Vibe Coding Is Overrated • Hacker News Board

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#91

Post by atonse » Sun, May 04, 2025, 2:16 PM UTC

manmal wrote: post #54

atonse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one time so far that I actually implemented a full feature using only vibe coding (and it wasn't trivial), I had to be very specific about what I wanted, and it was in a very widely used stack (React/NextJS), it was a very common feature (sorting, filtering, pagination on a table) and it worked beautifully. But it felt magical the one time it happened. Every other time, I'm mostly using tab autocomplete and that…

Your last sentence is a bit of a gut punch tbh - I was meaning to get more familiar with Elixir for side projects, and I’ve made a few small web apps with LiveViews. Absolutely love it, even though I don’t feel I‘ve grasped the language fully yet. But some research shows that most LLMs don’t support Elixir that well. But since my free time is so extremely limited, it would be really nice to get better LLM and agent s…

Elixir has been my main language since 2017 and it’s been amazing to work with all these years. I’ve built and delivered so much value and the quality of libraries in general feels much more stable than JS land with its ever changing upgrades. I’ve never had to worry about leaving a code base untouched for 6 months. Whereas in JS land I’d have to groan about half the stuff not working, some new transpiler breaking changes, blah blah and just give up.

But developer ergonomics rough edges mostly around LiveView, and partially language servers and type support (which recently had some developments) and bad LLM support (no fix yet) are finally causing me to question whether I should look elsewhere.

The underlying tech (scalability, echo, etc) has still been excellent.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#92

Post by johnfn » Sun, May 04, 2025, 6:47 PM UTC

hajile wrote: post #81

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…

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 s…

It is an ad hominem. "you shouldn't be turning into a script-kiddy" is guilt by association, see Wikipedia[1] or ask AI[2]. If you think that learning from AI is dangerous you should articulate why you think that. I find it neither "well-known" or "obvious".

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ad_hominem#Guilt_by_associatio... [2]: https://chatgpt.com/share/6817b741-8a80-800c-8d5d-1b315806dd...

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#93

Post by TimTheTinker » Thu, May 08, 2025, 8:04 PM UTC

manmal wrote: post #54

atonse wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The one time so far that I actually implemented a full feature using only vibe coding (and it wasn't trivial), I had to be very specific about what I wanted, and it was in a very widely used stack (React/NextJS), it was a very common feature (sorting, filtering, pagination on a table) and it worked beautifully. But it felt magical the one time it happened. Every other time, I'm mostly using tab autocomplete and that…

Your last sentence is a bit of a gut punch tbh - I was meaning to get more familiar with Elixir for side projects, and I’ve made a few small web apps with LiveViews. Absolutely love it, even though I don’t feel I‘ve grasped the language fully yet. But some research shows that most LLMs don’t support Elixir that well. But since my free time is so extremely limited, it would be really nice to get better LLM and agent s…

Honestly, I'd strongly suggest not using an LLM to get started on a new language. It'll be harder at first, but you'll build intuition about how things work under the covers (especially important when the runtime environment is unique like the Erlang OTP), and you'll build your ability to code idiomatically.

Instead, read lots of great code in that language and incrementally work to understand and imitate its style. The standard library and any popular tools written in it would be good places to start.