Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like • Hacker News Board

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#951

Post by jplusequalt » Sat, May 09, 2026, 11:28 PM UTC

gchamonlive wrote: post #912

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #885

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You are pitting your randomly acquired will power and your in large part unintentional stumbling through life against all of human kind's psychology knowledge, against billions of dollars spent on advertising and advertising research. That is at this point tens maybe hundreds of millions of years of acquired human knowledge how to manipulate you versus your very randomly acquired 'will power'. Have you seen the quote…

So if you are helpless in a world dominated by the billionaires and the clerics of psychological research, what's the hope for the average person? Should we just accept our fate and waste away in endless Instagram feeds, alcohol, drugs, gambling and all forms of addiction? These need to be managed at society level, banning or taxing goods. But no amount of regulation can compensate for someone determined to destroy h…

>So yeah, it's your fault

This framing is doing so much PR work for the alcohol/tobacco/social media companies of the world. Effectively removes any blame from the corporations making billions of dollars off harming our societies.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#952

Post by gchamonlive » Sun, May 10, 2026, 3:36 AM UTC

jplusequalt wrote: post #951

gchamonlive wrote: post #912

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if you are helpless in a world dominated by the billionaires and the clerics of psychological research, what's the hope for the average person? Should we just accept our fate and waste away in endless Instagram feeds, alcohol, drugs, gambling and all forms of addiction? These need to be managed at society level, banning or taxing goods. But no amount of regulation can compensate for someone determined to destroy h…

>So yeah, it's your fault This framing is doing so much PR work for the alcohol/tobacco/social media companies of the world. Effectively removes any blame from the corporations making billions of dollars off harming our societies.

It doesn't, or it shouldn't, but you are right, they subvert any responsibility the individual has so they can offload their responsibility into them. But my mistake here is not realising that people under abstinence doesn't behave as if they had any choice. In any case, my original comment was about social media only, which I think has a lot of psychological pressure over the individual, but doesn't have the pharmacological component.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#953

Post by gchamonlive » Sun, May 10, 2026, 12:53 PM UTC

jplusequalt wrote: post #950

gchamonlive wrote: post #814

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they don't want to, go for it. I'm all up for the freedom to choose your poison, as long as it doesn't restrict someone else's freedom of choice (like jumping off a building and landing on someone, killing you both). What I'm saying is that if you recognize booze is bad for you, but you don't do anything about it because heck there is a billion dollar industry behind it, everyone drinks and you'll die anyway, IDK…

>there is a billion dollar industry behind it, everyone drinks and you'll die anyway, IDK it seems to me like it's mostly your fault This is an absurd statement. What good is the willpower of a single human in the face of a billion dollars of capital aimed at a society with a penchant for drinking? People are not isolated systems. We live in a society.

> because you'd know where yo get help if you really wanted to. That is, of course, assuming where you live has good policies for treating people with such diseases.

You are probably not the kind of person that would read "Antichrist" and think that Nietzche was a satanist. Or that just because it's called National Socialist party, that the nazis where left-leaning, I'd wager. So why read statements in isolation?

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#954

Post by adithyassekhar » Sun, May 10, 2026, 2:52 PM UTC

rvz wrote: post #925

adithyassekhar wrote: post #468

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I would prefer hedge funds and traders to vibe code their software. Heck I am willing to do it if I mist.

You would never say that if you interviewed at a hedge fund or quant firm and they'll laugh at you before they look at your resume.

I am sorry I hurt you, or confused you. See, the intention of my post was to convey how bad of a programmer I will be and how badly I would vibe code their software that they lose all their money. Because I am not a huge fan of hedge funds. Or anything that makes the 1% richer. It was meant as a joke not a job request.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#955

Post by robotresearcher » Sun, May 10, 2026, 10:05 PM UTC

gspr wrote: post #949

robotresearcher wrote: post #941

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are syntactically well-formed C programs that are not sound programs because their behavior is undefined. Or, rephrasing: a subset of all parseable C programs contain 'do whatever, I dunno'. I interpret this as a lack of precision. One could take the position that specifying precisely 'do whatever, I dunno' counts as perfectly precise. But then a language that was entirely UB would count as precise, which would…

Nobody seriously interprets "the C programming language" as "parseable C". Of course there's parseable, undefined C, and of course it's very imprecise. It's not relevant. Now consider sound, in-spec C. Versus natural language.

Ok I’ll do the same move and show why it doesn’t persuade me.

Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. The rest is not relevant to evaluating the precision of natural language.

Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why?

Perhaps it’s a matter of degree, not a categorical difference.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#956

Post by eric_cc » Mon, May 11, 2026, 1:25 PM UTC

nozzlegear wrote: post #551

eric_cc wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also just talk it out loud to Claude while you’re on a walk getting some sunshine. Done.

Now you're working when you should be taking a break and enjoying your surroundings. Not good!

That’s not true. I would not treat a walk where I am working with Claude Code as a break. It’s just as much work as desk work is. You still owe yourself a proper break.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#957

Post by eric_cc » Mon, May 11, 2026, 1:28 PM UTC

dodu_ wrote: post #613

eric_cc wrote: post #406

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can also just talk it out loud to Claude while you’re on a walk getting some sunshine. Done.

I'd rather just be an actual schizophrenic at that point. It seems like less of a mental illness. Just be outside and present.

So stay inside like prison until I can be outside and present? No thank you. I enjoy mindful meditative walks as well. But I would never force myself to only take such walks. Now that I can be outside and work I will do so precisely for my mental health. Being stationary at a desk all day when you don’t have to be is much more mental illness-like in my opinion.

Re: Vibe coding and agentic engineering are getting closer than I'd like

#958

Post by gspr » Fri, May 15, 2026, 5:37 AM UTC

robotresearcher wrote: post #955

gspr wrote: post #949

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nobody seriously interprets "the C programming language" as "parseable C". Of course there's parseable, undefined C, and of course it's very imprecise. It's not relevant. Now consider sound, in-spec C. Versus natural language.

Ok I’ll do the same move and show why it doesn’t persuade me. Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. The rest is not relevant to evaluating the precision of natural language. Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why? Perhaps it’s a matter of degree, not a categorical diff…

> Consider the subset of natural language that has strictly defined semantics. This would include, for example, talking in about the arithmetic of real numbers. Does that exclusion feel different in the natural language case? Why?

Not really, no. I just think we have better ways of expressing well-defined mathematical concepts like that than natural language when the recipient is a machine.