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Comment by nine_k | Hacker News Reader

All these stories about vibe coding going well or wrong remind me of an old joke.

A man visits his friend's house. There is a dog in the house. The friend says that the dog can play poker. The man is incredulous, but they sit at a table and have a game of poker; the dog actually can play!

The man says: "Wow! Your dog is incredibly, fantastically smart!"

The friend answers: "Oh, well, no, he's a naïve fool. Every time he gets a good hand, he starts wagging his tail."

Whether you see LLMs impressively smart or annoyingly foolish depends on your expectations. Currently they are very smart talking dogs.

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Nobody says LLMs aren't impressive. But there is a subtle difference an impressive trick and being something worth throwing 1% of GDP at. Proponents say that if we keep throwing more money at it, it will improve, but this is far from certain.

We've thrown fantastical amounts on some very uncertain things, like the moon landing. I think that the willingness of betting big at a potentially transformative technology such as AI is a good thing and a bit of a return to the old days when humanity still engaged in big infrastructure bets. Yes, it may fail, but that's intrinsic of any ambitious project.

Doubt many would have supported the Apollo program if it meant Sam Altman got to be King of the Moon.

Some people definitely think they aren't impressive.

> 1 % of GDP

LLMs are basically the only thing genuinely new in decades , that have someone excited in basically every dept in the entirely world, why is it so bad that we spend money on them? The alternative is going back to shovelling web3 crap.

There's definitely a new generation of bullshit merchants to go with LLMs but I think they (the models) target a very different part of the brain to normal tech so in some ways they're much more resilient to usual fad archetypes (this is also why some people who are a bit jittery socially hate them)

We could be spending that money on real problems instead of trying to automate away half the population

Name one "real problem" that isn't easier to solve if humans are spending less time on bullshit (read: easily automated) jobs.

> why is it so bad that we spend money on them?

This money (and more importantly, this electricity and this amount of silicon) is diverted from other stuff.

Such as? Dumping money into private equity?

This is an underrated fact. We spend so much money on stupid hype because our system is built to keep giving more and more money to promising technologies, but we're running out of actually promising technologies, so the system is (a) focusing the exponentially growing money into just a few techs, and (b) falling for snake oil.

I get the sense that people might mean that the transformer paradigm might not scale. But I do not understand the argument that AI in general is hype, and that investing in it is cult-like.

It’s just a technology; one that will improve, sometimes stagnate, sometimes accelerate. Like anything else, right? I don’t see a time when we’ll just stop using AI because it “feels so trite.”

When software mangles data this badly, it is considered garbage and scrapped.

But if it is a half decent chatbot and has the label "AI", it gets another iteration with 10x the resources. This has happened a few times already.

It is a neat tool. It is very unreliable. Teams saying "just give us 10x as much resources so we can insist on this approach" is the hateful thing here.

The alternative is to not throw money at AI. The amount that we spend could be justified just under a national security budget and not even increased GDP

Somehow this also reminds me of http://raisingtalentthebook.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/t...

"I taught my dog to whistle!"

"Really? I don't hear him whistling."

"I said I taught him, not that he learnt it."

A person is flying a hot air balloon and realises he’s lost. He lowers the balloon and spots a man down below. He shouts:

“Excuse me! Can you help me? I promised a friend I’d meet him, but I have no idea where I am.”

The man replies, “You’re in a hot air balloon, hovering 30 feet above the ground, somewhere between 40 and 41 degrees north latitude and between 59 and 60 degrees west longitude.”

“You must be a Prompt Engineer,” says the balloonist.

“I am,” replies the man. “How did you know?”

“Well,” says the balloonist, “everything you told me is technically correct, but it’s of no use to me and I still have no idea where I am.”

The man below replies, “You must be a Vibe Coder.”

“I am,” says the balloonist. “How did you know?”

"Because you don’t know where you are or where you’re going. You made a promise you can’t keep, and now you expect me to solve your problem. The fact is, you’re in the same position you were in before we met, but now it’s somehow my fault!"

This is really good, saving it. :D

This is an old joke with the job titles changed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Jokes/comments/74lb9d/engineer_vs_m...

A joke from the same family involves a pilot who gets lost in IMC conditions, and his radio is dead. Suddenly, looming out of the gloom is an office building with an open window. An employee spots the plane going by and waves. The pilot circles around and shouts "Where am I?"

The employee shouts back "In an airplane!" The pilot nods, sets a course, and navigates precisely 11 nautical miles NNE, and descends. Sure enough, a runway appears and he lands perfectly. Of course, he's debriefed about the incident. "How, " the investigator asks, "Did you find the airport?"

The pilot recounts the shouted conversation. "My question was answered in a way that was absolutely correct but useless for any practical purpose. I reasoned that I was talking to Microsoft Tech Support at their HQ, and I could dead reckon to Redmond Municipal Airport from there."

From my experience (we have to vibe code as it becomes a norm in the company), vibe coding is most effective when the developer feeds detailed context to the agent beforehand, and gives very specific commands to it for each task. It still speeds up development quite a bit once everything goes the right direction.

I vibe code in domains I am unfamiliar with - getting Claude to configure the right choice of AWS service for a specific use-case can take a very long time. But would that still be quicker than me alone with docs is hard to tell.

I have never done any serious DevOps or Admin tasks, but I can imagine the pain. AWS doc is the best of the three IMO but getting the right paragraph is still a nightmare.

The variation I've seen on this applied to AIs is:

Fred insists to his friend that he has a hyper intelligent dog that can talk. Sceptical, the friend enquires of the dog "What's 2+2?"

"Five" says the dog

"Holy shit a talking dog!" says the friend "This is the most incredible thing that I've ever seen in my life".

"What's 3+3?"

"Eight" says the dog.

"What is this bullshit you're trying to sell me Fred?"

This joke is a closer analogy to reality with a small addition. After the friend is suitably impressed:

> "Holy shit a talking dog!" says the friend "This is the most incredible thing that I've ever seen in my life".

this happens:

"Yes," says Fred. "As you can see, it's already at PhD level now, constantly improving, and is on track to replace 50% of the economy in twelve months or sooner."

Confused, the friend asks:

> "What's 3+3?"

> "Eight" says the dog.

> "What is this bullshit you're trying to sell me Fred?"

Reality:

> The friend asks: "Alright. Doggy, answer as fast as you can without thinking. What is 387 times 521?"

> "201.627", the dog says, wagging his tail happily.

> "I don't buy it, Fred! This must be bullshit!"

(I did test it and it did give the correct answer. I was expecting a small error for the joke, but hey, works like this too.)

Try playing an adversarial word game with ChatGPT. like the rules are, one player asks questions and the other is not allowed to say "yes" or "no", not allowed to reuse the same wording, and not allowed to evade the question. You'll see its tail wagging pretty quickly.

You could very likely train an AI (llama?) to easily do this but trying to get a general LLM to play a game such as this doesn't make sense. Best way to get around it? Have it create a python program that will play the game correctly instead.

I asked chatgpt to write a short fable about the phenomena of vibe coding in the style of Aesop:

The Owl and the Fireflies

One twilight, deep in the woods where logic rarely reached, an Owl began building a nest from strands of moonlight and whispers of wind.

"Why measure twigs," she mused, "when I can feel which ones belong?"

She called it vibe nesting, and declared it the future.

Soon, Fireflies gathered, drawn to her radiant nonsense. They, too, began to build — nests of smoke and echoes, stitched with instinct and pulse. "Structure is a cage," they chirped. "Flow is freedom."

But when the storm came, as storms do, their nests dissolved like riddles in the rain.

Only the Ants, who had stacked leaves with reason and braced walls with pattern, slept dry that night. They watched the Owl flutter in soaked confusion, a nestless prophet in a world that demanded substance.

Moral: A good feeling may guide your flight, but only structure will hold your sky.

This is incoherent

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