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Breaking the spell of vibe coding

fast.ai

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Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#71

Post by Kye »

skydhash wrote: post #57
claudeomusic wrote: post #48

I think a big part of this discussion lost for a lot is a lot of people are trying to copy/paste how we’ve been developing software over the past twenty years into this new world which simply doesn’t work effectively. The differences are subtle but those of us who are fully bought in (like myself) are working and thinking in a new way to develop effectively with LLMs. Is it perfect? Of course not - but is it dramatic…

What are such new ways? You’re being very vague about them.

A post I saw the other day from someone in a similar situation who did share what changes were made: https://bsky.app/profile/abumirchi.com/post/3meoqzl5iec2o

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#72

Post by koolba »

mprast wrote: post #53
daxfohl wrote: post #7

I think it all boils down to, which is higher risk, using AI too much, or using AI too little? Right now I see the former as being hugely risky. Hallucinated bugs, coaxed into dead-end architectures, security concerns, not being familiar with the code when a bug shows up in production, less sense of ownership, less hands-on learning, etc. This is true both at the personal level and at the business level. (And astound…

It's very interesting to me how many people presume that if you don't learn how to vibecode now you'll never ever be able to catch up. If the models are constantly getting better, won't these tools be easier to use a year from now? Will model improvements not obviate all the byzantine prompting strategies we have to use today?

And if you can never catch up, how would someone new to the game ever be a meaningful player?

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#73

Post by lazystar »

ozim wrote: post #29
lazystar wrote: post #27

i used to lose hours each day to typos, linting issues, bracket-instead-of-curly-bracket, 'was it the first parameter or the second parameter', looking up accumulator/anonymous function callback syntax AGAIN... idk what ya'll are doing with AI, and i dont really care. i can finally - fiiinally - stay focused on the problem im trying to solve for more than 5 minutes.

idk what you’re doing but proper IDE was doing that for me for past 15 years or more. Like I don’t remember syntax or linting or typos being a problem since I was in high school doing Turbo Pascal or Visual Basic.

emacs-nox for 8 years :-)

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#74

Post by dns_snek »

mprast wrote: post #53
daxfohl wrote: post #7

I think it all boils down to, which is higher risk, using AI too much, or using AI too little? Right now I see the former as being hugely risky. Hallucinated bugs, coaxed into dead-end architectures, security concerns, not being familiar with the code when a bug shows up in production, less sense of ownership, less hands-on learning, etc. This is true both at the personal level and at the business level. (And astound…

It's very interesting to me how many people presume that if you don't learn how to vibecode now you'll never ever be able to catch up. If the models are constantly getting better, won't these tools be easier to use a year from now? Will model improvements not obviate all the byzantine prompting strategies we have to use today?

I think so, that's why I think that the risk of pretty much ignoring the space is close to zero. If I happen to be catastrophically wrong about everything then any AI skills I would've learned today will be completely useless 5 years from now anyway, just like skills from early days of ChatGPT are completely useless today.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#75

Post by koolba »

daxfohl wrote: post #21
_se wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Very reasonable take. The fact that this is being downvoted really shows how poor HN's collective critical thinking has become. Silicon Valley is cannibalizing itself and it's pretty funny to watch from the outside with a clear head.

I think it's like the California gold rush. Anybody and their brother can go out and dig, but the real money is in selling the shovels.

More like they’re leasing away deeply discounted steam shovels at below market rates and somehow expecting to turn a profit doing so.

The real profits are the companies selling them chips, fiber, and power.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#76

Post by jaapbadlands »

daxfohl wrote: post #62
mgraczyk wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if you believe that many are too far on one side now, you have to account for the fact that AI will get better rapidly. If you're not using it now you may end up lacking preparation when it becomes more valuable

But as it gets better, it'll also get easier, be built into existing products you already use, etc. So I wouldn't worry too much about that aspect. If you enjoy tinkering, or really want to dive deep into fundamentals, that's one thing, but I wouldn't worry too much about "learning to use some tool", as fast as things are changing.

The baseline, out-of-the-box basic tool level will lift, but so will the more obscure esoteric high-level tools that the better programmers will learn to control, further separating themselves in ability from the people who wait for the lowest common denominator to do their job for them.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#78

Post by __MatrixMan__ »

atleastoptimal wrote: post #44

That AI would be writing 90% of the code at Anthropic was not a "failed prediction". If we take Anthropic's word for it, now their agents are writing 100% of the code: https://fortune.com/2026/01/29/100-percent-of-code-at-anthro... Of course you can choose to believe that this is a lie and that Anthropic is hyping their own models, but it's impossible to deny the enormous revenue that the company is generating via th…

I wish one of those agents was smart enough to notice that their github-action which auto closes issues is broken: https://github.com/anthropics/claude-code/issues/16497. Then maybe we could get some of these bugs fixed.

Re: Breaking the spell of vibe coding

#80

Post by paulryanrogers »

wavemode wrote: post #67
daxfohl wrote: post #7

I think it all boils down to, which is higher risk, using AI too much, or using AI too little? Right now I see the former as being hugely risky. Hallucinated bugs, coaxed into dead-end architectures, security concerns, not being familiar with the code when a bug shows up in production, less sense of ownership, less hands-on learning, etc. This is true both at the personal level and at the business level. (And astound…

> I think it all boils down to, which is higher risk, using AI too much, or using AI too little? This framing is exactly how lots of people in the industry are thinking about AI right now, but I think it's wrong. The way to adopt new science, new technology, new anything really, has always been that you validate it for small use cases, then expand usage from there. Test on mice, test in clinical trials, then go to ma…

Those of us working from the bottom, looking up, do tend to take the clinical progressive approach. Our focus is on the next ticket.

My theory is that executives must be so focused on the future that they develop a (hopefully) rational FOMO. After all, missing some industry shaking phenomenon could mean death. If that FOMO is justified then they've saved the company. If it's not, then maybe the budget suffers but the company survives. Unless of course they bet too hard on a fad, and the company may go down in flames or be eclipsed by competitors.

Ideally there is a healthy tension between future looking bets and on-the-ground performance of new tools, techniques, etc.

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