I've used AI with "niche" programming questions and it's always a total let down. I truly don't understand this "vibe coding" movement unless everyone is building todo apps.
Good architecture plans help. Telling it where in an existing code base it can find things to pattern match against is also fantastic.
I'll often end up with a task that looks something like this:
* Implement Foo with a relation to FooBar.
* Foo should have X, Y, Z features
* We have an existing pattern for Fidget in BigFidget. Look at that for implementation
* Make sure you account for A, B, C. Check Widget for something similar.
It works surprisingly well.
Increasingly I find that AI at this point is good enough I am rarely stepping in to "do it myself".
This is they key answer right here.
LLMs are great at interpolating and extrapolating based on context. Interpolating is far less error-prone. The problem with interpolating is that you need to start with accurate points so that interpolating between them leads to expected and relatively accurate estimates.
What we are seeing is the result of developers being oblivious to higher-level aspects of coding, such as software architecture, proper naming conventions, disciplined choice of dependencies and dependency management, and even best practices. Even basic requirements-gathering.
Their own personal experience is limited to diving into existing code bases and patching them here and there. They often screw up the existing software architecture because their lack of insight and awareness leads them to post PRs that get the job done at the expense of polluting the whole codebase into an unmanageable mess.
So these developers crack open an LLM and prompt it to generate code. They use their insights and personal experience to guide their prompts. Their experience reflects what they do on a daily basis. The LLMs of course generate code from their prompts, and the result is underwhelming. Garbage-in, garbage-out.
It's the LLMs fault, right? All the vibe coders out there showcasing good results must be frauds.
The telltale sign of how poor these developers are is how they dump the responsibility of they failing to get LLMs to generate acceptable results on the models not being good enough. The same models that are proven effective at creating whole projects from scratch at their hands are incapable of the smallest changes. It's weird how that sounds, right? If only the models were better... Better at what? At navigating through your input to achieve things that others already achieve? That's certainly the model's fault, isn't it?
A bad workman always blames his tools.
No one cares about promises. The only thing that matters are the tangibles we have right now.
Right now we have a class of tools that help us write multidisciplinary apps with a few well-crafted prompts and zero code involved.
I've recently been asking questions about Dafny and Lean -- it's frustrating that it will completely make up syntax and features that don't exist, but still speak to me with the same confidence as when it's talking about Typescript. It's possible that shoving lots of documentation or a book about the language into the context would help (I haven't tried), but I'm not sure if it would make up for the model's lack of "intuition" about the subject.
You can use openwebui with deepseek v3 0324 via API with for example deepinfra as provider for your embeddings and text generation models
You can get pretty good results by copying the output from Firefox's Reader View into your project, for example: about:reader?url=https://learnxinyminutes.com/ocaml/
(This is particularly in the context of metadata-type stuff, things like pyproject files, ansible playbooks, Dockerfiles, etc)
That said, 100% pure vibe coding is, as far as I can tell, still very much BS. The subtle ugliness that can come out of purely prompt-coded projects is truly a rat hole of hate, and results can get truly explosive when context windows saturate. Thoughtful, well-crafted architectural boundaries and protocols call for forethought and presence of mind that isn’t yet emerging from generative systems. So spend your time on that stuff and let the robots fill in the boilerplate. The edges of capability are going to keep moving/growing, but it’s already a force multiplier if you can figure out ways to operate.
For reference, I’ve used various degrees of assistance for color transforms, computer vision, CNN network training for novel data, and several hundred smaller problems. Even if I know how to solve a problem, I generally run it through 2-3 models to see how they’ll perform. Sometimes they teach me something. Sometimes they violently implode, which teaches me something else.
I don't really agree. There's certainly a showboating factor, not to mention there is currently a goldrush to tap this movement to capitalize from it. However, I personally managed to create a fully functioning web app from scratch with Copilot+vs code using a mix of GPT4 and o1-mini. I'm talking about both backend and frontend, with basic auth in place. I am by no means a expert, but I did it in an afternoon. Call it BS, the the truth of the matter is that the app exists.
So vibe coding, sure you can create some shitty thing which WORKS, but once it becomes bigger than a small shitty thing, it becomes harder and harder to work with because the code is so terrible when you're pure vibe coding.
A few people were doing that.
With LLMs, anyone can do that. And more.
It's important to frame the scenario correctly. I repeat: I created everything in an afternoon just for giggles, and I challenged myself to write zero lines of code.
> So vibe coding, sure you can create some shitty thing which WORKS (...)
You're somehow blindly labelling a hypothetical output as "shitty", which only serves to show your bias. In the meantime, anyone who is able to churn out a half-functioning MVP in an afternoon is praised as a 10x developer. There's a contrast in there, where the same output is described as shitty or outstanding depending on who does it.
That's perfectly fine. It just means you tried without putting in any effort and failed to get results that were aligned with your expectations.
I'm also disappointed when I can't dunk or hit >50% of my 3pt shots, but then again I never played basketball competitively
> I truly don't understand this "vibe coding" movement unless everyone is building todo apps.
Yeah, I also don't understand the NBA. Every single one of those players show themselves dunking and jumping over cars and having almost perfect percentages in 3pt shots during practice, whereas I can barely get off my chair. The problem is certainly basketball.