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The Vibe Tax

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Re: The Vibe Tax

#71

Post by fragmede »

WD-42 wrote: post #33
ad_fontes wrote: post #22

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

Personal finance tracker - the TODO app of 2026.

voice dictation keyboard took the first half of 2026 for me

Re: The Vibe Tax

#72

Post by giancarlostoro »

guybedo wrote: post #29

i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this. I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast know…

I can one shot a prompt if I write down a nice spec file, Claude can do a lot in one shot. I test it every few months. With enough detail Claude will know what to do.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#73

Post by joshribakoff »

vanuatu wrote: post #56
0x457 wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. because that's how agents are marketed.

we should exercise critical thinking then heaps of people on this site expect them to be omnipotent then claim it’s fake when it doesn’t read minds

You’re right — people really should think critically, but the issue remains, that many do not.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#74

Post by joshribakoff »

infinite_spin wrote: post #54
0x457 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Literally any coding agent marking material: - https://cognition.com/ - https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-codex-app/ - https://www.anthropic.com/news/claude-3-7-sonnet anthropic specifically brags about how good claude code is every annoucement of a new model. I will surrender that none of them claim its "to perfection", but IMO its implied because no one would claim that their model one-shots any issue to dog…

- https://openai.com/index/introducing-the-codex-app/ no where does this document suggest that codex can "one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt". It describes using a prompt plus agent skills (which are essentially many other prompts) to develop a playable game.. nothing about it being perfect or anything more than being in a playable state.

Oh please, you sound so disingenuous, the claim wasn’t that the documents contained a specific phrase. You’re moving the goal posts. Their name is literally a play on anthropomorphising the models, such as… the ceo going on tv shows and repeatedly saying the models may be conscious and they may start nuclear wars, etc.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#75

Post by CoolestBeans »

guybedo wrote: post #29

i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this. I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast know…

Using AI is kayfabe. What I mean is, you create interaction patterns that resemble how humans work. This is because it is what the models are trained on but also because we've all been trained to interact in this way. So it manipulates you into providing more useful prompts.

But I don't really want to play a part in a simulation, trying to cajole my scene partners into saying the lines I need them to say. I want to use a tool the same way I would use any other tool. If this is AI it should just do the thing. Anything else is an imperfection of the technology.

But at the same time, language is a vague communication medium. We have a precise language for describing forms of computation, but that's code so we're back at square one. We still haven't nailed the right amount of follow up and correction and interrupt-ability of these coding agents.

And we may never figure it out. It may simply be impossible. But it doesn't mean this weird anthropomorphization of AI is something I want to do. If I wanted to be a manager, I would be a manager.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#76

Post by ryan_lane »

ad_fontes wrote: post #22

I feel like I'm living in a parallel universe when I read these types of posts. My agents have never created code that is straight-up garbage and I have never flushed a week's worth of tokens down the toilet. I just can't identify with all the constant complaints about AI-assisted coding. And my biggest project isn't some hello world app. It's a self-hosted, privacy-focused personal financial management application t…

It happens, but when it does, you need to ask yourself: if the agent is struggling this much to produce something that's working, am I taking the right approach?

If you ask for a particular thing, they'll do it, even if it's not a good idea. When you start running into issues, they'll try to solve those issues for you. They'll do that as long as you keep asking, even if there's no good way to properly fix the issues, because the initial approach was wrong.

When an agent is struggling to produce something, I switch to asking it to re-evaluate the approach itself, and ask it to suggest a less brittle approach. I then chat through the various options, and choose the best approach that makes sense, and then the agent is back on track, producing properly working code without the issues.

Some people just keep pushing through on bad approaches, without questioning it and then blame the agent for being unable to finish it.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#77

Post by drdo »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #72
guybedo wrote: post #29

i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this. I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast know…

I can one shot a prompt if I write down a nice spec file, Claude can do a lot in one shot. I test it every few months. With enough detail Claude will know what to do.

So we're coding in an ill-defined, ambiguous and error prone language.

Sweet, I can't believe some people don't love this.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#78

Post by j1elo »

Our AI agent is like a dumb monkey with all the knowledge of Humanity, so a few guardrails are needed.

In case it helps anyone, this is how I did describe my desired harness, from scratch. I didn't know nor wanted to write all the ".vscode/skills" files, or the AGENTS.md file or any of that, so I asked Opus to "write a Harness and all related skills as needed, to follow this procedure on absolutely every change"... It (at least on VSCode) already comes with a harness/agent creation skill by default, so it has the ability to write a very good standarized process for you.

I've been playing with AI seriously for the first time, with a Python app that reads a spreadsheet with investment bookkeeping records and generates a pre-filled tax form. The harness prompt was somewhat like this:

----

1. A "Technical Spec Writer" subagent notes down every requested change to a SPEC.md file. This spec includes functional and behavioral descriptions, together with detailed technical documentation, includes software architecture, data models, API boundary definitions, etc. It then reviews everything for inconsistencies, mistakes, and text consolidation opportunities.

2. A "Tax Law Expert" subagent makes a due diligence review of the spec corpus, and raises any concerns it has wrt. what the actual Law mandates vs. what the spec docs say. Any concern is a blocker which gets documented and must be resolved by the owner (me) before proceeding. Ask me for clarifications, rulings, reference documentation, etc. as needed.

3. A "Software Engineer" subagent takes the spec and implements it. Reviews for obvious mistakes, variable misuses, unhandled errors. Finally, reviews the code to find DRY or refactoring opportunities.

4. A "Quality Assurance" subagent makes a final pass on the code, ensuring full compliance of the codebase with the specification. Also, tests are passed and verified.

----

I would have never imagined how deep the "Tax Expert" would make me go until "it" was satisfied with the results. The resulting spec is by no means a replacement of a human expert reviewing the tax declaration, but I am 98% confident that much more than the "happy path" of what I particularly want to cover is actually right. It asked me for clarifications or references (actual URLs so it could read them) to jurispridence on corner cases that I had not even anticipated for my own declarations.

In comparison, the actual "software engineering" must have been like 15% of the time/tokens.

It definitely helped me do a much deeper dive on the legalese than I would have done otherwise when writing something like this. (Still no replacement for an actual expert)

Re: The Vibe Tax

#79

Post by polnoner »

giancarlostoro wrote: post #72
guybedo wrote: post #29

i'm not sure why people expect agents to one shot everything to perfection with just a prompt. There's a reason why we talk about software development lifecycle, design, architecture, testing ... It's because it's been the most reliable way to build and ship software. We shouldn't expect discard this and expect agents to perform well outside of this. I'm treating LLM agents as junior devs who happen to have vast know…

I can one shot a prompt if I write down a nice spec file, Claude can do a lot in one shot. I test it every few months. With enough detail Claude will know what to do.

Opus 5 one shot an access virus B synth clone for me as a single page index.html that is more impressive than anything I have seen as a VST synth.

That is also because I have been obsessed with this synth for almost 30 years. I built clones of it 20 years ago in reaktor. I know how to spec out every aspect of this synth and I gave Claude a 150 page pdf on digital filter design too.

The results are far different than someone who has never used a virus prompting "make me an access virus B synth as a single html page".

We are calling both of these processes "one shot" but this is not even close to the same process.

I suspect this is the LLM discourse in a nutshell. People are using the same vocabulary for wildly different processes.

Re: The Vibe Tax

#80

Post by alehlopeh »

ModernMech wrote: post #34
alehlopeh wrote: post #6

I tried, but I’m not sure I understand. The vibe tax is caused by the model trying to one-shot everything and doing so requires unnecessary tests? How are vibe coders training the model over months? Do you mean their sessions and preferences are being fed back into the RL?

I'll try to explain my experience with this. I've noticed the AI has a tendency to overengineer scaffolding. For instance, I asked it to help me with a refactor, and it erected this massive 100kloc function registry, and then caused GitHub CI to verify the contracts every single commit, which took upwards of 30 minutes (I suspect this proclivity is widespread and has contributed to their recent issues). As if this wa…

Don’t get me wrong, I agree. I see Fable and Opus 5 write garbage code and useless tests all the time. And don’t get me started on comments. I’m just trying to understand how vibe coders are to blame for it.
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