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Vibe coding is not coding

toolongautomated.com

1–10 of 10 posts

Re: Vibe coding is not coding

#5
> AI-assistance will be particularly helpful and powerful in large codebases (think 100k+ lines of code). It’s simply impossible for any human being to fully understand that amount of code in detail… Even PROs/craftsmen who enjoy writing the code manually can’t make such claims. Our context windows are simply not large enough.

This is a false premise because LLMs do not understand code. Yes, they may be capable of ingesting your entire massive codebase and spitting back out relevant stuff, but they don't actually understand any of it. Vibe coding is just "copy/paste from StackOverflow until it works" on steroids.

Re: Vibe coding is not coding

#6

> AI-assistance will be particularly helpful and powerful in large codebases (think 100k+ lines of code). It’s simply impossible for any human being to fully understand that amount of code in detail… Even PROs/craftsmen who enjoy writing the code manually can’t make such claims. Our context windows are simply not large enough. This is a false premise because LLMs do not understand code . Yes, they may be capable of i…

Refactoring a very large codebase into components that can be understood independently may seem daunting, but not doing it is a matter of unwillingness not incapability.

Re: Vibe coding is not coding

#7

> AI-assistance will be particularly helpful and powerful in large codebases (think 100k+ lines of code). It’s simply impossible for any human being to fully understand that amount of code in detail… Even PROs/craftsmen who enjoy writing the code manually can’t make such claims. Our context windows are simply not large enough. This is a false premise because LLMs do not understand code . Yes, they may be capable of i…

In The Pragmatic Programmer David Thomas and Andrew Hunt called it "Programming by Coincidence" (Chapter 6). Programmers not actively thinking about their code might get it to work, but they don't know why. When it breaks, the programmer doesn't know why and they can't fix it, because they never knew why it worked it in the first place.

Re: Vibe coding is not coding

#8

> AI-assistance will be particularly helpful and powerful in large codebases (think 100k+ lines of code). It’s simply impossible for any human being to fully understand that amount of code in detail… Even PROs/craftsmen who enjoy writing the code manually can’t make such claims. Our context windows are simply not large enough. This is a false premise because LLMs do not understand code . Yes, they may be capable of i…

I believe LLMs are definitely able to, in some vague sense, understand the code they’re working with. If they’re able to produce meaningful output from the input, especially in abstract problems, they get the gist of what’s being coded, not just the tokens. That’s what they’re storing in their inner representations: higher-level view of the text they’re processing.

Re: Vibe coding is not coding

#9

> AI-assistance will be particularly helpful and powerful in large codebases (think 100k+ lines of code). It’s simply impossible for any human being to fully understand that amount of code in detail… Even PROs/craftsmen who enjoy writing the code manually can’t make such claims. Our context windows are simply not large enough. This is a false premise because LLMs do not understand code . Yes, they may be capable of i…

In The Pragmatic Programmer David Thomas and Andrew Hunt called it "Programming by Coincidence" (Chapter 6). Programmers not actively thinking about their code might get it to work, but they don't know why. When it breaks, the programmer doesn't know why and they can't fix it, because they never knew why it worked it in the first place.

And that definitely is one of the most severe risks of the human-assisted coding (when humans barely instruct the AI to do the heavy lifting).