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Comment by rs186 | Hacker News Reader

A single tweet with lots of analogy, with no screenshot/screen recording/code examples whatsoever. These are just words. Are we just discussing programming based on vibe?

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It's influencer culture. It's like when people watch those "software developer" youtubers and pretend it's educational. It's reality television for computer people.

> reality television for computer people

Complete with computer people kayfabe!

Reality television plus cooking show, exactly.

Cooking shows are a perfect analogy for this stuff. For some reason I never connected the highly-edited-mass-appeal "watch someone do skilled work" videos on YouTube with Food Network style content until just now, but you're right they're totally scratching the same basic itch. They make people feel like they're learning something just by watching, while there is really no substitute for actually just doing the thing.

Not to mention cooking show hosts often recommend or outright sell/endorse their tools.

And the sad/crazy thing is that AI assisted coding/refactoring does seem to stray substantially over the line of observation vs participation to the point that the experience is largely defined by "learning by watching"

Prompt engineering (to the extent that it results in the difference between applied LLM success vs failure) requires the human to truly grok what they're getting help on - the current top comment notes that the model applied more or less exactly the same diff they would have done, based on deep understanding of the exact codebase being modified - and also have some level of intuition about how LLMs work.

Someone just treating the model and context like an obscure TV remote and pressing all the buttons to see what they do, will get a result, and it might seem interesting, but will it be ontologically correct? Good question!

I think the interest has more to do with who is doing the tweeting, don't you think?

Reminder: "appeal to authority" is a classical logical fallacy.

For me, I don't know this person, which means that all the words are completely meaningless.

Which is exactly the point.

I agree with you that the tweet is basically useless but what they have done there is not an appeal to authority fallacy. They have only explained why it’s popular. Arguably your response is a genetic fallacy.

I don't think it's really an appeal to authority. No one is saying it must be true because this guy says its true. However, when a very respected figure in software engineer culture like Steve Yegge gives an opinion, that is more noteworthy than when random joe schmo gives his opinion. The fact that you don't know who he is means it's not interesting to you. Clearly, it's noteworthy to others.

When Karpathy and Yegge speak, I listen. When they say approximately the same things, I listen carefully.

Exception: Be very careful not to confuse "deferring to an authority on the issue" with the appeal to authority fallacy. Remember, a fallacy is an error in reasoning. Dismissing the council of legitimate experts and authorities turns good skepticism into denialism. The appeal to authority is a fallacy in argumentation, but deferring to an authority is a reliable heuristic that we all use virtually every day on issues of relatively little importance. There is always a chance that any authority can be wrong, that’s why the critical thinker accepts facts provisionally. It is not at all unreasonable (or an error in reasoning) to accept information as provisionally true by credible authorities. Of course, the reasonableness is moderated by the claim being made (i.e., how extraordinary, how important) and the authority (how credible, how relevant to the claim).

Quotation from https://www.logicallyfallacious.com/logicalfallacies/Appeal-...

Where are you going with this? The authority provided no evidence so noting the logical fallacy is correct here. In this scenario, people are appealing to authority because there's nothing else to count on.

The tweet is a domain expert talking about his experiences using a product.

If (hyperbole) Picasso wrote a tweet saying certain canvases work great for certain tasks, and some random internet dude counters with A single tweet with lots of analogy, with no images/painting examples whatsoever. These are just words. Are we just discussing art based on vibe? ...

I will read that comment in the comic book guy voice.

> For me, I don't know this person, which means that all the words are completely meaningless.

Because you don't know who Yegge is, the words are meaningless to you? So a body of text is meaningful only if you know who the author is? That's...lame.

> vibe

People do literally call it vibe coding.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding (it turns out there is a wikipedia page already although suspect it'll be gone soon)

This is quite possibly one of the most disturbing things I've seen in awhile.

Sure, for fun and one-off private apps this is fine, but the second that some buzzed-on-the-sides haircut guy thinks this is the way, the chaos will rival a Hollywood disaster movie.

>"The practice defies the belief in the software industry that software engineering demands great skill."

But actual software engineering does demand great skill. What "vibe coders" are doing isn't engineering. It's not even programming. It's like calling yourself a chef when you microwaved a frozen meal.

Not even programming? That’s even better!

Great engineers know that code is 10-20% of the whole solution to a problem and it doesn’t matter too much. Code is not an asset, it’s a liability.

>Code is not an asset, it’s a liability.

Then AI generated code is a time bomb. Maintainability? Who needs that if you can sell the company quickly enough, I guess.

Always has been! Not sure what AI changes here.

It encourages developers to not worry about understanding the code they write. At least now, there's someone around (typically) who can figure things out.

But as more developers rely on AI and their skills atrophy, if entire products are being built with AI, eventually no one will exist who can fix the software when it breaks. Not only that, but anything that requires knowledge outside the training of the AI will be impossible (or at best, extremely difficult/costly) to implement.

You’re right, my point is for most software it doesn’t matter. I can envision some software not even checking code in to source control, just prompts, in essence jumping to a higher level of abstraction, just like we don’t analyze what the v8 jit does to js when it emits machine code. (There are some who do, and no doubt there will be people who will look and/or care, just like there will be software that needs to be written in an exact way in assembly today.)

I'm amused by all the flags this article has. It reinforces this belief that "vibe-coding" isn't something that evolved organically, but was forced. I wouldn't go as far as to call it "astroturfed", I believe it was a spontaneous emergence, but otherwise it feels like an effort by a disproportionately small group of people desperately trying to make vibe-coding a thing for whatever reason.

it's definitely more organic than you think. I know smart productive people doing it as purely a 0 to 1 thing.

What, someone cannot utter an opinion anymore?

I find that question ironic.

But isn't that the point?

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