Command Lines | Hacker News Reader

Command Lines

wreflection.com

68 pointsnowflux18 comments

This has been what I've been seeing internally within $DAYJOB down to the split between vibe coding / vibe engineering / artisinally crafted code.

The gaps between engineers using the tools and those not are continuing to grow, and I'm curious to see what tools we get to use internally and what we can't... I've been able to demonstrate significant speed up in development time for features with certain tools but the amount of control some of these companies want in contracts are things the company hadn't seen before, and made it too conservative to go in on.

I also see this space changing so much that I don't particularly care for the tools for individuals now as much as I care about the way I share the workload with my team. I need a way to keep everyone up to date and reviewing code without getting brain drained as fast. Review fatigue is real, and it sucks. I haven't really found one that I've liked in that regard and one that a Fortune N company would want to go in on.

> The gap between engineers using the tools and those not are continuing to grow

Yeah, the ONLY place I hear this where it means "AI pushers are getting faster" is on this website, where half of your salaries depend on said belief.

When I go outside and talk to real engineers who I respect, in confidence and away from the suits forcing them to use AI, away from the hype of the industry telling them only one opinion is allowed, they all agree that "agentic coding" is simply not a meaningful improvement in quality or speed of publishing working software in the real world.

Maybe you like it, and that's fine. If you want to pay a lot of money for advanced IntelliSense and you can get your boss to do that for you, have fun. Just don't force it on me.

I don't believe you'll be meaningfully faster or produce better work than I can without the clanker's help.

If I get furloughed I'm going to get a new career working with my hands.

I’m still waiting for an article like this one:

https://jlouisramblings.blogspot.com/2013/04/acme-as-editor_...

It’s clear, informative, and even without reproducing it, you can still form an opinion about the tool.

All the AI pushers’s comments are either very vague or experiments whose sole quality is that it has been done with LLMs (often badly).

There’s been a few that show the Git history of a project that were (allegedly) fully written with an LLM. Not fully vibe coded, but in a meaningful amount.

We used https://www.coderabbit.ai/ at my work to do reviews and I was a pretty impressed with it. Might be worth a look. Not affiliated in any way.

> I've been able to demonstrate significant speed up in development time for features with certain tools

Curious to hear more about this. I can't help feeling such an attempt is fundamentally flawed just as software estimates are. Because you're never building the same thing twice.

That and the thing "I" build with AI is not the same as the thing I would have built myself. So you're comparing some lowest common denominator version of the software with an original work created by a human. Not once have I got an LLM to output code where I think that's what I had in my mind's eye when I wrote the prompt.

Cursor may have had incredible growth, but so many companies are getting into these early and obvious products to enhance developer productivity, I don't think they're going to be dominant (independently at least) for much longer.

Google is a direct competitor now, every major model company has an agentic coder, tons of people are putting out small enhancements and useful tools to augment all of these.

In terms of creating a viable business, I would (and have) position myself a step or two away from these obvious solutions. Further out in the ecosystem there's a ton of nuance around specific use cases, programming languages, development and deployment environments; all which will be revolutionized (again) in the years to come.

I wonder if decline of sites like StackOverflow will mean that model quality may crest at some point, at least for newest topics. There are cyclic dependencies in the industry though so maybe everything will evolve in a novel direction. Another possibility is that such sites may become valuable enough as training inputs to start sharing some of the money firehose with contributors.

I was trying to create a spectrum of agentic tools ranging from "Vibe coding" to "Old-school craftmanship". This article did exactly that for me :)

I’d like the term “Trad Coding” to catch on.

Hot take: Sounds too similar to stuff like "Trad wife", with an implied connotation of right-wing politics. (Is it possible to be tradcoding a transcoding? :P )

I think “trad wife” is kind of a special case. “Trad climbing” is a common usage and doesn’t carry that connotation. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Traditional_climbing

I think you're late to make this leap.

> Sounds too similar to stuff like "Trad wife"

In a way it does. Traditional coding then?

> with an implied connotation of right-wing politics

For many people that is not al all a bad thing as it also implies a distancing from all those weird left-wing fetishes which many people would rather see gone A.S.A.P.

While you seem to consider 'right-wing' to be something bad it really is not. Neither is 'left-wing' necessarily bad, it is just that so many bat-shit crazy things have been pushed by 'the left' for so many years that it often is hard to take those who claim support for such seriously. Most of the bad things which have been (sometimes wrongly [1]) associated with 'right-wing' politics are understood to be bad by nearly everyone while the looney 'left-wing' ideas tend to be left alone for fear of being labelled as an '-ist' or '-phobe'.

[1] wrongly as in not being limited to 'right-wing' politics. There's plenty of racism to be had in 'left-wing' circles for starters.

> implied connotation of right-wing politics.

Because they are both conservatism, so that correlation is correct. Perhaps this is an opportunity to self-evaluate whether you've become too polarized, if that gives you pause?

TIL that Grace Hopper invented zero-based version numbers.

> Eventually, one day, AI may get so good that it will generate applications on demand and create entire software ecosystems autonomously.

This is a huge hidden value add of using AI tools - you can vibe code replacements for SaaS dependencies and migrate off them.

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