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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

#521

Post by [deleted] »

reese_john wrote: post #314
bcrosby95 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have…

If you are a company founder, what scenario would you rather find yourself in? a) a pristine, good codebase that follows the best coding practices, but it is built on top of bad specs, wrong data/domain model b) a bad codebase but it correctly models and nails the domain model for your business case Real life example, a fintech with: a) a great codebase but stuck with a single-entry ledger b) a bad codebase that perf…

[deleted]

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#522

Post by butlike »

bcrosby95 wrote: post #78
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.

Bad code works fine until it doesn't. In my experience, with humans, doing the right thing is worth it over doing the bad thing if your time horizon is a few months. Once you're in years, absolutely do the right thing, you're actually throwing time away if you don't. And I don't mean "big refactor", I mean at-change-time, when you think "this change feels like an icky hack." For LLMs, I don't really know. I only have…

But why not rewrite the app, change the name, and get shareholder value from a new product announcement? It shouldn't take a long time, the spec for the new product is the old product being rewritten.

See Google Hangouts > Google Chat

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#523

Post by nothinkjustai »

physicles wrote: post #519
nothinkjustai wrote: post #489

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not a troll. I’ve been doing a lot of self reflection on this topic lately. Some people seem to enjoy software for the act & craft, where the outcome / artifact is secondary or irrelevant. I don’t. Some people enjoy the artifacts it produces, for their utility or economic value. Not really me either. Often people frame it as this dichotomy, but I’ve realized my enjoyment and self-fulfillment comes from creating an ar…

This is all valid. Your original comment came across as a troll because it implied that nobody could ever feel good about stuff they built with AI. Asserting that you know more about the emotional state of strangers on the internet than they know themselves is arrogant.

Well, it’s a genuine question. Like, if I have a machine in my house where I give it a recipe and it spits out the food, should I feel good about having “cooked” that food? Or what if someone prompts an AI for some art, should they feel proud of “creating” that art? I think not. And it’s the same with code. Depending on how much of the work you actually did should influence how you talk and feel about a creation. So many people lazily prompt an AI and then come here to post about something they “made” and I think that’s wrong.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#524

Post by drob518 »

abustamam wrote: post #517
drob518 wrote: post #498

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 worl…

IME AI-native engineering requires a lot of infrastructure to make it viable. Teams who are just opening up cursor and putting it on "auto" and trying to one shot features may get stuff that works but is indeed slop. Since the beginning of the year, I've been spearheading a low-stakes AI-native project (an internal tool). No one's written a single line of code. And we've learned so much from this experience. The firs…

Cool. Are you restricting the AI to be very focused on a function or an architectural blocks that is envisioned, or are you giving it more freedom? I seem to have less slop when I really constrain things, but that takes a lot of work (e.g., specs) and dialogue with the AI (“focus on X, now let’s design block Y,” etc.).

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#525

Post by tombert »

thesz wrote: post #507
tombert wrote: post #442

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have actually, for my personal projects. I have been writing a library called "assume" where you can specify a type signature, give it a prompt, and it generates a function on the fly in the background with Claude Code, so you still write some code, but whenever you need a function you "assume" that such a function exists. I have a Java version that works right now and I will likely be pushing it within the next we…

> I have been writing a library called "assume" where you can specify a type signature, give it a prompt, and it generates a function on the fly in the background with Claude Code, so you still write some code, but whenever you need a function you "assume" that such a function exists. This is very much like good old djinn [1], which would generate code from Haskell type specification. [1] https://mail.haskell.org/pip…

You don't have to convince me.

LLMs are neat, code generation is neat, but I do wish that people had learned type theory and instead used those.

I'm not aware of djinn, but I do remember the "Type Driven Development" that Idris had that I thought was absurdly cool; when you make the type specification clear enough, there ends up being basically exactly one reasonable way of writing the code, in which case it can just be "deduced" by machinery.

I'm a huge advocate for formal methods, and it does sort of bother me that pretty much all work on that seems to have been refocused on AI.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#526

Post by abustamam »

drob518 wrote: post #524
abustamam wrote: post #517

Earlier quoted context omitted.

IME AI-native engineering requires a lot of infrastructure to make it viable. Teams who are just opening up cursor and putting it on "auto" and trying to one shot features may get stuff that works but is indeed slop. Since the beginning of the year, I've been spearheading a low-stakes AI-native project (an internal tool). No one's written a single line of code. And we've learned so much from this experience. The firs…

Cool. Are you restricting the AI to be very focused on a function or an architectural blocks that is envisioned, or are you giving it more freedom? I seem to have less slop when I really constrain things, but that takes a lot of work (e.g., specs) and dialogue with the AI (“focus on X, now let’s design block Y,” etc.).

I give it freedom but with the predefined restrictions. I use a plug-in called Obra Superpowers. Whenever I want to start on a block of work, whether it's a ticket or if I just want to tackle tech debt, I start with the brainstorm command. I say something vague like "implement X" or "last time i tried to vibe code Y, Z happened. I don't want that to happen again. Let's improve the harness."

It'll ask follow questions, which I answer, then generate specs that I manually review. If it looks good, it'll generate a plan. If not then I'll give it feedback.

When the scope of work is well-defined (ie my boss says users should be able to do Y) then this process is fairly seamless.

When it's not well-defined then it does take a bit longer and more dialogue as you said. But because everything is documented and written down, we have a pretty good feedback loop (boss asks why it works like X, I can look at the generated spec/plan, or ask the AI to, to understand why).

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#527

Post by drob518 »

abustamam wrote: post #526
drob518 wrote: post #524

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Cool. Are you restricting the AI to be very focused on a function or an architectural blocks that is envisioned, or are you giving it more freedom? I seem to have less slop when I really constrain things, but that takes a lot of work (e.g., specs) and dialogue with the AI (“focus on X, now let’s design block Y,” etc.).

I give it freedom but with the predefined restrictions. I use a plug-in called Obra Superpowers. Whenever I want to start on a block of work, whether it's a ticket or if I just want to tackle tech debt, I start with the brainstorm command. I say something vague like "implement X" or "last time i tried to vibe code Y, Z happened. I don't want that to happen again. Let's improve the harness." It'll ask follow questions…

Ok, so it’s constrained by specs, but you dialog with the AI and have it create the specs. I should try that. I’ve been creating my own specs and having it work from those and then iterating, but that’s not exactly quick and I find myself thinking, “At this rate I could do it faster myself.”

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#528

Post by Sohcahtoa82 »

tombert wrote: post #88
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.

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…

> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked.

At a place I worked at with their core product written in Python, it was exceptionally common for engineers to make shell calls for file operations that had easy Python-native functions.

For example, rather than `os.remove("some_file")`, they'd do `os.system("rm some_file")`. Sometimes, the file name being acted on included user input.

I found so many shell injections that could have easily been prevented.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#529

Post by abustamam »

drob518 wrote: post #527
abustamam wrote: post #526

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I give it freedom but with the predefined restrictions. I use a plug-in called Obra Superpowers. Whenever I want to start on a block of work, whether it's a ticket or if I just want to tackle tech debt, I start with the brainstorm command. I say something vague like "implement X" or "last time i tried to vibe code Y, Z happened. I don't want that to happen again. Let's improve the harness." It'll ask follow questions…

Ok, so it’s constrained by specs, but you dialog with the AI and have it create the specs. I should try that. I’ve been creating my own specs and having it work from those and then iterating, but that’s not exactly quick and I find myself thinking, “At this rate I could do it faster myself.”

Yeah definitely agreed. I'm lucky I'm that my boss is willing to invest in this little experiment so the point isn't "can we do this faster manually" it's "how can we build our AI infrastructure such that it can actually be faster."

And also, I'm taking care of my infant daughter while working so my workflow is often "launch an AI agent from my computer while she's asleep, review plan on my phone while feeding or napping the little one, approve it and execute it" so it's often running when I'm not really in a mental space to be thinking deeply.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#530

Post by bluefirebrand »

bit-anarchist wrote: post #251
bluefirebrand wrote: post #184

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The argument against this is that human coders are also non-deterministic, so does it really matter if it's a human or an AI agent producing the code Actually yes, because Humans can be held accountable for the code they produce Holding humans accountable for code that LLMs produce would be entirely unreasonable And no, shifting the full burden of responsibility to the human reviewing the LLM output is not reasonab…

> Holding humans accountable for code that LLMs produce would be entirely unreasonable Why? LLMs have no will nor agency of their own, they can only generate code when triggered. This means that either nature triggered them, or people did. So there isn't a need to shift burdens around, it's already on the user, or, depending on the case, whoever forced such user to use LLMs.

Because the whole thrust of this movement is to remove humans from the loop, or at least minimize them?

What you are proposing isn't scalable, so it isn't really an end goal.

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