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“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

cendyne.dev

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Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#61

Post by Etheryte »

CharlesW wrote: post #54
Etheryte wrote: post #24

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

Even at its current size, the software outsourcing business is multiple orders of magnitude smaller than the software business itself. While there's money to be made, clearly the hype didn't live up to even remotely what it promised to be.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#62

Post by Nextgrid »

CharlesW wrote: post #54
Etheryte wrote: post #24

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

The market can stay irrational for longer than you can stay solvent.

This is not to say outsourcing can't ever work, but the situations where it does work are much rarer than what every outsourcing vendor would like you to believe.

I bet a previous client's attempt at outsourcing (well into the 6 figures now) is included in that number... yet the expensive onshore devs outsourcing was supposed to replace are still there 2 years later except now they have to also babysit the offshore idiots and fix their messes.

But hey, the vendor got paid, the idiot executive who fell for their pitch wouldn't want to lose face, so it all gets handwaved away as a continuing success and more money gets thrown into the dumpster fire.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#63

Post by spoaceman7777 »

bobxmax wrote: post #3

Vibe Coding is a trigger word for devs who insist it's a pointless exercise because it doesn't do 100% of the job. Devs don't seem to realize that's not the point - the point is you can hire less devs if you're only worried about the remaining 20%. Also this article is immensely distracting.

Exactly. I see these threads over and over, and it's just senior devs complaining about how it's the tool's fault, and not that they haven't put the time in to learn the new tool

The cycle of tool and framework re-skilling is constant in industry, and those trying to fight the wave always lose. And this one is a tidal wave. UPDATE YOUR SKILLS FOLKS!

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#64

Post by MyOutfitIsVague »

CharlesW wrote: post #54
Etheryte wrote: post #24

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

In my experience, I started my career 15 years ago cleaning up codebases developed by cheap outsourced developers. They were an absolute mess. Today, I work with many very talented developers overseas. People who develop code at my level of quality and above (and I am a stickler for high quality, maintainable code).

The thing is how you research, what you expect to get out of it, and what you're willing to pay. There was absolutely a gold rush on bottom-dollar development by cheap overseas developers by management who had no idea how software really worked, and thought they could build a business on cheap offshore development. These were software farms staffed by unappreciated undertrained people from diploma mills. I saw truly shocking things. I saw code written entirely with gotos instead of loops, because the developer had never learned how to write a while loop. The companies spent way more in the long run trying to iterate, ask for changes, and ultimately having to hire higher quality talent for much more money.

I agree with the GP. The LLMs will get better, maybe people will learn that you need an LLM with a skilled developer, or maybe the agents will get good enough to fully drive themselves properly, or maybe just good enough that a non-technical pilot can get good work out of them. Right now, "vibe coding" is largely non-technical people making messy, unmaintainable, insecure code. Some of these are programmers and non-programmers just playing around, but some people are trying to build money-making businesses off this, and it does feel like a very similar situation.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#65

Post by jevndev »

Trasmatta wrote: post #2

The more I work with LLMs and try things like "vibe coding" the less worried I am about AI taking my job any time soon. In the right contexts, I find LLMs can speed up my work a lot. But it's nowhere close to being able to replace what I do.

I feel like a lot of people are forgetting how good llms are at small isolated tasks because of how much better they've gotten at larger tasks. The best experiences I've had with llms all involve sketching out the interfaces for components I need and letting it fill in the implementation. That mentality also rewards choices that lead to good/maintainable code. you give functions good names so the AI knows what to implement. You make the code you ask it to generate as small as possible to minimize the chance of it hallucinating/going off the rails. You stub simple apis for the same reason. And (unsurprisingly) small, well defined functions are extremely testable! Which is a great trait to have for code that you know can very well be wrong.

In time the AI will be good enough design whole applications in this vibe-code-y way... But all of the examples I've seen so far indicate that even the best publicly available models aren't there. It seems like every example I've seen has the developer bickering with the ai about something it just won't get right - often wasting more time than they were slightly more hands on. Until the tech gets over that I'll stick to it being the "junior developer I give a uml diagram to so they can figure out the messy parts".

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#66

Post by simonw »

varenc wrote: post #10
Trasmatta wrote: post #2

The more I work with LLMs and try things like "vibe coding" the less worried I am about AI taking my job any time soon. In the right contexts, I find LLMs can speed up my work a lot. But it's nowhere close to being able to replace what I do.

Speeding up your work does lead to job loss. If some developers can suddenly be 3x as productive than a company doesn't need as many engineers.

Alternatively: if LLMs make devs 3x productive that means companies can get 3x the value out of an engineering hire, so they should hire more.

(Unless that company somehow has no substantial engineering backlog, which I've yet to encounter anywhere I've ever worked.)

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#67

Post by mdaniel »

axegon_ wrote: post #34

I hate how what is effectively a stupid meme phrase became an actual term in a few days. > "Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept. But to produce something reliable, secure, and worth spending money on, you’ll need experienced humans to do the hard work not possible with today’s models. The problem is that 80% of the job is a proof of concept at best. 80% is effectively a QA walking into a b…

And that's not even getting into the class of testers which try to order ';--drop table beers;-- beers, alert(1) beers or &q2; style beers

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#68

Post by iamEAP »

CharlesW wrote: post #54
Etheryte wrote: post #24

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

My father never dissuaded me from the computer science degree I went for (starting in 2007), but later on in life, he told me that, at the time, he was worried about my choice because outsourcing was all the rage and everyone was saying there’d be no programming work in the states-that it was all going to be done in India.

That reality in fact never materialized.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#69

Post by throwaway382948 »

sfjailbird wrote: post #47

This brilliant piece of satire from Steve Yegge got buried for some reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43446695 Judging by the comments, most people couldn't even tell it was satire, which goes to show how absurd the hype is right now (and probably why it was buried).

He works for a company who tries to sell coding agents. He's absolutely trying to pump it up and induce FOMO. If you can't see that because he hides it behind a layer of humor, that's on you.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#70

Post by jaza »

noosphr wrote: post #23

Hot take: Vibe coding is going to be the new Excel of technical debt. Most tech savvy places will avoid it, most good programmers will never encounter it. A bunch or us will make a career out of fixing the mess it makes after it explodes. My first real job was doing just that at a broker trader which lost 10m on a trade made by an Excel spreadsheet that used a stale yahoo finance API to get exchange rates.

Oh god. Fixing an excel spreadsheet full of crazy macros was my first job too. The nightmares still haunt me.
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