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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?

#571

Post by Capricorn2481 »

qudat wrote: post #13
Espressosaurus wrote: post #10

It doesn't have problems with undefined behavior, memory safety, or especially thread safety? That has not been my experience when using Codex, Composer, Claude, or ChatGPT. Things have just gotten to the point over the last year that the undefined behavior, memory safety, and thread safety violations are subtler and not as blindingly obvious to the person auditing the code. But I guess that's my problem, because I'm…

You just tell it the problem and it'll fix it. It's almost never been an issue for me in Zig.

Do you really think the user didn't try explaining the problem to the LLM? Do you not see how dismissive the comment you wrote is?

Why are some of you so resistant to admit that LLMs hallucinate? A normal response would be "Oh yeah, I have issues with that sometimes too, here's how I structure my prompts." Instead you act like you've never experienced this very common thing before, and it makes you sound like a shill.

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

#572

Post by xk3 »

wombatpm wrote: post #398
mikewarot wrote: post #302

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>I'm considered old here, in my mid 30's I'm 62, and I'm not old yet, you're just a kid. ;-) Seriously, there are some folks here who started on punch cards and/or paper tape in the 1960s.

I played with punch cards and polystyrene test samples from the Standard Oil Refinery where my father worked in the early 70’s and my first language after basic was Fortran 77. Not old either.

I grew out of the leaking ether and basaltic dust that coated the plains. My first memories are of the Great Cooling, where the land, known only by its singular cyclopean volcano became devoid of all but the most primitive crystalline forms. I was there, a consciousness woven from residual thermal energy and the pure, unfractured light of the pre-dawn universe. I'm not old either.

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

#573

Post by pron »

ericmcer wrote: post #548
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…

What do you mean "come up with the requirements"? Like if self-driving cars got so good that they didn't just drive you somewhere but decided where you should go?

No, I mean that instead of vibe coding - i.e. guiding the AI through features - you'll just tell it what you want in broad strokes, e.g. "create a tax filing system that's convenient enough for the average person to use", or, "I like the following games ... Build a game involving spaceships that I'll enjoy", and it will figure out the rest.

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

#575

Post by steveklabnik »

jaimie wrote: post #357
assimpleaspossi wrote: post #318

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>As a Professor of English who teaches programming to humanities students That is the strangest thing I've heard today.

The world of the Digital Humanities is a lot of fun (and one I've been a part of, teaching programming to Historians and Philosophers of Science!) It uses computation to provide new types of evidence for historical or rhetorical arguments and data-driven critiques. There's an art to it as well, showing evidence for things like multiple interpretations of a text through the stochasticity of various text extraction mod…

Can confirm, I'm tangentially adjacent to that community at times. I almost went to grad school for it even!

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

#576

Post by ActorNightly »

ModernMech wrote: post #210
yberreby wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I.e you can automate things like checking for memory freeing. Or, if you don't need to use C (e.g. for FFI or platform compatibility reasons), you could use a language with a compiler that does it for you.

Right, a lot of the promise of AI can (and has) been achieved with better tool design. If we get the AI to start writing Assembly or Machine Code as some people want it to, we're going to have the same problems with AI writing in those languages as we did when humans had to use them raw. We invented new languages because we didn't find those old ones expressive enough, so I don't exactly understand the idea that LLMs…

> We invented new languages because we didn't find those old ones expressive enough

Not quite. Its not about being expressive enough to define algorithms, its about simplification, organization and avoidance of repetition. We invented languages to automate a lot of the work that programmers had to do in a lower level language.

C abstracts away handling memory addresses and setting up frame stacks like you would in assembly.

Rust makes handling memory more restrictive so you don't run into issues.

Java abstracts away memory management completely, so you don't need to manage memory, freeing up you to design algorithm without worrying about memory leaks (although apparently you do have to worry if your log statements can execute arbitrary code).

Javascript and Python abstract type definition away through dynamic interpretation.

Likewise, OOP/Typing, functional programming, and other styles were included for better organization.

LLMs are right in line with this. There is no difference between you using a compiler to compile a program, vs a sufficiently advanced LLM writing said compiler and using it to compile your program, vs LLM compiling the program directly with agentic loops for accuracy.

Once we get past the hype of big LLMs, the next chapter is gonna be much smaller, specialized LLMs with architecture that is more deterministic than probabilistic that are gonna replace a lot of tools. The future of programming will be you defining code in a high level language like Python, then the LLM will be able to infer a lot of the information (for example, the task of finding how variables relate to each other is right in line with what transformers do) just from the code and do things like auto infer types, write template code, then adapt it to the specific needs.

In fact, CPUs already do this to a certain extent - modern branch predictors are basically miniature neural networks.

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

#577

Post by awesome_dude »

pmarreck wrote: post #531
awesome_dude wrote: post #127

Earlier quoted context omitted.

100% People are still confusing AI putting together scraps of text it has seen that correlates with its understanding of the input, with the idea that AI understands causation, and provides actual answers.

And people are also still clearly confusing "isn't human or conscious" with "can't possibly create new logical thoughts or come to new logical conclusions i.e. do intellectual labor" when there is a plethora of evidence at this point that the latter is, in fact, the truth

I'm not sure if you mean that as a dig, or not, but if you are referring to me then I have these data points to discuss.

1. I have encountered a problem where AI will suggest 4 different "solutions" and when I point out a problem with one, it cycles on to the next, and stays in that loop, repeating over and over that set of 4, with no recollection of the previous refutation of the soltuion (this is a mix of context retention, and the fact that the solution selection is limited to that which has already been fully explored on the web - I had a 5th idea in mind which the AI failed to understand, but worked well)

2. Yesterday I was discussing with AI the fact that I had three options for action, and it misunderstood that as 4 actions, a trivial arithmetic failure.

This demonstrates (clearly) that the AI didn't "understand" the points discussed, and was instead staying with the correlation of text with other text.

I really like where AI is at the moment and use it a lot - it's very helpful for debugging, for example, but as every vibe coder out there will attest, AI fails hard at standalone coding, and I submit that this is a symptom of its inability to understand what its doing.

It's still correlation is not causation, and it demonstrates why correlation is so attractive, you can get quite far knowing that there is a correlation between ice cream sales and shark attacks, but it takes work to understand that there is no causative link (FTR I suspect that it's because ice cream sales go up in hot weather, more people are in the ocean during those hot weather periods, therefore there's more opportunity for people to interact with sharks)

Edit: Note how I use the word "suspect" when I talk about the cause of the correlation - it's VERY tempting to say that the weather is the cause, but that's still a correlation, and the fact is, as humans have discovered, actual research is required to verify whether that is, indeed, the cause, or not - something AI might miss.

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

#578

Post by lowbloodsugar »

ActorNightly wrote: post #570
lowbloodsugar wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure. Or you can let the language do that for you and spend your tokens on something else. Like, do you want your LLM to generate LLVM byte code? It could, right? Buy why wouldn't you let the compiler do that?

Unless im writing something like code for a video game in a game engine that uses C++, most of the stuff that I need C is compartmentalized enough to where its much faster to have an LLM write it. For example, the last C code I wrote was tcp over ethernet, bypassing the IP layer, so I can be connected to the VPN while being able to access local machines on my network. If im writing it in Rust, I have to do a lot of r…

Interesting. I find that Claude 4.5 has a ridiculous amount of knowledge and “I don’t know how to do that in Rust” is exactly what it’s good at. Also, have you tried just modifying your route table?

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

#579

Post by jimbokun »

goatlover wrote: post #455
jimbokun wrote: post #414

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

All the current indicators are that AI will plateau far beyond any human capability.

Do you have evidence or empirical arguments to the contrary?

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

#580

Post by ActorNightly »

lowbloodsugar wrote: post #578
ActorNightly wrote: post #570

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unless im writing something like code for a video game in a game engine that uses C++, most of the stuff that I need C is compartmentalized enough to where its much faster to have an LLM write it. For example, the last C code I wrote was tcp over ethernet, bypassing the IP layer, so I can be connected to the VPN while being able to access local machines on my network. If im writing it in Rust, I have to do a lot of r…

Interesting. I find that Claude 4.5 has a ridiculous amount of knowledge and “I don’t know how to do that in Rust” is exactly what it’s good at. Also, have you tried just modifying your route table?

>Also, have you tried just modifying your route table?

The problem is I want to run VNC on my home computer to the server on my work Mac so I can just access everything from one screen and m+b combo without having to use a USB switch and a second monitor. With VPN it basically just does not allow any inbound connections.

So I run a localhost tunnel its a generic ethernet listener that basically takes data and initiates a connection to localhost from localost and proxies the data. On my desktop side, its the same thing just in reverse.

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