Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

Post by computerex » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 6:29 PM UTC

Insanity wrote: post #9

mycentstoo wrote: post #4

I believe choosing a well known problem space in a well known language certainly influenced a lot of the behavior. AIs usefulness is correlated strongly with its training data and there’s no doubt been a significant amount of data about both the problem space and Python. I’d love to see how this compares when either the problem space is different or the language/ecosystem is different. It was a great read regardless!

100% this. I tried haskelling with LLMs and it’s performance is worse compared to Go. Although in fairness this was a year ago on GPT 3.5 IIRC

Post by stavros » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 6:43 PM UTC

talles wrote: post #52

stavros wrote: post #3

I've come to view LLMs as a consulting firm where, for each request, I have a 50% chance of getting either an expert or an intern writing my code, and there's no way to tell which. Sometimes I accept this, and I vibe-code, when I don't care about the result. When I do care about the result, I have to read every line myself. Since reading code is harder than writing it, this takes longer, but LLMs have made me too laz…

> Since reading code is harder than writing it, Reading bad code is harder than writing bad code. Reading good code is easier than writing good code.

Post by jagged-chisel » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 7:24 PM UTC

layer8 wrote: post #34

afro88 wrote: post #21

Great article, though I'm still reading it as it's a mammoth read! A side note: as it's been painfully pointed out to me, "vibe coding" means not reading the code (ever!). We need a term for coding with LLMs exclusively, but also reviewing the code they output at each step.

We could revive the old CASE acronym ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Computer-aided_software_engine... ). ;)

Post by stavros » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 7:31 PM UTC

jagged-chisel wrote: post #54

stavros wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I beg to differ.

No need to beg. Everyone’s got their opinion. I just wish, this being Hacker News, that more people would articulate their different opinions instead of just stopping with “I disagree.”

Post by therein » Sun, Aug 31, 2025, 7:52 PM UTC

kaptainscarlet wrote: post #5

stavros wrote: post #3

I've come to view LLMs as a consulting firm where, for each request, I have a 50% chance of getting either an expert or an intern writing my code, and there's no way to tell which. Sometimes I accept this, and I vibe-code, when I don't care about the result. When I do care about the result, I have to read every line myself. Since reading code is harder than writing it, this takes longer, but LLMs have made me too laz…

I've also had a similar experience. I have become too lazy since I started vibe-coding. My coding has transitioned from coder to code reviewer/fixer vey quickly. Overall I feel like it's a good thing because the last few years of my life has been a repetition of frontend components and api endpoints, which to me has become too monotonous so I am happy to have AI take over that grunt work while I supervise.