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Vibe Coding Is Overrated

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Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#81

Post by hajile »

johnfn wrote: post #74
hajile wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the learning to fish problem. If you understand git well, a solution isn't very hard (eg, rev-parse each branch and compare to the rev-parse of the current branch and deleting if they match). If you don't understand git well, you shouldn't be turning into a script-kiddy pasting in whatever the AI spits out and hoping that it works.

You are using "script-kiddy" as an ad hominem rather than making an argument with proper justification. "script-kiddy" refers to website vandalism and cracking. That has nothing to do with using AI to learn what rev-parse does. Learning about `git rev-parse` through documentation and learning about `git rev-parse` through AI fundamentally have the same outcome at the end of the day: you have learned how to use `git r…

I’m using it as a pejorative (not an ad hominem) for people who blindly trust unknown code because they don’t have any real understanding. It’s a shortcut for a whole, well-known and obvious argument about the danger of playing with things being your understanding.

http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/S/script-kiddies.html

If you are using AI to learn, understand, and verify what it spit out, by definition, you aren’t a script kiddy. My argument was about how you use AI rather than a commentary on if you should.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#82

Post by hajile »

johnfn wrote: post #73
hajile wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't understand what the copy/paste is actually doing, you shouldn't be script-kiddying it in your project. If you do understand, then the AI is just quickly writing what you already intended. If you are having to understand something you didn't understand, it's probably taking a bunch of time to read and verify what the script does. This can be a good learning experience and reveal unknown unknowns, but prob…

This seems false to me. I vibe code shell scripts all the time. I understand what it's doing perfectly, but it would have taken me ages to look up all the bash syntax and get it all correct. Is it one square bracket pair around if statements, or two?

You are in the category I mentioned that already know the answer and are using AI to write the code you already understand faster. This is rather different from “vibe coding” in my opinion.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#83

Post by IshKebab »

hajile wrote: post #58
IshKebab wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No, there's a very very long tail of tasks that are too niche for a proper tool to exist for but it would be annoying effort to figure out yourself. My most recent example of this: write a script to delete all git branches that point to HEAD. Go ahead see how long it takes you to figure out the command for that, because it took me under 60 seconds with AI.

This is the learning to fish problem. If you understand git well, a solution isn't very hard (eg, rev-parse each branch and compare to the rev-parse of the current branch and deleting if they match). If you don't understand git well, you shouldn't be turning into a script-kiddy pasting in whatever the AI spits out and hoping that it works.

> eg, rev-parse each branch and compare to the rev-parse of the current branch and deleting if they match

Yeah now go and do that in under 60 seconds.

You seem to be a bit confused. I understand Git very well. But AI can simply do this much faster than I could.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#84

Post by anon22981 »

jdgoesmarching wrote: post #49
ramoz wrote: post #38

> Vibe coding is now a burgeoning tech movement. Will it last? Only time will tell. Was this vibe-blogged? 'Vibe coding' is here to stay and the future of software development is assistant-led interfaces. I pair program daily with Claude Code on a distributed systems & a handful of other apps as needs arise. Most of my work is puppeteering, as well as careful directing. & I can't sit blindly, but we're producing vali…

We really need to lock down semantics here, but I wouldn’t describe what you’re doing as vibe coding. Seems like we’re need a term for something between basic tab autocomplete and purely vibing without glancing at the code. If only to have separate conferences in 2-3 years.

My thoughts exactly reading these comments. Generating scripts is a very good use for LLMs, but I was under the impression that vibe coding generally referred to building whole products with just prompts. It’s a very different beast to do a small script (or a todo app) than to do a relatively more complex application.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#85

Post by Jensson »

skydhash wrote: post #77
johnfn wrote: post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are using "script-kiddy" as an ad hominem rather than making an argument with proper justification. "script-kiddy" refers to website vandalism and cracking. That has nothing to do with using AI to learn what rev-parse does. Learning about `git rev-parse` through documentation and learning about `git rev-parse` through AI fundamentally have the same outcome at the end of the day: you have learned how to use `git r…

> Learning about `git rev-parse` through documentation and learning about `git rev-parse` through AI fundamentally have the same outcome at the end of the day: you have learned how to use `git rev-parse`. But with a non-zero chance of hallucination.

If you learn many things that way the chance grows to 100%.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#86

Post by ramoz »

anon22981 wrote: post #84
jdgoesmarching wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We really need to lock down semantics here, but I wouldn’t describe what you’re doing as vibe coding. Seems like we’re need a term for something between basic tab autocomplete and purely vibing without glancing at the code. If only to have separate conferences in 2-3 years.

My thoughts exactly reading these comments. Generating scripts is a very good use for LLMs, but I was under the impression that vibe coding generally referred to building whole products with just prompts. It’s a very different beast to do a small script (or a todo app) than to do a relatively more complex application.

Most of what I do is prompting. It feels vibey because I can do whatever I want while the agent works

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#87

Post by egeozcan »

salgernon wrote: post #11
m348e912 wrote: post #3

Vibe coding is definitely problematic for someone who isn't a strong coder, aka me. Recently for fun, I used ChatGPT to code a python script to scrape another news site and render it in the style of HackerNews. It took 21 iterations of code updates to get a working version. It isn't bad but doesn't pull the latest articles (I don't know why) and hell if I could debug it.

With experience and ADHD I learned to think in units that can be debugged separately. The experience tells me where those lines should be drawn, and the ADHD taught me to avoid creating units that are too big to fit in my head.

ADHD teaches me a lot of things but I can never pause to recall them. I can never pause. Few weeks ago someone told me that pausing a few seconds before starting to talk allows her to express herself much better and that people react positively to it. I simply cannot do it. Impossible.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#88

Post by egeozcan »

skydhash wrote: post #79
_bin_ wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Unfortunately this is consistent for non-ultra-mainstream langs. They’re next to unusable for complex Haskell. If you want to vibe code, it’s Python/typescript/react or nothing.

I wonder how well they do for Go and Java. The first is a boring language where there's little to none chance to stray from the default. The second is verbose, but with strict rules on the syntax.

They are fine with Go. Not with whole codebases but libraries/functions around a thousand lines of code are written perfectly with tests (Although, I always say, never let the LLM write the tests AND the code, or at least write your own tests in addition to what it generates).

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#89

Post by int_19h »

sharkbot wrote: post #18

There are parallels to the “rapid application development” push of the 90’s. Visual Basic, Tcl/Tk, Python with Tkinter, HyperCard; all of them promised shortening the development cycle and democratizing computing. Code was interpreted rather than compiled, dynamically typed rather than statically, and a lot of batteries were included. It sorta worked, and sorta didn’t. I’m seeing no evidence that this round is differ…

I don't think it's a particularly good comparison. RAD made many things easier, but it still required you to understand coding. Nor were all those things that you list universal. E.g. Delphi was arguably the pinnacle of 90s RAD, yet it was compiled and statically typed (and stricter about it than e.g. C++). VB6 could be compiled and was opt-in typed. And so on.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#90

Post by int_19h »

hajile wrote: post #82
johnfn wrote: post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This seems false to me. I vibe code shell scripts all the time. I understand what it's doing perfectly, but it would have taken me ages to look up all the bash syntax and get it all correct. Is it one square bracket pair around if statements, or two?

You are in the category I mentioned that already know the answer and are using AI to write the code you already understand faster. This is rather different from “vibe coding” in my opinion.

It's different by the canonical definition - you aren't supposed to review the code when "vibe coding", only the app behavior.
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