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Comment by andrewstuart2 | Hacker News Reader

Finally, good efficient code is going to get its moment to shine! Which will totally happen because it's not like 80% of the industry is vibe coding everything, right?

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just do vibe performance optimization (I am not even kidding)

Yep I’ve seen multiple instances of this so far.

Yeah, I got the AI to convert some code that ran at 30fps in Javascript to C, and it resulted in a program that generated 1 frame every 20 seconds. Then I told it to optimize it, and now it's running at 1 fps. After going back and forth with the AI for hours, it never got faster than 1 fps. I guess I'm "doing it wrong" as the hypesters like to tell me.

> Yeah, I got the AI to convert some code that ran at 30fps in Javascript to C, and it resulted in a program that generated 1 frame every 20 seconds. Then I told it to optimize it, and now it's running at 1 fps. After going back and forth with the AI for hours, it never got faster than 1 fps. I guess I'm "doing it wrong" as the hypesters like to tell me.

Remove the "I actually only want a slideshow" instruction from your prompt :-)

speedrunning super mario world with neural nets is weirdly effective though. i guess you need a genetic algorithm to refine different approaches rather than a neural net.

Try converting the Javascript into a slide deck and spam the next button.

Honestly speaking, it has started to look like AI coders could actually do a better job than 80% of app developers in writing efficient apps just by being set to adhere to best-practice programming conventions by default (notwithstanding their general tendency of trying to be too clever instead of writing clear and straightforward code).

They would do well just by letting the AI generate Rust code.

Vibe coding might be a positive here since there's no need to optimize for DX over perf when the clanker is the one reading/writing code.

This is my theory: we're going to see a lot of languages with straightforward and obvious semantics, high guard rails, terrible dx, and great memory allocation and performance behavior out of the box. Assembler or worse, but with extremely strong typing bolted on in a way that no human would ever tolerate, basically, something in that vibe.

So Pascal and Delphi are coming back? I'm actually cool with that.

I vibe coded a library in Nim the other day (a language I view very much as a spiritual continuation of the Pascal/Modula line), complete with a C ABI.

The language has well defined syntax, strong types, and I turned up the compiler strictness to the max, treat all warnings as errors etc. After a few hours I put the agent aside, committed to git then deleted everything and hand coded some parts from scratch.

I then compared the results. Found one or two bugs in the AI code but honestly, the rest of our differences were “maters of taste” (is a helper function actually justified here or not kind of things).

Yeah actually I worked with Pascal early in my career and that's kinda the vibes I am thinking about, with maybe a stronger type system more ada-esque though (composite, partial and range-and-domain types, all that jazz)

Have a look at Nim

Pascal inspired syntax

Ada inspired type system

Lisp inspired templating and Macros

Compiles to C

You can get more forward thinking than that: AI will output machine code, compiling it directly.

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