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The problem with "vibe coding"

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Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#61

Post by motorest »

alganet wrote: post #14

Sometimes I want to cook a home meal. If I wanted to open a large world class fast food chain, I wouldn't be cooking home meals then. That would be silly. Copilot can help me cook the equivalent of a McDonalds special in terms of software. It's good, I think McDonalds is delicious. But it cannot help me cook a home meal software. It will insist that my home made fries must go in a little red box, and my fish sandwich…

> Copilot can help me cook the equivalent of a McDonalds special in terms of software. It's good, I think McDonalds is delicious.

No. The likes of Copilot help you cook the meal you'd like, how you'd like it. In some cases it forgets to crack open eggs, in other cases it cooks a meal far better than whatever you'd be able to pull together in your home kitchen. And does it in seconds.

The "does it in seconds" is the key factor. Everyone heard of the "million monkeys with a typewriter" theorem. The likes of Copilot is like that, but it takes queues and gathers context and is supervised by you. The likes of Copilot is more in line with a lazy intern that you need to hand-hold to get them to finish their assignment. And with enough feedback and retries, it does finish the assignment. With flying colors.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#62

Post by motorest »

alganet wrote: post #56
doug_durham wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty weak analogy. Copilot can show you how to make either McDonalds or a Michelin starred restaurant meal. It is endlessly variable.

It's kind of true story actually. I found one of my license texts for a hobby project[0] in a Microsoft product[1]. I have no idea how they use it. Copilot is very poor at understanding how the DSL arrangement of the project works or how to assemble validator trees. Before Copilot many other "enterprise" stuff like JetBrains IDEs had problems auto-completing it. But it was always good enough for me, for my own things…

> No, copilot is not endlessly variable. It works best with typed languages and an enterprise mindset.

I don't think your assumption is true. The key factor is the corpus used to train it, and the context you fed it. I already experienced Copilot fumbling references to methods of a simple Java class, whereas it pulled off thinks like ARM templates flawlessly. You need to understand that internally LLMs do probability-based text completion. If you feed them enough context to maximize the probability they output things you expect, they do so.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#63

Post by alganet »

selcuka wrote: post #51
roncesvalles wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Asking the LLM for something is like doing an "Ask the Audience" in Who Wants to be a Millionaire . You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking.

> You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking. There is nothing wrong with going with the consensus answer. Sure, you can't invent an O(N) sorting algorithm with the consensus, but LLMs can definitely write good, maintainable code. Michelin star analogy might be an exaggeration, but it can help cook a good homemade meal, possibly even better than most wannabe home cooks.

Dude, ask ChatGPT to explain the analogy for you. It understood well enough. It will save both of us some time.

Maybe AI is useful for some things after all.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#64

Post by motorest »

roncesvalles wrote: post #46
doug_durham wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pretty weak analogy. Copilot can show you how to make either McDonalds or a Michelin starred restaurant meal. It is endlessly variable.

Asking the LLM for something is like doing an "Ask the Audience" in Who Wants to be a Millionaire . You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking.

> You're basically polling the consensus answer to the question you're asking.

That's perfectly fine, because that's what you expect from human work to begin with. From natural text like blog article or tecnical reports to software changes, all output is expected to comply with patterns we are already familiar with. Heck, look at pull requests, where you ask your audience to evaluate your work hoping to reach a consensus.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#65

Post by pjmlp »

commandersaki wrote: post #7

One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users. I've changed my outlook on vibe coding after seeing the results of this wholesome vibe coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJUXocn7aE . This guy didn't just make…

Hence why software developers are out of job, eventually.

The day of only a few people around the factory floor to babysit the robots will come, but lets keep celebrating the day they start unloading them from the delivery trucks for installation.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#66

Post by aglione »

rvz wrote: post #22

‘Vibe coding’ isn’t software engineering. It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of unchecked AI output by clicking “accept all” on the output. You would certainly NOT use ‘vibe coded’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems. The ones pushing “vibe coding” are the same ones who are all invested in th…

fun fact: nobody would never accept vibe coding software level for a 200$/month vibe coding software tools

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#67

Post by anal_reactor »

nonethewiser wrote: post #30
charcircuit wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The pure definition is to have AI do everything for you without caring about what the actual code is.

That’s ambiguous. Whats the input? Copilot anticipating based off what you’re typing? An explicit prompt about what you want?

> That’s ambiguous. Whats the input?

The input is undefined char*, and that's the magic of it. It's kinda funny we're reaching the phase where some people throw Syntax Error on a missing colon, but AI be like "I want sfssfsfsffsfs" "ayyy got you covered". How the tables have turned.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#68

Post by alganet »

motorest wrote: post #62
alganet wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's kind of true story actually. I found one of my license texts for a hobby project[0] in a Microsoft product[1]. I have no idea how they use it. Copilot is very poor at understanding how the DSL arrangement of the project works or how to assemble validator trees. Before Copilot many other "enterprise" stuff like JetBrains IDEs had problems auto-completing it. But it was always good enough for me, for my own things…

> No, copilot is not endlessly variable. It works best with typed languages and an enterprise mindset. I don't think your assumption is true. The key factor is the corpus used to train it, and the context you fed it. I already experienced Copilot fumbling references to methods of a simple Java class, whereas it pulled off thinks like ARM templates flawlessly. You need to understand that internally LLMs do probability…

Please, think about what you just said.

How can I feed to it context about a DSL that does not exist yet?

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#69

Post by ohgr »

motorest wrote: post #61
alganet wrote: post #14

Sometimes I want to cook a home meal. If I wanted to open a large world class fast food chain, I wouldn't be cooking home meals then. That would be silly. Copilot can help me cook the equivalent of a McDonalds special in terms of software. It's good, I think McDonalds is delicious. But it cannot help me cook a home meal software. It will insist that my home made fries must go in a little red box, and my fish sandwich…

> Copilot can help me cook the equivalent of a McDonalds special in terms of software. It's good, I think McDonalds is delicious. No. The likes of Copilot help you cook the meal you'd like, how you'd like it. In some cases it forgets to crack open eggs, in other cases it cooks a meal far better than whatever you'd be able to pull together in your home kitchen. And does it in seconds. The "does it in seconds" is the k…

Sometimes it poisons your family to death. That’s the dangerous bit.

Re: The problem with "vibe coding"

#70

Post by NitpickLawyer »

rvz wrote: post #22

‘Vibe coding’ isn’t software engineering. It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of unchecked AI output by clicking “accept all” on the output. You would certainly NOT use ‘vibe coded’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems. The ones pushing “vibe coding” are the same ones who are all invested in th…

‘OUTSOURCING’ isn’t software engineering. It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of CHEAP output by clicking “I AGREE” on a contract.

You would certainly NOT use ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems.

An incident involving using ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware is just waiting to happen.

... oh, wait...

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