everything - the whole world is held together with spit, bailing wire, a prayer, and some old dude who remembers.

It doesn't mean it's something to strive for

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#493

Post by blairharper »

The real cult is the engineers who refuse to shift their perception of what "good" or "quality" means in a world where humans, for the most part, won't be reading or writing code anymore.

I get it, existential threats are scary, but you can't just shit talk them and hope they go away.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#495

Post by 21asdffdsa12 »

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.

You have a operation that tries to establish market-dominance- by quality and scaling.

Quality is expensive when it comes to token consumption. Scaling is expensive due to parallel service to users requiring tons of data center on standby.

I would expect a gradient of code quality. As in- the hotpaths that consume the most resources are still maintained strictly in "only human code" with rigorous eye on quality and savings. Everything else.. can be vibecoded at least in theory..

I would expect that difference to also appear in the language and code used. The inner core written in C++, the outter user-glue-code in C#, TS, etc.

If dogfood is all you eat, squandering shareholder resources, you might open yourself up to liability.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#496

Post by benterix »

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 shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

It shows that given enough hype and fomo you can convince many people to do this tool to build various types of things while the quality of this code suffers.

It's the opposite of how non-vibecoding companies and individuals are using LLMs to improve the quality of the code.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#497

Post by i_love_retros »

gitaarik wrote: post #465
i_love_retros wrote: post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're all fucking crazy. Or maybe I am? I can literally see my teams codebase becoming an unmaintainable nightmare in front of my eyes each day. I use copilot and Claude code and I frequently have to throw away their massively verbose and ridiculously complex code and engage my withering brain to come up with the correct solution that is 80% less code. I probably get to the solution in the same time when all…

Sounds very similar to my experience with colleagues before AI. It just goes even faster now.

But before AI it was possible to keep things in check because pull requests were manageable in both size and frequency. Now we have people passing figma screen shots to copilot and Claude and putting up single shot pull requests that have what used to be 5 jira stories all in one. It's impossible to keep any semblance of consistency and correctness in the codebase. Its also exhausting for the people that actually care.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#498

Post by drob518 »

okr wrote: post #470
marcus_holmes wrote: post #438

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's an unpopular truth for our industry, but the point of commercial software development is not to write good code; it's to write profitable code. There are some cases where the most profitable code is also good code. We like those. But in most (99%+) cases, the code is not going to survive contact with the market and so spending any time on making it good is wasted.

To my believe there was not a goal to write good code. The goal was maintainability and to keep it simple, so that people understand. People come and go, you constantly get to see foreign code and you have to do something with it. Anyways, i see the maintainability hell coming onto us. I still wonder how i organize this with AI. I definitly do not want to touch it what is written by AI.

I think the industry-wide hope is that AI manages the AI-written code, but it’s unclear whether that’s actually going to work out in practice. Right now, my experience is that is dicey. I’ve had AI mess up a codebase to the point where I threw it away and restarted. Maybe I was doing it wrong, though, in that I was looking at the code and was increasingly horrified by the slop. I get the feeling that in this new world, we’re supposed to ignore how the sausage is made and just focus on the final outcome.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#499

Post by drob518 »

progmetaldev wrote: post #432
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.

I mean, hasn't it learned from reading other's code? I don't think it can be any better than the common patterns and practices that it has been trained on. Some outlier of amazing code is probably not going to make much of a difference, unless I am completely misunderstanding LLMs (which I very well may be, and would gladly take any criticism on my take here).

Yes, but, that’s a low bar, no? I mean, when they first started talking about AI, were you envisioning a mediocre AI that is just average, or were you imagining an expert?

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#500

Post by drob518 »

Eufrat wrote: post #387
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.

I thought the sales pitch of all of this is that the AI was supposed to relieve people from having to do a bunch of annoying bootstrap coding and to do it in a way that we could extended easily. I have a subscription to Claude Code and despite my skepticism, it has been pretty good at just getting a goofy PoC thing going. When I look at the code, it’s usually insane unless the prompt was so narrow and specific like a…

Exactly. I thought AI was going to be smarter. I thought AI would give us expert coders. Instead we have idiot savants.
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