Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

bramcohen.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

51–60 of 555 posts

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#51

Post by Schiendelman »

operatingthetan wrote: post #21
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.

What I'm missing so far is how they produced such awful code with the same product I'm using, which definitely would have called out some of those issues. Perhaps the problem is getting multiple vibe-coders synced up when working on a large repo.

I suspect a lot of it is just older, before Opus 4.5+ got good at calling out issues.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#52

Post by rectang »

saulpw wrote: post #8

> That wouldn’t even be a big violation of the vibe coding concept. You’re reading the innards a little but you’re only giving high-level, conceptual, abstract ideas about how problems should be solved. The machine is doing the vast majority, if not literally all, of the actual writing. Claude Code is being produced at AI Level 7 (Human specced, bots coded), whereas the author is arguing that AI Level 6 (Bots coded,…

> https://visidata.org/ai

Thanks for that list of levels, it's helpful to understand how these things are playing out and where I'm at in relation to other engineers utilizing LLM agents.

I can say that I feel comfortable at approximately AI level 5, with occasional forays to AI level 6 when I completely understand the interface and can test it but don't fully understand the implementation. It's not really that different from working on a team, with the agent as a team member.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#53

Post by hombre_fatal »

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.

Also, many of the complaints seem more like giddy joy than anything.

The negative emotion regex, for example, is only used for a log/telemetry metric. Sampling "wtf?" along would probably be enough. Why would you use an agent for that?

I don't see how a vibe-coded app is freed from the same trade-offs that apply to a fast-moving human-coded one.

Especially since a human is still driving it, thus they will take the same shortcuts they did before: instead of a formal planning phase, they'll just yolo it with the agent. Instead of cleaning up technical debt, they want to fix specific issues that are easy to review, not touch 10 files to do a refactor that's hard to review. The highest priority issues are bugs and new integrations, not tech debt, just like it always was.

This is really just a reminder of how little upside there is to coding in the open.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#54

Post by aleph_minus_one »

> The AI is very bad at spontaneously noticing, “I’ve got a lot of spaghetti code here, I should clean it up.” But if you tell it this has spaghetti code and give it some guidance (or sometimes even without guidance) it can do a good job of cleaning up the mess.

Set up an AI bot to analyze the code for spaghetti code parts and clean up these parts to turn it into a marvel. :-)

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#55

Post by hypeatei »

spoiler wrote: post #39
andrenotgiant wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code which has always been true

Yes, and to add, in case it's not obvious: in my experience the maintenance, mental (and emotional costs, call me sensitive) cost of bad code compounds exponentially the more hacks you throw at it

Now with AI, you're not only dealing with maintenance and mental overhead, but also the overhead of the Anthropic subscription (or whatever AI company) to deal with this spaghetti. Some may decide that's an okay tradeoff, but personally it seems insane to delegate a majority of development work to a blackbox, cloud-hosted LLM that can be rug pulled from underneath of you at any moment (and you're unable to hold it accountable if it screws up)

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#56

Post by cladopa »

"Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos"

The ship has sailed. Vibe coding works. It will only work better in the future.

I have been programming for decades now, I have managed teams of developers. Vibe coding is great, specially in the hands of experts that know what they are doing.

Deal with it because it is not going to stop. In the near future it will be local and 100x faster.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#57

Post by bs7280 »

In my opinion there are two main groups on the spectrum of "vibe coding". The non technical users that love it but don't understand software engineering enough to know what it takes to make a production grade product. The opposite are the AI haters that used chatgpt 3.5 and decided LLM code is garbage.

Both of these camps are the loudest voices on the internet, but there is a quiet but extremely productive camp somewhere in the middle that has enough optimism, open mindedness along with years of experience as an engineer to push Claude Code to its limit.

I read somewhere that the difference between vibe coding and "agentic engineering" is if you are able to know what the code does. Developing a complex website with claude code is not very different than managing a team of off shore developers in terms of risks.

Unless you are writing software for medical devices, banking software, fighter jets, etc... you are doing a disservice to your career by actively avoiding using LLMs as a tool in developing software.

I have used around $2500 in claude code credits (measured with `bunx ccusage` ) the last 6 months, and 95% of what was written is never going to run on someone else's computer, yet I have been able to get ridiculous value out of it.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#58

Post by jasonmp85 »

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.

[dead]

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#60

Post by bluefirebrand »

ozgrakkurt wrote: post #41
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.

This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about. This is similar to retarded builders in Turkey saying “wow, I can make the same building, sell for the same price, but spend way less” and then millions of people becoming victim when there is an earthquake. This is not how responsible people should think abou…

> This is a really wrong perspective on software. Short term monkey style coding does not produce products. You might get money but that is not what it is about

You're not alone in thinking that, but unfortunately I think it's a minority opinion. The only thing most people and most businesses care about is money. And frankly not even longterm, sustainable money. Most companies seem happy to extract short term profits, pay out the executives with big bonuses, then rot until they collapse

Post reply on HN