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The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

bramcohen.com

61–70 of 555 posts

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#61

This reminds me of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption. Disruption happens when firms are disincentivized to switch to the new thing or address the new customer because the current state of it is bad, the margins are low. Intel missed out on mobile because their existing business was so excellent and making phone chips seemed beneath them. The funny thing is that these firms are being completely rational. Why…

Even if AI progress plateaus, I'm confident we would build tooling and patterns around the current models that would surpass hand crafted equivalents.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#62
No, I completely disagree with this entire article.

Bad code or good code is no longer relevant anymore. What matters is whether or not AI fulfills the contract as to how the application is supposed to work. If the code sucks, you just rerun the prompt again and the next iteration will be better. But better doesn't matter because humans aren't reading the code anymore. I haven't written a line of code since January and I've made very large scale improvements to the products I work on. I've even stopped looking at the code at all except a cursory look out of curiosity.

Worrying about how the sausage is made is a waste of time because that's how far AI has changed the game. Code doesn't matter anymore. Whether or not code is spaghetti is irrelevant. Cutting and pasting the same code over and over again is irrelevant. If it fulfills the contract, that's all that matters. If there's a bug, you update the contract and rerun it.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#64

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.

Do we know if the original code was vibe coded? It's like chicken and an egg dilemma.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#65
post #37
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,…

I'm at a 5, and only because I've implemented a lot of guardrails, am using a typed functional language with no nulls, TDD red/green, and a good amount of time spent spec'ing. No way I'd be comfortable enough this high with a dynamic language. I could probably get to a 7 with some additional tooling and a second max 20 account, but I care too much about the product I'm building right now. Maybe for something I cared…

You aren't leveling up here... these levels are simple measures of how you use the tools to do something. You can regularly do things from any level or multiple levels at the same time.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#66
post #45

> I’ll start a conversation by saying “Let’s audit this codebase for unreachable code,” or “This function makes my eyes bleed,” and we’ll have a conversation about it until something actionable comes up. Then I explain what I think should be done and we’ll keep discussing it until I stop having more thoughts This is painful to read. It feels like rant from person who does not use version control, testing and CI. It i…

wow - I thought it was called 'ideation' or 'brainstorming'. he didn't give it a 'spec', he started a conversation with it to see if 'something actionable comes up' - which you actually quoted, but didn't appear to read ?

No, I read it. Machine needs handholding because it makes spagheti code.

This can be easily automated away!

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#67
> In this particular case, a human could have told the machine: “There’s a lot of things that are both agents and tools. Let’s go through and make a list of all of them, look at some examples, and I’ll tell you which should be agents and which should be tools. We’ll have a discussion and figure out the general guidelines. Then we’ll audit the entire set, figure out which category each one belongs in, port the ones that are in the wrong type, and for the ones that are both, read through both versions and consolidate them into one document with the best of both.”

But that isn't the hard part. The hard part is that some people are using the tool versions and some are using the agent versions, so consolidating them one way or another will break someone's workflow, and that incurs a real actual time cost, which means this is now a ticket that needs to be prioritized and scheduled instead of being done for free.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#68
post #57

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 somew…

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Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#69
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,…

Interesting breakdown of levels. I like it.

I’m not sure I believe that Level 7 exists for most projects. It is utterly *impossible* for most non-trivial programs to have a spec that doesn’t not have deep, carnal knowledge of the implementation. It can not be done.

For most interesting problems the spec HAS to include implementation details and architecture and critical data structures. At some point you’re still writing code, but in a different language, and it migtt hurt have actually been better to just write the damn struct declarations by hand and then let AI run with it.

Re: The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok

#70
post #39

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

Sure, for humans. Not sure they'll be the primary readers of code going forward
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