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Vibe coding is mad depressing
81–90 of 168 posts
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#82I feel that agent coding is actually giving a second wind of life to solid principles, “proper” software architecture. Now you can nag the llm to follow them and A- it will actually apply them if well directed and does not mind the (small?) extra complexity upfront B- you pretty much immediately see the effects
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#83This article is not about vibe coding per se, it's about not having strong boundaries between you as the developer, and your client. You should not be allowing the client to dictate how you work, much less them having the permissions to merge in code. This was true before AI too, where clients might say, do X this way, and you should simply say no, because they are paying for your expertise*. It's like hiring a plumb…
Video/audio production here and the exact same rules apply. You can’t let clients dictate your tools any more than you feel you should tell your plumber what they can use to fix your sink. “We use Premiere.” Cool. I use Resolve. If we aren’t collaborating on the edit then this is an irrelevant conversation. You want a final product , that’s what you hired me for my dude. If you want me to slot into your existing edit…
Not all freelancers are good, sometimes you just ask these questions to understand how good the freelancer is.
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#84This article is not about vibe coding per se, it's about not having strong boundaries between you as the developer, and your client. You should not be allowing the client to dictate how you work, much less them having the permissions to merge in code. This was true before AI too, where clients might say, do X this way, and you should simply say no, because they are paying for your expertise*. It's like hiring a plumb…
This is also a story about marketing.
At this point, the level of puffery is on par with claiming a new pair of shoes will turn you into an Olympic athlete.
People are doing this because they’re told it works, and showing up to run a marathon with zero training because they were told the shoes are enough.
Some people may need to figure out the problem here for themselves.
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API. Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested! Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile. Me: it does not compile. AI: Yes, but the code…
Include in the prompt a verifiable testable exit criteria (compiling) and use agentic AI like cursor or codex with this, you’d be surprised what happens :)
Is claude code with both Sonnet and Opus agentic enough? Because it is constantly finding creative ways to ignore direct, repeated instructions ("user asked X but it is hard, let's do Y instead"), implement fake tests ("feature X is complex. we need to test it completely. let's write script that will create files that feature X would have created, then test that files exist"), sabotage and delete working code ("we need to track FD of the open file (runs strace). The FD is 5 (hardcodes 5 in the code instead of implementing anything useful) tests pass now!")
I have not experienced the level of malice and sweet-talking work avoidance from anyone. It apologizes like an alcoholic, then proceeds doubling down.
Can you force it to produce actually useful code? Yes, by repeatedly yelling at it to please follow the instructions. In the process, it will break, delete, or implement hard to find bugs in rest of the codebase.
I'm really curious, if anyone actually has this thing working, or they simply haven't bothered to read the generated code
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API. Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested! Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile. Me: it does not compile. AI: Yes, but the code…
Holy shit, I feel the same. I was arguing with an LLM one day about how to do Kerberos auth on incoming HTTP requests. It kept giving me bogus advice that I could disprove with a tiny snip of code. I would explain. It would react just like yours. After a few rounds, it would give the first answer again. Awful. So infuriating. I had a similar issue with GNU plot. The LLM-suggested scripts frequently had syntax errors.…
You can write any program you want, as long as it is flappy bird in reactjs.
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API. Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested! Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile. Me: it does not compile. AI: Yes, but the code…
It's terrible at the niches I actually have expertise in, which are in mathematics. I'd guess an expert is going to find the flaws in anything it's doing in their field. That being said, if you're just trying to e.g. see what some GUI library can do then it's pretty useful to get something going. I personally would prefer not using it in anything that's not very much a throwaway test project though, but that is my lu…
But doesn't your argument actually mean it is terrible at absolutely everything in a very subtle, convincing way, so that it takes an actual expert in the field to tell that the generated text is not a profound revelation but a bag of nonsense?
Meaning, is the answer in the field I'm not an expert of good, or am I simply being fooled by emoji and nice grammar?
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
I have yet to find the niche where it is "good at the beginning". So far I've mostly tried asking to build C tools that use advanced linux API. Me: hey make this, detailed-spec.txt AI: okidoki (barfs 9k lines in 15 minutes) all done and tested! Me looks at the code, that has feature-sounding names, but all features are stubs, all tests are stubs, and it does not compile. Me: it does not compile. AI: Yes, but the code…
I'm not sure what you're using. I've used Claude in agent mode to port a very complex and spaghetti coded C application to nicely structured C++. The original code was so intertwined that I didn't want to figure out so I had shelved the project until AI came along. It wasn't super bad at converting the code but even it struggled with some of the logic. Luckily, I had it design a test suite to compare the outputs of t…
In my case that was Claude Code with Opus.
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#89This article is not about vibe coding per se, it's about not having strong boundaries between you as the developer, and your client. You should not be allowing the client to dictate how you work, much less them having the permissions to merge in code. This was true before AI too, where clients might say, do X this way, and you should simply say no, because they are paying for your expertise*. It's like hiring a plumb…
>It's like hiring a plumber then trying to tell them how to fix the toilet.
And continuing to shit and piss and puke in the toilet while they are trying to fix it.
Re: Vibe coding is mad depressing
#90I recently ported c-rrb to c#, and when the first port was done Unused ai to help me refine the code. It was a pleasant experience, apart from the AI every three or four prompts introduced subtle bugs. In the end, Claude and I managed to speed up the code by almost 2x.
The worst was pushing the tail into the tree. My original code was pretty slow, but every time AI changed more than 4 lines it introduced subtle bugs.
I did not actually think ai would be that useful.