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All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

varunraghu.com

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Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#71

Post by meander_water »

> at first i was very hopeful i can finally 'build' now with my minimal tech skills

You can. You just can't do it fast.

You need to build up your tech skills first. But AI platforms are not incentivized to help you do that. So you have to be very controlled about the speed at which you code.

I learned that letting the AI drive implementation wasn't working for me. The speed is intoxicating at first, and you start trusting the output blindly. But eventually you have to face the music and fix up the mess.

So now I just use it as a glorified autocorrect and search engine, as well as a rubber duck (Ask mode in Cursor). This speed works for me. You have to find the speed that works for you.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#72

Post by bluefirebrand »

lordnacho wrote: post #10

> at first i was very hopeful i can finally 'build' now with my minimal tech skills This is the problem. If you couldn't have coded it slowly in the old world, you will have problems coding it in AI world. However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very…

> However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools.

This has not been my experience and it is very frustrating. I've been programming almost 20 years, I'm pretty good at it

I don't know where the disconnect is, but no matter how I try (and I am trying, I don't want to get left behind) I cannot get remotely good results from LLM coding tools

They always, always, always take longer to build what I want than just doing it myself

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#73

Post by johnnyanmac »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #23
lawlessone wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This will be a big problem in the future if it means more companies choosing not to hire/train juniors. Eventually all the experienced people will be dead or retired.

The answer here is two-fold -- 1) that the tools become more Socratic and interactive and educational and walk the engineer through what they're doing 2) juniors pair with a senior who is using the tool and see the process and the decisions being made. I know the industry wants these things to replace us, but in fact it's more like a power drill than a spinning jenny. It augments and lets the existing craftsmen work…

>I know the industry wants these things to replace us

sadly, "The market can stay irrational longer than you can stay solvent". It will correct itself long term, but the damage over the last few years will linger for years, maybe even decades to come.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#74

Post by dghlsakjg »

kamranjon wrote: post #4

I sit on a few indie hacker rooms with folks that slurped up the vibe coding koolaid immediately and they've been posting about their 100x output for over a year now - but none of them have shipped anything remotely successful - so I think at least anecdotally I somewhat agree. I also just overall haven't seen a huge influx of new and useful apps and websites as you'd expect based on how tech leaders are talking abou…

I think what a lot of people fail to grasp is that the hard/expensive part about running an app based business is rarely writing the app.

Most web developers can clone twitter in a day, even before LLMs. I've seen it assigned as homework for bootcamp devs (not knocking bootcamp devs, just pointing out that it isn't a tall ask even for a junior. Most apps aren't hard to code to an MVP.

The hard part about an app based business is the business part. Marketing, billing, and getting actual revenue and customers is much harder than writing code.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#75

Post by dorcy »

cramsession wrote: post #7

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

I was able to teach my interns more about architectural designs instead of coding. Teaching them more about DDD instead of going through what’s broken with this function. We might be close to a point where you can teach product people about these basic concepts, packages and saas tools, and have them vibe code a whole app.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#76

Post by hellisothers »

cramsession wrote: post #7

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

“You need to know…” do you need to know though? I agree I need to know the things to work in a mature codebase or make something maintainable in the long run but to bang out a get rich quick project? Probably not.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#77

Post by hackable_sand »

GuinansEyebrows wrote: post #30
alexashka wrote: post #20

Meh. The greater scam here is that rugged individualism can lead to positive societal outcomes. Just more free market capitalism, bro! We just need more freedom for the tech bros, the finance bros, bro! This AI shit is yet another oh look - increase in rugged individual 'productivity' is going to lead to positive societal outcomes, trust me, bro! It's all bullshit but what else have the western retarded elite got? Or…

what a roller coaster. i was with you mostly until the end of your rant. climate change is a real problem; one, in fact, that many of the elites you speak of are actively working to exacerbate for short-term gain. that felt kinda out of left field for someone who's essentially espousing leftwing ideology, which more or less entirely embraces climate change as a major concern.

I didn't read it like that.

Imagine an LLM service company making contributions to climate science.

It's the scorpion ferrying the frog across the water. No different.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#78

Post by cmrdporcupine »

chamomeal wrote: post #34
cmrdporcupine wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. It's augmentation not automation, it does what I want or it gets the hose again. You make the framework and it colours in the lines. If you don't draw the pattern first you're going to get a kindergarten mess. There are times I'm amazed by its suggestions but it will also cheat and "lie" and if you're not paying attention, you'll miss it. But these days many tasks for me consist of: I need this, look how…

It’ll cheat a lot when writing unit tests. Particularly “agentic” tools like cursor. It’ll get a test to pass, even if it’s against a laughably incorrect implementation. I’ve ended up with tests called stuff like “foobar successfully returns impossible value that suggests programmer error” lmao

Yeah, or "bug was pre-existing and not my fault so shrug, here's a TODO and we'll just say it passed" (not those exact words, but close)

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#79

Post by csar »

cmrdporcupine wrote: post #78
chamomeal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’ll cheat a lot when writing unit tests. Particularly “agentic” tools like cursor. It’ll get a test to pass, even if it’s against a laughably incorrect implementation. I’ve ended up with tests called stuff like “foobar successfully returns impossible value that suggests programmer error” lmao

Yeah, or "bug was pre-existing and not my fault so shrug, here's a TODO and we'll just say it passed" (not those exact words, but close)

“70% of tests pass. This codebase is ready for production!”

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#80

Post by johnnyanmac »

_el1s7 wrote: post #12

Yeah, at this point, it's certainly annoying. But to be fair, this technology is still at an early stage, and we don't know it's limits. It's scary to imagine a future where the development process in companies is fully handled by AI agents, which are the only ones who can read and maintain the code.

I mean, the way I see it:

- "Vibe coding" is a state of action and being, a mental design paradigm for how you approach a problem.

- Generative/LLM based coding is the technology used to enable vibe coding.

I'm not going to fully dismiss the latter because I can't predict the future, and if we're being frank: no one "cares" about the underlying code when you launch a product. Only that it works. Art/Design is king.

Vibe Coding will inevitably fail once you try to scale to make bigger projects or reason with harder problems. Engineering is about understanding a problem space and figuring out a solution to it with the tools/techniques you acquire and derive; black boxing that aspect of engineering will only take you so far.

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