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“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

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Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#81

Post by bigstrat2003 »

IshKebab wrote: post #60
cmdli wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Currently, AIs emulate a less skilled, junior developer. They can certainly get you up and running, but adding junior developers doesn’t speed up a lot of projects. What we are seeing is people falling into the “mythical man month” trap, where they believe that adding another coding entity will reduce the amount of work humans do, but that isn’t how most projects come out. To put it simply, it doesn’t matter if AI do…

Yeah but AI coding does speed up some simple tasks. Sometimes by a lot. But we have to endure these tedious self-congratulatory "mwa ha well it's still not as good as my code" posts. No shit. Nobody is saying AI can write a web browser or a compiler or even many far simpler things. But it can do some very simple things like making basic websites. And sure it gets a lot of stuff wrong and you have to correct it, or fi…

> This post feels like complaining about cruise control because it isn't level 5 autonomy.

It's nothing like that, because cruise control works reliably. There is never a situation where cruise control randomly starts going 90mph or 10mph while I have it set to 60mph. LLMs on the other hand...

This is why I disagree with people who argue (as you did) "it really does speed up simple tasks". No it doesn't, because even for simple tasks I have to check its work every time. In less than the time it takes me to do that, I could've written the code myself. So these tools slow me down, they don't speed me up.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#82

Post by stusmall »

CharlesW wrote: post #54
Etheryte wrote: post #24

At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.

> Then the reality hit. Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

I think that's a great point. There is a place for outsourcing. Some projects and organizations are well suited for it. Some projects end up only using outsourcing at supplementing some parts of the work. Some can't do it for quality or compliance reasons.

I think we will see something similar with LLMs. There will be areas where it will deliver cheaper and faster. There will be areas where it will deliver nothing but disaster. It'll change the industry but not eat it alive. The folks talking about fully autonomous coding on the near horizon are dreaming.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#83

Post by mellosouls »

Please can everybody who dislikes LLMs stop conflating "vibe coding" (fun, see how far you can get without actually coding but not intended for serious projects as per karparthy's original tweet) with the grifter version that sells it without the cautionary note, or with LLM tool usage as a whole class.

They are 3 different things, and neither of the first two represent anything more than a subset of the capabilities of the latter.

If you don't like LLMs that's cool, but at least take some time to understand the context here.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#84

Post by __gcd »

rtfeldman wrote: post #48

I think the bigger "AI hype vs. Reality" gap is about the productivity numbers people casually throw around, like "10x as productive" or even 100x. For example, here are YC partners quoting a company in a batch claiming "100x speedup" in coding performance compared to the previous month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=1837s You can tell this claim is false, because that level of productivity increase w…

To be fair if your benchmark is against demo day, at some point Amdahl's law kicks in regardless of how many multiples you have on engineering. Not sure if I believe the multiple of 10x or 100x anyway, but a better metric is “number of customer feedback loops” is a better metric than “can complete one (1) demo day in X time”. My (non YC) impression is that people are hitting more loops.

Also multiples “up” versus “down” are not symmetric. Airplanes are around 10x faster than cars, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be getting to work in 60 seconds.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#86

Post by mentalgear »

This should be called "vape coding".

Strongly agree with the article, and happy to see so many lucid people, comments and articles on HN that thoroughly deconstruct the "vibe coding" illusion.

Also, Andrej Karpathy really disappointed pushing such brittle BS as a revolution.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#87

Post by softwaredoug »

mr_mitm wrote: post #6

> "Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept. But to produce something reliable, secure, and worth spending money on, you’ll need experienced humans to do the hard work not possible with today’s models. This would have been clear from Karpathy's full statement: > It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing.

Exactly. People have gotten too worked up about this idea without reading the original intention.

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#88

Post by amarcheschi »

exe34 wrote: post #77
booleandilemma wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My first job in the industry was cleaning up a large codebase created overseas by indian developers. Maybe the new kids today will break into the industry by cleaning up messes that have been generated by AI.

the next version of AI will simply make it into a bigger mess.

Now, now, not with this mindset. You have to ask the Ai to fix the mess, and if it doesn't, try again!

Re: “Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

#90

Post by mdaniel »

rtfeldman wrote: post #48

I think the bigger "AI hype vs. Reality" gap is about the productivity numbers people casually throw around, like "10x as productive" or even 100x. For example, here are YC partners quoting a company in a batch claiming "100x speedup" in coding performance compared to the previous month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=1837s You can tell this claim is false, because that level of productivity increase w…

I see your problem (at least according to Yegge's theory): the batch applicants are just too senior. If they were more junior, only then would they benefit from the 100x multiplier. The olds are just too far removed from the enlightened way, you see
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