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Vibe coding creates fatigue?

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Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#91

Post by QuercusMax »

pyrophane wrote: post #78
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

> I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. You didn’t find that to be a little too much unfamiliarity? With the couple of projects that I’ve worked on that were developed using an “agent first” approach I found that if I added too many new things at once it would put me in a difficult space where I didn’t feel confident enough to evaluate what…

I'm assuming this is the case where they are working in an existing codebase written by other humans. I've been in this situation a lot recently, and Copilot is a pretty big help to figure out particularly fiddly bits of syntax - but it's also really stupid suggests a lot of stuff that doesn't work at all.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#92

Post by QuercusMax »

OptionOfT wrote: post #80
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

If you do this on your personal stuff, eh, I wouldn't do it, but you do you. But we're seeing that this becomes OK in the workplace, and I don't believe it is. If you propose these changes that would've normally taken you 2 weeks as your own in a PR, then I, as the reviewer, don't know where your knowledge ends and the AI's hallucinations begin. Do you need to do all of these things? Or is it because the most commonl…

A lot of that stuff can be handled by linters and static analysis tools.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#93

Post by tinfoilhatter »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #69
habinero wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's the joke. "vibe coding" only sounds cool if you don't know how to code but horrific if you do.

> "vibe coding" only sounds cool if you don't know how to code but horrific if you do. Disagree. Vibe coding is even more powerful if you know what you're doing. Because if you know what you're doing, and you keep up with the trends, you also know when to use it, and when not to. When to look at the code or when to just "vibe" test it and move on.

What does "vibe" testing code entail exactly? Apparently you don't look at code when you're "vibe" testing it based on this statement:

> When to look at the code or when to just "vibe" test it and move on.

I'm really curious how you're ensuring the code output by whatever LLM you're using, is actually doing what you think it's doing.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#94

Post by hansmayer »

observationist wrote: post #34
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

There's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it m…

> I'm not a professional SWE

It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for everyone - even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right?

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#95

Post by bigstrat2003 »

NitpickLawyer wrote: post #69
habinero wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I mean, that's the joke. "vibe coding" only sounds cool if you don't know how to code but horrific if you do.

> "vibe coding" only sounds cool if you don't know how to code but horrific if you do. Disagree. Vibe coding is even more powerful if you know what you're doing. Because if you know what you're doing, and you keep up with the trends, you also know when to use it, and when not to. When to look at the code or when to just "vibe" test it and move on.

If you know how to program, vibe coding is useless. It only ever can produce worse results than you could've made yourself, or the same results but with more effort (because reviewing the code is harder than creating it).

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#96

Post by wiether »

blitz_skull wrote: post #84
Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

I think it's less "going fast" and more "going fast forever." To your point, you can blow through damn-near anything pretty quickly now. Now I actually find myself problem-solving for nearly 8 hours every day. My brain feels fried at the end of the day way more than it used to.

Same feeling here!

I used to be like: "well, this thing will take me at least half a day, it's already 16:00, so I'll better do something quiet to cooldown to the end of the day and tackle this issue tomorrow". I'll leave the office in an regular mood and take the night to get ready for tomorrow.

Now I'm like: "17:30? 30 minutes? I have time to tackle another issue today!" I'll leave the office exhausted and take the night to try and recover from the day I had.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#97

Post by lenerdenator »

I find the increased speed to be an opportunity to slow down and focus on certain things, particularly the architectural changes of the feature I'm looking to introduce.

If you're able to blaze through feature tickets using GenAI on existing projects of any major complexity, there's almost certainly something which would produce better code that you're skipping.

I have plenty of info and agents for Claude Code to take into account when I use it to make features in our projects, but what it can't know is the cadence of what our business partners expect, the unknown unknowns, conversations that humans have about the projects, and the way end-users feel about the project. My job is to direct it with those factors in mind, and the work to account for those factors takes time.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#98

Post by lubujackson »

xnorswap wrote: post #13

I feel this. I take breaks. But I also get drawn to overworking ( as I'm doing right now ), which I justify because "I'm just keeping an eye on the agent". It's hard work. It's hard to explain what's hard about it. Watching as a machine does in an hour what would take me a week. But also watching to stop the machine spin around doing nothing for ages because it's got itself in a mess. Watching for when it gets lazy,…

I think it taxes your brain in two different ways - the mental model of the code is updated in the same way as a PR from a co-worker updates code, but in a minute instead of every now and then. So you need to recalibrate your understanding and think through edge cases to determine if the approach is what you want or if it will support future changes etc. And this happens after every prompt. The older/more experienced you are, the harder it is to NOT DO THIS thinking even if you are intending to "vibe" something, since it is baked into your programming flow.

The other tax is the intermittent downtime when you are waiting for the LLM to finish. In the olden days you might have productive downtime waiting for code to compile or a test suite to run. While this was happening you might review your assumptions or check your changes or realize you forgot an edge case and start working on a patch immediately.

When an LLM is running, you can't do this. Your changes are being done on your behalf. You don't know how long the LLM will take, or how you might rephrase your prompt if it does the wrong thing until you see and review the output. At best, you can context switch to some other problem but then 30 seconds later you come back into "review mode" and have to think architecturally about the changes made then "prompt mode" to determine how to proceed.

When you are doing basic stuff all of this is ok, but when you are trying to structure a large project or deal with multiple competing concerns you quickly overwhelm your ability to think clearly because you are thinking deeply about things while getting interrupted by completed LLM tasks or context switching.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#99

Post by quotemstr »

Zigurd wrote: post #10

I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag. I recently used a coding agent on a project where I was using an unfamiliar language, framework, API, and protocol. It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing because it…

> I don't want to be that contrarian guy, but I find it energizing to go faster. For example, being able to blast through a list of niggling defects that need to be fixed is no longer a stultifying drag.

It's often that just getting started at all on a task is the hardest part. That's why writers often produce a "vomit draft" (https://thewritepractice.com/vomit-first-draft/) just to get into the right frame of mind to do real writing.

Using a coding agent to fix something trivial serves the same purpose.

Re: Vibe coding creates fatigue?

#100

Post by Izkata »

colechristensen wrote: post #65
habinero wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's very funny that I can't tell if this is sarcasm or not. "Just tell it to do better."

Oh I'm not at all joking. It's better at evaluating quality than producing it blindly. Tell it to grade it's work and it can tell you most of the stuff it did wrong. Tell it to grade it's work again. Keep going through the cycle and you'll get significantly better code. The thinking should probably include this kind of introspection (give me a million dollars for training and I'll write a paper) but if it doesn't you…

An experiment on that from a year ago: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42584400
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