Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing | Hacker News Reader

Vibe coding: What is it good for? Absolutely nothing

theregister.com

10 pointsgalaxyLogic9 comments

I kinda want authors to define "vibe coding" in their specific context when they write articles like this.

Is it "try to one-shot something via a Web UI" or "Figure out proper spec with Claude in Plan mode, let it implement according to the plan"? Both give completely different results.

And it doesn't matter a bit if LLM produced code isn't deterministic. We have 100% deterministic tools to check the code. Have had for decades. Agentic LLMs might produce bad code, but they can also run deterministic checks on the output and fix them immediately before even bothering the user.

This is just the same flippant dismissive stuff as usual. At this point, it's its own brand of anti-AI slop. Just because LLMs are not deterministic, it does not mean that you can't effectively iterate and modify code it generates. Or that it won't give you something useful almost every time you use it. Also, this article talks about possible use cases of LLMs for learning, and then dismisses them as completely replaceable with a book, a tutorial, or a mentor. Not counting the fact that books and tutorials are not individually tailored to the person and what they want to work on and are interested in can't be infinitely synthesized to take you as far as you want to go and are often limited for certain technologies and mentors are often very difficult to come by.

I get your part about mentors. I came up through having to figure stuff out myself a lot via stack overflow and friends, where the biggest problem for me is usually how to ask the right question (eg with elastic search, having to find and understand "index" vs "store" - once I have those two terms, searching is a lot easier, and without them, it's a bit of a crapshoot). Mentors help here because they had to travel that road too and probably can translate from my description to the correct terms.

And I really wish I could trust an llm for that, or, indeed, any task. But I generally find answers fall into one of these useless buckets: 1. Reword the question as an answer (so common, so useless) 2. Trivial solutions that are correct - meaning one or two lines that are valid, but that I could have easily written myself quicker than getting an agent involved, and without the other detractors on this list 3. Wildly incorrect "solutions". I'm talking about code that doesn't even build because the llm can't take proper direction on which version of the library to refer to, so it keeps giving results based off old information that is no longer relevant. Try resolving a webpack 5 issue - you'll get a lot of webpack 4 answers and none of them will work, even if you specify webpack 5 4. The absolute worst: subtly incorrect solutions that seem correct and are confidently presented as correct. This has been my experience with basically every "oh wow, look what the llm can do" demo. I'm that annoying person who finds the big mid-demo.

The problems are: 1. A person inexperienced in the domain will flounder for ages trying out crap that doesn't work and understanding nothing of it. 2. A person experienced in the domain will spend a reasonable amount of time correcting the llm - and personally, I'd much rather write my own code via tdd-driven emergent design - I'll understand it, and it will be proven to work when it's done.

I see that proponents of the tech often gloss over this and don't realise that they're actually spending more time overall, especially when having to polish out all the bugs. Or maintain the system.

Use whatever you want, but I've got zero confidence in the models, and I prefer to write code instead of gambling. But to each, their own.

The way I see AI coding-agents at the moment is they are interns. You wouldn't give an intern responsibility for the whole project. You need an experienced developer who COULD do the job with some help from interns, but now the AI can be the intern.

There's an old saying "Fire is a good servant, but bad master". I think same applies to AI. In "vibe-coding" AI is too much the master.

But it's the amount and location(?) of the vibes that matters.

If I want to say, create a Youtube RSS hydrator that uses DeArrow to de-clickbait all URLs before they hit my RSS reader.

Level 1 (max vibe) I can either just say that to an LLM hit "go" and hope for the best (maximum vibes on spec and code). Most likely gonna be shit. Might work too.

Level 2 (pair-vibing the spec) is me pair-vibing the spec with an LLM, web versions might work if they can access sites for specs (figuring out how to turn a youtube URL to an RSS feed and how the DeArrow API works)

After the spec is done, I can give it to an agent and go do something else. In most cases there's an MVP done when I come back, depending on how easy said thing is to test (RSS/Atom is a fickle spec and readers implement it in various ways) automatically.

Level 3 continues the pair-vibed spec with pair-coding. I give the agent tasks in small parts and follow along as it progresses, interrupting if it strays.

For most senior folks with experience in writing specs for non-seniors, Level 2 will produce good enough stuff for personal use. And because you offload the time consuming bits to an agent, you can do multiple projects in parallel.

Level 3 will definitely bring the best results, but you can only progress one task at a time.

> And I really wish I could trust an llm for that, or, indeed, any task. But I generally find answers fall into one of these useless buckets: 1. Reword the question as an answer (so common, so useless) 2. Trivial solutions that are correct - meaning one or two lines that are valid, but that I could have easily written myself quicker than getting an agent involved, and without the other detractors on this list 3. Wildly incorrect "solutions". I'm talking about code that doesn't even build because the llm can't take proper direction on which version of the library to refer to, so it keeps giving results based off old information that is no longer relevant. Try resolving a webpack 5 issue - you'll get a lot of webpack 4 answers and none of them will work, even if you specify webpack 5 4. The absolute worst: subtly incorrect solutions that seem correct and are confidently presented as correct. This has been my experience with basically every "oh wow, look what the llm can do" demo. I'm that annoying person who finds the big mid-demo.

This is just not my experience with coding agents, which is interesting. You could chalk this up to me being a bad coder, insufficiently picky, being fooled by plausible looking code, whatever, but I carefully read every diff the agent suggests, force it to keep every diff small enough for that to be easy, and I'm usually very good at spotting potential bugs, and very picky about code quality, and the ultimate test passes: the generated code works, even when I extensively test it in daily usage. I wonder if maybe it has something to do with the technologies or specific models/agents you're using? Regarding version issues, that's usually something I solve by pointing the agent at a number of docs for the version I want and having it generate documentation for itself, and then @'ing those docs in the prompt moving forward, or using llms.txt if available, and that usually works a charm for teaching it things.

> I see that proponents of the tech often gloss over this and don't realise that they're actually spending more time overall, especially when having to polish out all the bugs. Or maintain the system.

I am a very fast, productive coder by hand. I guarantee you, I am much faster with agentic coding, just in terms of measuring the number of days it takes me to finish a feature or greenfield prototype. And I doing corrections are a confounding factor because I very rarely have to correct these models. For some time I used agent that tracks how often as a percentage I accept tool calls including edits the agent suggests. One thing to know about me is that I do not ever accept subpar code. If I don't like an agent's suggestion I do not accept and then iterate; I want it to get it right from the first. My acceptance rate was 95%.

"New thing bad, old things good"

- people throughout all of recorded human history

"New thing good, old thing bad"

- also people throughout all of recorded human history

Pfffft. People have been making solutions for "now we need no more developers" since at least Bill Gates 1991 introduction of Visual Basic. And frankly, Bill Gates showed easily 10x the charisma of Sam Altman and Sundar Pichai combined back then.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Fh_UDQnboRw

I mean, I know, we all used Delphi after trying it for a little bit, but still.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com