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All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

varunraghu.com

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Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#91

Post by simianwords »

amradio1989 wrote: post #83

Actually, I think hand-coders will still be around in future generations. There are still people who hand sew, weave baskets, and blacksmith. You will still have people who code by hand. Coding is at the stage of maturing from commodity to a craft. This generation will pass it on to the next generation, and so on. As with all crafts, there will be a great demand for quality craftsmanship. And it will command a much h…

Your analogy doesn’t exactly work because code is more utilitarian than say a painting or sculpture

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#92

Post by spaceman_2020 »

_mu wrote: post #59
spaceman_2020 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have about 6 months of actual coding knowledge via bootcamp. But I’ve seen enough repos that I know what good practices look like. That’s about enough for me to build out fairly complex products very fast with AI (Claude Code). Claude Code often makes some fundamental mistakes that you wouldn’t be able to catch if you didn’t have any coding experience (like today, it was trying to save large images directly in the…

> But I’ve seen enough repos that I know what good practices look like. This is the danger - I get why you think it's true, but it's not true. I've mentored many many bootcamp grads. The biggest danger with y'all is you don't know what you don't know. Even if you are a really good bootcamp grad and you have good taste and ability, you do not have experience . Software experience is measured really in years and decade…

I agree. But I’m not making enterprise software - I’m making fun little apps where people can virtually try on clothes. As long as I keep my customers data secure (which I do), I think its okay to vibe code this stuff away.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#93

Post by sixtyj »

actsasbuffoon wrote: post #85
cortesoft wrote: post #35

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree that this is how the experience is right now. I don't necessarily think it will stay this way, though. The tools are so new, we shouldn't be so sure that the future versions won't allow non-coders to code successfully.

I disagree, at least for the next 5 years or so. Even with humans, it’s very common to ask them for something and get something back that’s completely different than what you wanted. Short of reading your mind, AI is going to require a lot of info to get the desired result. So someone is going to have to gather requirements and break them down into a clear, well thought out set of instructions for the computer. That’…

In the past, we depended on editors that were easy to switch. Now coders are becoming dependent on tools that are hard to switch off.

And I’ve realized that even when I try to stay in control, I often don’t read the output code—I just copy and paste.

Metaphorically, it’s like pilots who know how to use the autopilot, but can’t switch back to manual control. That’s the generation of coders we’re raising.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#94

Post by queenkjuul »

mikeocool wrote: post #41
chamomeal wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’ll cheat a lot when writing unit tests. Particularly “agentic” tools like cursor. It’ll get a test to pass, even if it’s against a laughably incorrect implementation. I’ve ended up with tests called stuff like “foobar successfully returns impossible value that suggests programmer error” lmao

My favorite thing Claude code has been doing recently is adding second totally separate implementation of whatever I asked it to write tests for, and writing the tests against that. Conveniently, when it then changes the original implementation, the tests don’t fail!

This is just about the only type of test i see it write lol

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#95

Post by queenkjuul »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #72
lordnacho wrote: post #10

> at first i was very hopeful i can finally 'build' now with my minimal tech skills This is the problem. If you couldn't have coded it slowly in the old world, you will have problems coding it in AI world. However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very…

> However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools. This has not been my experience and it is very frustrating…

Same. I mostly just don't believe people when they say they get good results. Or i guess, i think my definition of "good results" must be very different than other people's.

My manager uses cursor and Claude for everything. I can always tell. He pretends like he wrote it himself even, but he obviously didn't. I end up rewriting big chunks of it, or finding all sorts of baffling quirks during review.

Idk, I'm just not at all willing to settle for "good enough," which means Claude doesn't really save me any time. If I'm going to do it, I'm going to do it right.

It's a good rubber duck, and it's good for scaffolding new projects (arguably), and it's good at converting code from one language to another or for generating a one-off bash script or something. That's about all i can get out of it.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#96

Post by level09 »

cramsession wrote: post #7

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

But is it really vibe coding if you’re carefully building step by step and checking everything along the way? I feel like the kind of vibe coding people usually mean is more about blindly iterating until things work and patching bugs as they pop up—where you eventually get an app that runs, but it’s so messy that even a senior dev would struggle to audit or fully understand it.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#97

Post by OutOfHere »

LLM coding, if done right, is an extremely involved process, perhaps more involved than coding it yourself. The professional result is that the code can be produced with significantly higher quality than if I were to code it myself.

It takes significant human effort to thoroughly understand, define, and refine specifications to recursively satisfy all important feedback from multiple LLMs. Only then can the coding begin, and the actual coding then takes just a couple of minutes. Following this, the code has to be thoroughly reviewed, perhaps also slightly refactored. Lastly, sometimes some follow-up issues have to be created to improve the feature further before it is shippable.

As with anything else, the quality of the result is proportional to the level of effort you put in.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#98

Post by bluefirebrand »

queenkjuul wrote: post #95
bluefirebrand wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools. This has not been my experience and it is very frustrating…

Same. I mostly just don't believe people when they say they get good results. Or i guess, i think my definition of "good results" must be very different than other people's. My manager uses cursor and Claude for everything. I can always tell. He pretends like he wrote it himself even, but he obviously didn't. I end up rewriting big chunks of it, or finding all sorts of baffling quirks during review. Idk, I'm just not…

My biggest beef is that I feel like settling for "good enough" is a one way ticket to vulnerability town

"Good enough" often has AWS keys embedded into the code itself, stupid things like that

I hold myself to a higher standard

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#99

Post by cramsession »

level09 wrote: post #96
cramsession wrote: post #7

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

But is it really vibe coding if you’re carefully building step by step and checking everything along the way? I feel like the kind of vibe coding people usually mean is more about blindly iterating until things work and patching bugs as they pop up—where you eventually get an app that runs, but it’s so messy that even a senior dev would struggle to audit or fully understand it.

The truth is I don't check everything along the way! That's part of my high scale, I can now work on a dozen projects instead of a couple because I'm freed up from having to read all of the code. A huge shift in mindset for sure, but it's been working great.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#100

Post by cortesoft »

dmitrygr wrote: post #66
cortesoft wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sure, if you granted me odds commiserate with my statement that "you can't be so sure", meaning I would get like 99-1 odds. I wasn't saying it will certainly reach the point where non-coders can code, I am saying we can't be certain it won't just because it can't yet

1:1 odds, but i'll give you a huge (tech-wise) time horizon of, say, 3 years?

Ha, no I am thinking more like 10-20 years, or maybe even longer. But I know from experience that 10-20 years goes by faster than you think.
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