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A guide to Gen AI / LLM vibecoding for expert programmers

iLoveOncall 1y ago
This illusion that senior engineers are too good to fall in all the traps laid by vibe coding really needs to stop. Just yesterday I was reading the comment of a Principal Engineer saying "of course vibe coding carries a huge risk for more junior engineers that don't understand when the LLM does something that looks right but is actually wrong", as if just because they have more experience THEY CAN. No, you can't either. Not a single soul on this planet can review the thousands of lines of vibe coded bullshit that LLMs spit out. Here's my guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Expert Programmers: don't.
- jandrese 1y ago
  I think that's going a bit too far. The big thing is to have the AI spit out small digestible modules, check those for correctness, and then glue them together. The same way a person normally writes code, you are just having the AI do the grunt work. This does have the caveat that reading code is usually harder than writing it, so the total time savings is far less than what AI companies claim. You only get in real danger when you don't review the code and just YOLO it into production.
  - shortrounddev2 1y ago
    If you have to describe the code to the ai and then read through each line of it anyways, why not just write the code yourself?
    - leptons 1y ago
      It takes way more time to explain, and then re-explain, and then re-re-re-explain to the LLM what I want the code to do. No, it isn't because I don't understand LLMs, it's because LLMs don't understand, period. Trying to coax a fancy word predictor to output the correct code can be extremely frustrating especially when I know how to write the code.
      - polishdude20 1y ago
        Usually if you have to re re re explain, it means you didn't leave those details in the first prompt. So writing out the code yourself, you'd still get into this trap because you discover as you write. Just like you discover the details as the LLM writes.
        iLoveOncall 1y ago
        Do you have access to GPT-10 or something like this? Because my experience is that you can give as much detail as you want and you WILL need to re re re explain regardless.
    - simonw 1y ago
      Because it's significantly faster at both typing and looking up small details than you are.
      - shortrounddev2 1y ago
        But I can write code faster than I can read it
- apwell23 1y ago
  exactly. using ai is not a "skill" that ppl are trying to make it to be.
- ivape 1y ago
  You underestimate how much code some people have sifted through in their lifetime. I read through every line the LLM codes, function by function. I know exactly when it’s going sideways. You’d have to know to even know, it’s one of those things. If you don’t know then you don’t know. Put it another way, you know how some people fail open book tests? How’s that possible? The book is not enough.
  - exitb 1y ago
    I found that once I spend enough time to actually fully understand what LLM wrote, I’ve burned through my efficiency gains. If that’s the case, why bother?
    - jbeninger 1y ago
      It depends. I had an LLM whip up a JavaScript function "theThursdayAfterNextSunday" JavaScript isn't my primary language and date functions are always a pain. But I know enough to review and test the code quickly. It doesn't change a 1-week project into a 4-hour one, but it can change a 20-minute project into a 5-minute one.
    - ivape 1y ago
      Because I’m not just trying to get efficiency gains. I’m literally trying to build next gen products of good quality. I suppose for your actual job (if you happen to be in the IDGAF mode), yeah, why work harder and not smarter? That’s a different story altogether, as many will be mailing it in.
- abletonlive 1y ago
  You sound like a cynical junior engineer. As a tech lead I have to review thousands of lines of code from human engineers and let me tell you it’s no different than reviewing llm code
  - ajaioslaja 1y ago
    As a senior engineer, I can say I probably wouldn’t like working with you. For a dev worth paying for, the crucial details of some code is discussed prior to the PR in a way that the PR review becomes an afterthought. You can follow this process with an LLM but the PR review is still brutal. It doesn’t do what you say and it doesn’t learn (in a deterministic way a good human dev does). High performing teams do not have many changes nor comments in a PR (on average, obviously).
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    As a tech lead I have reviewed code written by junior engineers and written by AI, and there is a very clear difference between the two. You also seem to be missing the point that if vibe coding lets your engineers write 10x the amount of code they previously could in the same working hours, you now have to review 10x that amount. It's easy to see how there is an instant bottleneck here... Or maybe you're saying that the same amount of code is written when vibe-coding than when writing by hand, and if that's the case then obviously there's absolutely no reason to vibe-code.
    - lagrange77 1y ago
      You have forgotten the most important part: Lay off 90% of those devs.
- EagnaIonat 1y ago
  > Not a single soul on this planet can review the thousands of lines of vibe coded bullshit that LLMs spit out. Even if you could the code can't be copyrighted.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Citation needed on that one. If that is true, how come huge companies like Microsoft and Salesforce and Google keep boasting about the increasing percentage of their code that is written by LLMs? What do you know that they don't?
    - qzw 1y ago
      I’m with you here. No way these companies are labeling all the AI code as such. They must all be commingled with human code and copyrighted.
    - EagnaIonat 1y ago
      > Citation needed on that one. I can't speak for every country but Copyright laws in the US, EU and UK require a human creator to be valid for copyright. A casual search brought up this: - https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appellate-court-affirms-human-authorship https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell... - https://www.openpolicy.co/resources/u-s-copyright-office-clarifies-ai-authorship-rules-in-part-ii-of-its-copyright-ai-report https://www.openpolicy.co/resources/u-s-copyright-office-cla... - https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2025/02/copyrightability-of-ai-outputs-us-copyright-office-analyzes-human-authorship-requirement https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2025/02/copyrightabilit... To add to that you can't patent anything created by an AI either. > What do you know that they don't? Oh they are well aware of this. At enterprise level coding, everything normally needs a programmers certificate of origin as it were. So AI generated code is tagged within the source. A good example of this (pre-gpt) was SCO vs IBM. Where SCO claimed IBM stole their code. IBM could prove the full history of code they created because of these procedures. So.. if a person vibe codes a whole application and it gets stolen/copied, legally they have no way to protect that. [edit] Reading further for UK when it comes to computer generated the law is a bit vague when it comes to vibe coding. There are laws to protect digital works. [edit]
- ebiester 1y ago
  So, why would you review thousands of lines at a time? That means you didn't break the problem down appropriately. PRs should be around 100-200 lines of code, including tests. You build your tasks appropriately. Reviewing thousands of lines at a time is always a failure state.
  - iLoveOncall 1y ago
    The number of lines you have to review at once doesn't matter. Vibe coding is letting AI write code so you spend less time writing the same amount of code (ideally not more, in practice definitely more). If more code is written you have to review more code. Doesn't matter if you break it down in 10 lines PRs or if you review a million lines at once, you still end up having to review all the code generated.
    - leptons 1y ago
      Is this a 1-person dev team? Because on teams, one person has to submit a PR and then someone else on the team has to code review it, right? So then you're doubling the review time of the code. If you wrote the code yourself, you would already know that it works, then you submit the PR, and then someone else reviews the code one time, not twice. And typically reading and understanding code you did not write takes longer than writing the code yourself. It does not seem like "AI" coding is really saving anyone any time, and is probably wasting more time than it saves.
    - ebiester 1y ago
      It entirely matters. It matters because as humans, we can only keep so much context in mind. That means that if you are looking at 100-200 lines at a time, you can think about the architecture. You can modify the code, whether it's fixing or refactoring. It means that it can only get too far off base. It also means that sometimes, you say "this is bad code," refine the prompt, and run it again. Yes, it means that you as a code reviewer is a bottleneck. It means that you are limited to the productivity gain that can exist. We are talking 10-15% productivity gains per person in mature code bases, not some magic replacement. But if you're worried about reviewing code, maybe we shouldn't allow junior programmers to contribute to codebases either. After all, you might make a mistake in reviewing that.
- rychco 1y ago
  > as if just because they have more experience THEY CAN I don't follow. Why wouldn't you believe that a senior engineer, that has been reviewing code for years, be any better at reviewing code?
- ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
  Notice that the examples I show are very minimal changes. If you prompt it to solve the right problems which involves minimal code, then the diffs are easy to manage. There are lots of problems like this. Leave the hard ones for yourself. The only big diff it should ever make is for a refactor.
throwanem 1y ago
> Vibe coding is useful only if you have enough problems that you’re happy that some subset [is] being solved, not caring what in that subset is solved.
ppqqrr 1y ago
generic advice about how you should use the same tool and methodology (claude code, scrum) that everyone’s already using, lot of hand waving about being “senior,” This may be the most 2025 blog post ever written. if anyone takes the art of software programming further using LLMs, it’s going to be young inexperienced people who grow up closely observing and learning the transcendental nature of LLMs and software, not hardened industry titans joyfully cracking their whip over an army of junior devs and LLMs.
- rafterydj 1y ago
  Not to be rude, but what about understanding the "transcendental nature" of LLMs allows people to build more, faster, or with better maintainability than a "hardened industry titan"?
  - Retr0id 1y ago
    New generations are always leapfrogging those that came before them, so I don't find it too hard to believe even under more pessimistic opinions of LLM usefulness. They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long. Learning new paradigms while your brain is still plastic is an advantage, and none of us can go back in time.
    - alfalfasprout 1y ago
      > Learning new paradigms while your brain is still plastic is an advantage, and none of us can go back in time. You can absolutely learn new paradigms at any age. This idea that you can only do so as an 18-25 year old is ridiculous.
      - fragmede 1y ago
        it's a lot of work and some of us are tired
    - lagrange77 1y ago
      But automating isn't a programming paradigm. > They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long. I doubt that. For me this is the real dilemma with a generation of LLM-native developers. Does a worker in a fully automated watch factory become better at the craft of watchmaking with time?
mccoyb 1y ago
Try and use it for shit and play around with it — you’ll figure out where it sucks, where it is good by yourself. Play with it — that’s the only way anyone masters anything. Separate yourself from the results, be prepared to waste time, but try and have some fun and keep your eyes open.
- simonw 1y ago
  Couldn't agree more. The only way to really get effective at using this stuff is to spend time with it, building up intuition about what it can and cannot do. Playing with it is a great way to do that. If there is something you are certain it won't be able to do, it's worth giving it a go anyway. Most of the time you will be right - and will still learn something new in confirming that and watching the way in which it fails. Very occasionally you'll be wrong and you will discover a new capability that surprises you.
GuB-42 1y ago
I think the article could be more accurately titled "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Programmers who hate their job" To me, someone who actually love programming, it makes vibe coding look like hell. > The workflow of vibe coding is the same as managing scrums or helping a student through a research thesis Which programmer wants that?! Just hearing the word "scrum" makes me want to run away and I know I am not alone here. Helping a student through a research thesis doesn't sound so bad, because as a human, helping people feels good. But here, there is no student, no human feelings, and you are not even helping the AI become better in the long term.
- uncircle 1y ago
  > I think the article could be more accurately titled "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Programmers who hate their job" Given how “vibe coding” is all about explaining clearly the requirements and defining context, it’s for programmers who should have chosen middle management as a career. To actual programmers that enjoy the craft, using an LLM means ruining the beautiful art of abstraction and mental visualisation of a complex piece of logic, by putting it through the very lossy process of explaining it into words. It would be a bit like a composer or a painter having to use words instead of leveraging their well-honed instinct.
  - jf22 1y ago
    I've been middle management for half my career and the role has never been about explaining or requirements or defining context like I do with an LLM to code...
  - starfallg 1y ago
    The reality is that hacking code isn't always beautiful. Most of the time, it is mundane grunt work. You can always leave the core logic for your to work on and have the AI handle all the bits that you don't like to do. This is what we do for modelling for example, AI helps with the interface and data backends, the core modelling logic is hand-crafted.
    - 1y ago
bobsmooth 1y ago
Trying to get better at vibe coding is like trying to get better at sleeping. The whole point is not to put effort into it.
- leptons 1y ago
  Not a good analogy. You can put effort into getting better sleep. If the sunlight wakes you up too early, block out the windows. If your bed is uncomfortable, get a more comfortable bed. If the room is too hot, adjust the thermostat before you go to bed. A little bit of effort can go a long way towards getting better sleep. But you can't change the fundamental operation of an LLM, by its very nature it is not suitable for producing consistently correct results. Getting better at "vibe coding" is an exercise in futility.
  - deleted 1y ago
    [deleted]
- simonw 1y ago
  I completely disagree, for both definitions of vibe coding (the unreviewed-prompt-generated-code definition and the llm-assisted-coding definition.) In both cases the more experience and mindful experimentation you have the better your results will be.
- cheema33 1y ago
  > The whole point is not to put effort into it. You sound like you have not spent much time using AI tools.
jackblemming 1y ago
I always wonder what kind of slop people are creating when they say they have a bajillion Claude instances all churning out code.
- alfalfasprout 1y ago
  Impressive sounding slop that either rarely amounts to anything, breaks, or becomes someone else's problem. Unfortunately I'm starting to see these people at work... What's worse is they also tend to be the type of "evangelists" that become wildly defensive or accusatory when you question anything about their work.
- kasey_junk 1y ago
  In my experience you would not be able to identify code I wrote by hand from code I generated with an asynchronous agent, because I wouldn’t let it get to you if something stood out as off. But I don’t “vibe code” anything. I understand and review all the code that gets generated. Most of the stuff coming from my agents is either boilerplate or extensively uses libraries and static analysis tools that make it easy to verify. I kill aggressively any code the agent outputs that doesn’t match my standards unless it’s obvious that I can get it up to par quickly. This is one of the big advantages of the llm. I can do that without navigating inter personal conflict. But the output is mostly indistinguishable from what I create by hand.
- chermi 1y ago
  It's very easy to check out his GitHub, no need to wonder. Hint: it's not slop
- ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
  I'm sure there's lots of slop being generated by this stuff, but at least for my work it's mostly solving the simple issues. Maybe it's the slop of "hey can you find out why my code isn't working?" and "closed issue 268 because it works on the latest versions, and we made your code into an MWE for the future". If you check any open source project that gets traction, there's tens of thousands of issues to handle. A good thousand of them are just "unit conversion would be good here", "this docstring is missing this option", etc. Those little PRs are the slop of Github that someone has to do, and I'd prefer not telling my interns to do that because otherwise they'd just quit. Good thing Claude doesn't quit, he's a good boy.
redeyedtreefrog 1y ago
It's hardly original, but my take is that vibe coding works brilliantly for personal projects (or potentially for tiny startups that need to rapidly churn out CRUD boilerplate, API integrations, etc), but terribly for most large commercial systems. I'm having fun with Claude Code and Vibe Kanban on personal projects, and before that I spent a lot of time with both the Windsurf and Cursor agents. It's making me literally 10x more productive on personal projects, maybe even 50x. On personal projects: - no-one but me needs to decide on requirements - no-one but me needs to make decisions - no-one but me needs to maintain the code going forward - much of the time I'm intentionally using languages and frameworks that I am somewhat clueless about, and an LLM providing continuous ideas (even if sometimes entirely silly ones) stops me getting stuck - I don't mind if there are large chunks of useless or half-working code On commercial projects: - every line of code is a massive liability. Every line needs to be reviewed by another engineer, and every developer who joins the project needs to be aware of it, take it into consideration when making changes elsewhere, and potentially debug it if something goes wrong - senior engineers are almost always hired to work with languages and technologies they are already very familiar with, meaning for many tasks it's often quicker to write out the code by hand (or perhaps with Cursor's auto-complete) than guide an LLM to do it - much of the time is spent in meetings trying to unearth the real product requirements or providing updates to stakeholders - much of the time is spent reading old code and working out how to implement things in extremely large and complex systems in a minimally disruptive way - a lot of time is spent reviewing other people's PRs, and getting infuriated when people (often either very junior or very senior) produce 1000 line PRs consisting of unnecessary changes, excessive boilerplate, half-finished experiments, and things that clearly haven't been tested properly. This was the case long before LLMs, AI just makes it ever more tempting for people to act this way. - trying to avoid or gently negotiate political games over who is in control of the project, or who gets to makes technical decisions
- fragmede 1y ago
  if we have to put numbers on it, I'm attempting projects I wouldn't have, because the startup cost was too high, so does that make me infinity times more productive on that project because the denominator otherwise would have been zero?
andai 1y ago
> For the record, I now have about 32 Claude agents continuously running in tmux windows that I can ssh to, so all day long I can just check via laptop or phone and keep plugging along. What's the cost of 32Cph?
- ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
  The same $200/month Max plan as anyone else. It just gets rate limited sometimes but who cares, you just go back to the fun part of doing your own coding until it's back.
- seblon 1y ago
  How the hell he's using so much argents at the same time. Is it for 32 different "issues" like feature 1, 2, 3, ...?
simonw 1y ago
This piece is excellent - it's full of ideas and tips that I have not seen in other similar tutorials. Worth spending some time with, especially if you are still skeptical of the value that can be unlocked by AI-assisted programming. (A minor disagreement: it's using a definition of "vibe coding" that applies to any form of ai-assisted programming. I prefer to define vibe coding with its original definition from all the way back in February where it only refers to code that is generated through prompting without any review.)
isaacremuant 1y ago
I use LLMs, just like i use Google and other things but I don't vibe code as defined like the original meaning and I feel that all these people who are trying to tell me how good they are with it are yet to explain how on earth code is the most complex thing. Coding is the easy part. Knowing what to code, how to work with people, how to interact with the real world and with chaos, with bad data, with poor integrations, and entropy. I'm all for making AI and coding better and helping people do that and think. I'm not impressed by anyone who doesn't show me they can think about the problems we face better and faster, and keep doing it without slowing down to a halt or making it someone's else's problem. Everyone else is just talking themselves up or selling something, neither of which are useful to me.
renodino 1y ago
My recent vibe code experience made me realize it's almost exactly like being a tech lead managing offshore development. I learned early on that the key to leading successful offshore projects is precise, detailed specifications, and very rigorous code review and testing. Now I'm using the exact same discipline to "vibe" code. I really think there needs to be a different term for professional solution engineering using LLMs (like "prompt engineering" but for coding) to differentiate from casual prototyping or simple web UI hacking by non-devs that uses "vibe" coding.
- ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
  > I really think there needs to be a different term for professional solution engineering using LLMs (like "prompt engineering" but for coding) to differentiate from casual prototyping or simple web UI hacking by non-devs that uses "vibe" coding. Yeah, maybe it needs another name because yes when you say you're vibe coding everyone imagines some 20 year old kid with sunglasses spitting out Javascript and calling it Python. While the tools are the same, the understanding and the discipline is very different. I think "tech lead managing offshore development" is an excellent analogy.
afro88 1y ago
> The moment you see it go off the rails, just throw it out. That problem is too hard for Claude, it’s for you now. Or, any of: - the problem was too big in scope and needed a stepped plan to refer to and execute step by step - your instructions weren't clear enough - the context you provided was missing something crucial it couldn't find agentically, or build knowledge of (in which case, document that part of the codebase first) - your rules/AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md needs some additions or tweaking - you may need a more powerful model to plan implementation first Just throwing away and moving on is often the wrong choice and you'll get better at using these tools slower. If you're still within the "time it would have taken me to do it myself" window, think about what caused it to go off the rails or fail spectacularly and try giving it another go (not following up, throw away current results and chat and try again with the above in mind)
- polishdude20 1y ago
  I totally agree. I've recently been using Cursor to help create a new react project with a lot of functionality. I realized I need to have it do more smaller steps that I get to have lots of input on rather than say "this is the big picture now go forth".
jpollock 1y ago
I've just spent the better part of two weeks trying to convince a LLM to automate some programming for me. We use feature flags. However, cleaning them up is something rarely done. It typically takes me ~3minutes to clean one up. To clean up the flag: 1) delete the test where the flag is off 2) delete all the code setting the flag to on 3) anything getting the value of the flag is set to true 4) resolve all "true" expressions, cleaning up if's and now constant parameters. 5) prep a pull request and send it for review This is all fully supported by the indexing and refactoring tooling in my IDE. However, when I prompted the LLM with those steps (and examples), it failed. Over and over again. It would delete tests where the value was true, forget to resolve the expressions, and try to run grep/find across a ginormous codebase. If this was an intern, I would only have to correct them once. I would correct the LLM, and then it would make a different mistake. It wouldn't follow the instructions, and it would use tools I told it to not use. It took 5-10 minutes to make the change, and then would require me to spend a couple of minutes fixing things. It was at the point of not saving me any time. I've got a TONNE of low-hanging fruit that I can't give to an intern, but could easily sick a tool as capable as an intern on. This was not that.
- polishdude20 1y ago
  Which LLM? How are you prompting it? I've been using Cursor for the last few months and notice that for tasks like this, it helps to give examples of the code you're looking for, tell it more or less how the feature flags are implemented and also have it spit out a list of files it would modify first.
  - jpollock 1y ago
    I gave it explicit ordering, instructions on what tools to _not_ use, and before/after examples from the codebase. A full page of instructions. After iterating on that for a while, I did a bunch manually (90) and then gave the LLM a list of pull requests as examples, and asked _it_ to write the prompt. It still failed. Finally, I broke the problem up and started to ask it to generate tools to perform each step. It started to make progress - each execution gave me a new checkpoint so it wouldn't make new mistakes.
bgwalter 1y ago
The author's 200 GitHub packages not withstanding, the startups he is involved in are both founded on machine learning, so I don't consider him unbiased. It is always the founder type who is trying to peddle fantasies like this: Vibe coding turns any individual into the CTO leading a team of 20, 30, 50, 60 interns. How much does his new hobby cost? On my $200/month Claude 20x Max subscription I used enough tokens for about $5,200 of compute in the first month. This is obviously not sustainable, but hey, it’s a startup world and VCs are paying for it right now.
wsintra2022 1y ago
Let’s just call it like it is, Vibe coding takes away the thinking of the execution of steps to solve the problem and offloads that part of our mind to a text generator with intelligent emergent properties. If you enjoy keeping the intelligence sharp for laying out the steps to solve the problem and executing the steps then don’t vibe code. If you don’t mind the engineering skills atrophy then go ahead and vibe code. But know this. You will lose the skills.
- ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
  > If you don’t mind the engineering skills atrophy then go ahead and vibe code. But know this. You will lose the skills. I don't see why it's an either or. As explained in the article, I'm still coding all day. Just some trivial PRs are getting done and tidied up while I'm doing so. You still have to do all of the code review, and you still have to solve all of the hard problems, you just do less of the refactoring by hand.
polotics 1y ago
This appears to me to be a surprisingly low-effort article. Nothing about managing context length and starting tasks from a good context, managing .md files and structuring repos, very anthropomorphising which does not help, nothing about tools to use to build the right context, no comparison of different approaches, what kind of MCP and/or RAG to get agents to look at documentation.
- Ethee 1y ago
  The article clearly isn't directed at how expert programmers are 'supposed' to use AI, though we see at least one of those a day on the front page of HN now. The first paragraph makes it pretty obvious that the author is trying to convince people who have completely disregarded AI, for one reason or another, to give it another try in a more meaningful way. Telling the reader how the author configures his AI isn't going to convince those people, as they likely are already very aware of how these tools 'work' the problem is in the 'how to use them' department which has nothing to do with what MCP tool you're using.
- ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
  That's kind of the whole point. Setting up a few MCPs etc. is really a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I have setup context7, Sequential Thinking, etc. and my Claude.md has a lot of details in it, but that only improves the accuracy so much. My whole point is that if the mindset is "I need this to be very accurate for it to work", then you're already putting too much effort into it. I personally have not found any of that time worth it. For any PR I had to put effort into, I could have done it quicker myself. So I learned those things and they just didn't have a payoff for my work. They did really well in some things like front end development, devops, and stuff of that sort, but if it's the normal kind of problem that is my "here's my actual hard problem of the day", i.e. something where I would need to start white boarding a new algorithm and semi-prove some numerical stability result before throwing code, the LLMs just fail to ever come up with anything new enough to get a solution. But, slamming down commands for it on only easy problems in order to get 90% of a PR done and just finishing it yourself? That can get you 6 PRs in instead of 3, where you did the hard 3 and just looked at the transcripts for another 15, and tossed all but the 3 that looked good. Using Claude like that takes about half an hour out of your day and you get a good benefit, and that is what I am pointing to as a very useful approach. I personally don't think any amount of MCP servers will make "Claude, find me a novel algorithmic improvement in this space and code it up" work, but hey if that works for you that's great. But reviewing and checking the proofs would likely make it not worth it for what I'm doing.
theusus 1y ago
This looks like rambling than a guide.
nphardon 1y ago
I think the idea that it's important to know how to code is going to be seriously challenged. I know I feel like the learning process and insight I gain is important, but I wonder if it is, beyond the subjective. Like I'm sure the grad students working for Euler learned a ton generating logarithmic tables by hand, but it proved to be useless in the end. Could having a solid grasp on memory management/access in C be the same? I think this is why obsolescence can be hard to predict. Like if in 30 years all code is run and managed by ai bots, then all this debate about "it's important to know how to code!" will seem really silly.
- mangamadaiyan 1y ago
  > Could having a solid grasp on memory management/access in C be the same? Perhaps not when the code is getting written (by yourself or by an AI). When you're dealing with a memory leak in production (yes, they can and do happen), or worse -- if you're dealing with a drop in performance -- good luck with the vibe debugging. Maybe there will be a time not too far off in the future when the stochastic cockatoos become sentient enough to do all of this by themselves, it's sure as hell not happening tomorrow. Oh, and logarithmic tables were still a useful thing as late as forty odd years ago :)
percentcer 1y ago
I like programming. It's fun, and sometimes it even requires creativity. There are plenty of times when it's not that fun, and doesn't require any creativity (because whatever it is has been done by someone else a thousand times over), and you just want a result. Vibecoding is great for _that_ stuff (think little throw-away scripts, shell one liners, tool plugins, etc) I generally don't get great results from LLM code because most of my work is in C++ (which I'm guessing is underrepresented in the training data?), but when I point it towards some well-worn javascript thing I've had real successes! Most recent example is this little chrome plugin I had it whip up in one shot (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/favicon-tab-grouper/hmgbdbenimanjdnjcngocojmikpljffo https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/favicon-tab-grouper...) because I couldn't find the exact functionality I needed in other plugins. Works perfectly for my needs, took less than five minutes to spin up, and I use it all the time. If you're looking to get started with vibecoding stuff, try making plugins that provide niche functionality for your hyper-specific workflows.
dimtass 1y ago
After 25 years in embedded, embedded Linux, devops and cloud security I don’t care about coding anymore. I’ve done almost everything in so many programming languages and assembly that I can’t even count. Every programming task seems like a repetitive task. But architecture and solving a real problem wow, this still kicks in me. So, LLMs are my pals that we spend so much time in planning and go to every single small detail and in such depth that it’s hard to explain the mental erection. Just give it a prompt to try to contradict every step and make it hard for you and try to convince it that it’s wrong. I can spend hours just building the plan and the idea. Then I have the solution and it’s just boring to write the code. I know I can write the code and I’ve already done it before. So, I just create a full plan with specs and a water flow to do list and let it do the job. I check if it does it right and keep it on track not to over engineer things (they tend to do that a lot) and just enjoy the outcome. I would say I do vibe-planning before vibe-coding.

This illusion that senior engineers are too good to fall in all the traps laid by vibe coding really needs to stop. Just yesterday I was reading the comment of a Principal Engineer saying "of course vibe coding carries a huge risk for more junior engineers that don't understand when the LLM does something that looks right but is actually wrong", as if just because they have more experience THEY CAN. No, you can't either. Not a single soul on this planet can review the thousands of lines of vibe coded bullshit that LLMs spit out. Here's my guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Expert Programmers: don't.

jandrese 1y ago
I think that's going a bit too far. The big thing is to have the AI spit out small digestible modules, check those for correctness, and then glue them together. The same way a person normally writes code, you are just having the AI do the grunt work. This does have the caveat that reading code is usually harder than writing it, so the total time savings is far less than what AI companies claim. You only get in real danger when you don't review the code and just YOLO it into production.
- shortrounddev2 1y ago
  If you have to describe the code to the ai and then read through each line of it anyways, why not just write the code yourself?
  - leptons 1y ago
    It takes way more time to explain, and then re-explain, and then re-re-re-explain to the LLM what I want the code to do. No, it isn't because I don't understand LLMs, it's because LLMs don't understand, period. Trying to coax a fancy word predictor to output the correct code can be extremely frustrating especially when I know how to write the code.
    - polishdude20 1y ago
      Usually if you have to re re re explain, it means you didn't leave those details in the first prompt. So writing out the code yourself, you'd still get into this trap because you discover as you write. Just like you discover the details as the LLM writes.
      - iLoveOncall 1y ago
        Do you have access to GPT-10 or something like this? Because my experience is that you can give as much detail as you want and you WILL need to re re re explain regardless.
  - simonw 1y ago
    Because it's significantly faster at both typing and looking up small details than you are.
    - shortrounddev2 1y ago
      But I can write code faster than I can read it
apwell23 1y ago
exactly. using ai is not a "skill" that ppl are trying to make it to be.
ivape 1y ago
You underestimate how much code some people have sifted through in their lifetime. I read through every line the LLM codes, function by function. I know exactly when it’s going sideways. You’d have to know to even know, it’s one of those things. If you don’t know then you don’t know. Put it another way, you know how some people fail open book tests? How’s that possible? The book is not enough.
- exitb 1y ago
  I found that once I spend enough time to actually fully understand what LLM wrote, I’ve burned through my efficiency gains. If that’s the case, why bother?
  - jbeninger 1y ago
    It depends. I had an LLM whip up a JavaScript function "theThursdayAfterNextSunday" JavaScript isn't my primary language and date functions are always a pain. But I know enough to review and test the code quickly. It doesn't change a 1-week project into a 4-hour one, but it can change a 20-minute project into a 5-minute one.
  - ivape 1y ago
    Because I’m not just trying to get efficiency gains. I’m literally trying to build next gen products of good quality. I suppose for your actual job (if you happen to be in the IDGAF mode), yeah, why work harder and not smarter? That’s a different story altogether, as many will be mailing it in.
abletonlive 1y ago
You sound like a cynical junior engineer. As a tech lead I have to review thousands of lines of code from human engineers and let me tell you it’s no different than reviewing llm code
- ajaioslaja 1y ago
  As a senior engineer, I can say I probably wouldn’t like working with you. For a dev worth paying for, the crucial details of some code is discussed prior to the PR in a way that the PR review becomes an afterthought. You can follow this process with an LLM but the PR review is still brutal. It doesn’t do what you say and it doesn’t learn (in a deterministic way a good human dev does). High performing teams do not have many changes nor comments in a PR (on average, obviously).
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  As a tech lead I have reviewed code written by junior engineers and written by AI, and there is a very clear difference between the two. You also seem to be missing the point that if vibe coding lets your engineers write 10x the amount of code they previously could in the same working hours, you now have to review 10x that amount. It's easy to see how there is an instant bottleneck here... Or maybe you're saying that the same amount of code is written when vibe-coding than when writing by hand, and if that's the case then obviously there's absolutely no reason to vibe-code.
  - lagrange77 1y ago
    You have forgotten the most important part: Lay off 90% of those devs.
EagnaIonat 1y ago
> Not a single soul on this planet can review the thousands of lines of vibe coded bullshit that LLMs spit out. Even if you could the code can't be copyrighted.
- simonw 1y ago
  Citation needed on that one. If that is true, how come huge companies like Microsoft and Salesforce and Google keep boasting about the increasing percentage of their code that is written by LLMs? What do you know that they don't?
  - qzw 1y ago
    I’m with you here. No way these companies are labeling all the AI code as such. They must all be commingled with human code and copyrighted.
  - EagnaIonat 1y ago
    > Citation needed on that one. I can't speak for every country but Copyright laws in the US, EU and UK require a human creator to be valid for copyright. A casual search brought up this: - https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appellate-court-affirms-human-authorship https://www.skadden.com/insights/publications/2025/03/appell... - https://www.openpolicy.co/resources/u-s-copyright-office-clarifies-ai-authorship-rules-in-part-ii-of-its-copyright-ai-report https://www.openpolicy.co/resources/u-s-copyright-office-cla... - https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2025/02/copyrightability-of-ai-outputs-us-copyright-office-analyzes-human-authorship-requirement https://www.jonesday.com/en/insights/2025/02/copyrightabilit... To add to that you can't patent anything created by an AI either. > What do you know that they don't? Oh they are well aware of this. At enterprise level coding, everything normally needs a programmers certificate of origin as it were. So AI generated code is tagged within the source. A good example of this (pre-gpt) was SCO vs IBM. Where SCO claimed IBM stole their code. IBM could prove the full history of code they created because of these procedures. So.. if a person vibe codes a whole application and it gets stolen/copied, legally they have no way to protect that. [edit] Reading further for UK when it comes to computer generated the law is a bit vague when it comes to vibe coding. There are laws to protect digital works. [edit]
ebiester 1y ago
So, why would you review thousands of lines at a time? That means you didn't break the problem down appropriately. PRs should be around 100-200 lines of code, including tests. You build your tasks appropriately. Reviewing thousands of lines at a time is always a failure state.
- iLoveOncall 1y ago
  The number of lines you have to review at once doesn't matter. Vibe coding is letting AI write code so you spend less time writing the same amount of code (ideally not more, in practice definitely more). If more code is written you have to review more code. Doesn't matter if you break it down in 10 lines PRs or if you review a million lines at once, you still end up having to review all the code generated.
  - leptons 1y ago
    Is this a 1-person dev team? Because on teams, one person has to submit a PR and then someone else on the team has to code review it, right? So then you're doubling the review time of the code. If you wrote the code yourself, you would already know that it works, then you submit the PR, and then someone else reviews the code one time, not twice. And typically reading and understanding code you did not write takes longer than writing the code yourself. It does not seem like "AI" coding is really saving anyone any time, and is probably wasting more time than it saves.
  - ebiester 1y ago
    It entirely matters. It matters because as humans, we can only keep so much context in mind. That means that if you are looking at 100-200 lines at a time, you can think about the architecture. You can modify the code, whether it's fixing or refactoring. It means that it can only get too far off base. It also means that sometimes, you say "this is bad code," refine the prompt, and run it again. Yes, it means that you as a code reviewer is a bottleneck. It means that you are limited to the productivity gain that can exist. We are talking 10-15% productivity gains per person in mature code bases, not some magic replacement. But if you're worried about reviewing code, maybe we shouldn't allow junior programmers to contribute to codebases either. After all, you might make a mistake in reviewing that.
rychco 1y ago
> as if just because they have more experience THEY CAN I don't follow. Why wouldn't you believe that a senior engineer, that has been reviewing code for years, be any better at reviewing code?
ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
Notice that the examples I show are very minimal changes. If you prompt it to solve the right problems which involves minimal code, then the diffs are easy to manage. There are lots of problems like this. Leave the hard ones for yourself. The only big diff it should ever make is for a refactor.

throwanem 1y ago

> Vibe coding is useful only if you have enough problems that you’re happy that some subset [is] being solved, not caring what in that subset is solved.

ppqqrr 1y ago

generic advice about how you should use the same tool and methodology (claude code, scrum) that everyone’s already using, lot of hand waving about being “senior,” This may be the most 2025 blog post ever written. if anyone takes the art of software programming further using LLMs, it’s going to be young inexperienced people who grow up closely observing and learning the transcendental nature of LLMs and software, not hardened industry titans joyfully cracking their whip over an army of junior devs and LLMs.

rafterydj 1y ago
Not to be rude, but what about understanding the "transcendental nature" of LLMs allows people to build more, faster, or with better maintainability than a "hardened industry titan"?
- Retr0id 1y ago
  New generations are always leapfrogging those that came before them, so I don't find it too hard to believe even under more pessimistic opinions of LLM usefulness. They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long. Learning new paradigms while your brain is still plastic is an advantage, and none of us can go back in time.
  - alfalfasprout 1y ago
    > Learning new paradigms while your brain is still plastic is an advantage, and none of us can go back in time. You can absolutely learn new paradigms at any age. This idea that you can only do so as an 18-25 year old is ridiculous.
    - fragmede 1y ago
      it's a lot of work and some of us are tired
  - lagrange77 1y ago
    But automating isn't a programming paradigm. > They are young and inexperienced today, but won't stay that way for long. I doubt that. For me this is the real dilemma with a generation of LLM-native developers. Does a worker in a fully automated watch factory become better at the craft of watchmaking with time?

mccoyb 1y ago

Try and use it for shit and play around with it — you’ll figure out where it sucks, where it is good by yourself. Play with it — that’s the only way anyone masters anything. Separate yourself from the results, be prepared to waste time, but try and have some fun and keep your eyes open.

simonw 1y ago
Couldn't agree more. The only way to really get effective at using this stuff is to spend time with it, building up intuition about what it can and cannot do. Playing with it is a great way to do that. If there is something you are certain it won't be able to do, it's worth giving it a go anyway. Most of the time you will be right - and will still learn something new in confirming that and watching the way in which it fails. Very occasionally you'll be wrong and you will discover a new capability that surprises you.

GuB-42 1y ago

I think the article could be more accurately titled "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Programmers who hate their job" To me, someone who actually love programming, it makes vibe coding look like hell. > The workflow of vibe coding is the same as managing scrums or helping a student through a research thesis Which programmer wants that?! Just hearing the word "scrum" makes me want to run away and I know I am not alone here. Helping a student through a research thesis doesn't sound so bad, because as a human, helping people feels good. But here, there is no student, no human feelings, and you are not even helping the AI become better in the long term.

uncircle 1y ago
> I think the article could be more accurately titled "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Programmers who hate their job" Given how “vibe coding” is all about explaining clearly the requirements and defining context, it’s for programmers who should have chosen middle management as a career. To actual programmers that enjoy the craft, using an LLM means ruining the beautiful art of abstraction and mental visualisation of a complex piece of logic, by putting it through the very lossy process of explaining it into words. It would be a bit like a composer or a painter having to use words instead of leveraging their well-honed instinct.
- jf22 1y ago
  I've been middle management for half my career and the role has never been about explaining or requirements or defining context like I do with an LLM to code...
- starfallg 1y ago
  The reality is that hacking code isn't always beautiful. Most of the time, it is mundane grunt work. You can always leave the core logic for your to work on and have the AI handle all the bits that you don't like to do. This is what we do for modelling for example, AI helps with the interface and data backends, the core modelling logic is hand-crafted.
  - 1y ago

bobsmooth 1y ago

Trying to get better at vibe coding is like trying to get better at sleeping. The whole point is not to put effort into it.

leptons 1y ago
Not a good analogy. You can put effort into getting better sleep. If the sunlight wakes you up too early, block out the windows. If your bed is uncomfortable, get a more comfortable bed. If the room is too hot, adjust the thermostat before you go to bed. A little bit of effort can go a long way towards getting better sleep. But you can't change the fundamental operation of an LLM, by its very nature it is not suitable for producing consistently correct results. Getting better at "vibe coding" is an exercise in futility.
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
simonw 1y ago
I completely disagree, for both definitions of vibe coding (the unreviewed-prompt-generated-code definition and the llm-assisted-coding definition.) In both cases the more experience and mindful experimentation you have the better your results will be.
cheema33 1y ago
> The whole point is not to put effort into it. You sound like you have not spent much time using AI tools.

jackblemming 1y ago

I always wonder what kind of slop people are creating when they say they have a bajillion Claude instances all churning out code.

alfalfasprout 1y ago
Impressive sounding slop that either rarely amounts to anything, breaks, or becomes someone else's problem. Unfortunately I'm starting to see these people at work... What's worse is they also tend to be the type of "evangelists" that become wildly defensive or accusatory when you question anything about their work.
kasey_junk 1y ago
In my experience you would not be able to identify code I wrote by hand from code I generated with an asynchronous agent, because I wouldn’t let it get to you if something stood out as off. But I don’t “vibe code” anything. I understand and review all the code that gets generated. Most of the stuff coming from my agents is either boilerplate or extensively uses libraries and static analysis tools that make it easy to verify. I kill aggressively any code the agent outputs that doesn’t match my standards unless it’s obvious that I can get it up to par quickly. This is one of the big advantages of the llm. I can do that without navigating inter personal conflict. But the output is mostly indistinguishable from what I create by hand.
chermi 1y ago
It's very easy to check out his GitHub, no need to wonder. Hint: it's not slop
ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
I'm sure there's lots of slop being generated by this stuff, but at least for my work it's mostly solving the simple issues. Maybe it's the slop of "hey can you find out why my code isn't working?" and "closed issue 268 because it works on the latest versions, and we made your code into an MWE for the future". If you check any open source project that gets traction, there's tens of thousands of issues to handle. A good thousand of them are just "unit conversion would be good here", "this docstring is missing this option", etc. Those little PRs are the slop of Github that someone has to do, and I'd prefer not telling my interns to do that because otherwise they'd just quit. Good thing Claude doesn't quit, he's a good boy.

redeyedtreefrog 1y ago

It's hardly original, but my take is that vibe coding works brilliantly for personal projects (or potentially for tiny startups that need to rapidly churn out CRUD boilerplate, API integrations, etc), but terribly for most large commercial systems. I'm having fun with Claude Code and Vibe Kanban on personal projects, and before that I spent a lot of time with both the Windsurf and Cursor agents. It's making me literally 10x more productive on personal projects, maybe even 50x. On personal projects: - no-one but me needs to decide on requirements - no-one but me needs to make decisions - no-one but me needs to maintain the code going forward - much of the time I'm intentionally using languages and frameworks that I am somewhat clueless about, and an LLM providing continuous ideas (even if sometimes entirely silly ones) stops me getting stuck - I don't mind if there are large chunks of useless or half-working code On commercial projects: - every line of code is a massive liability. Every line needs to be reviewed by another engineer, and every developer who joins the project needs to be aware of it, take it into consideration when making changes elsewhere, and potentially debug it if something goes wrong - senior engineers are almost always hired to work with languages and technologies they are already very familiar with, meaning for many tasks it's often quicker to write out the code by hand (or perhaps with Cursor's auto-complete) than guide an LLM to do it - much of the time is spent in meetings trying to unearth the real product requirements or providing updates to stakeholders - much of the time is spent reading old code and working out how to implement things in extremely large and complex systems in a minimally disruptive way - a lot of time is spent reviewing other people's PRs, and getting infuriated when people (often either very junior or very senior) produce 1000 line PRs consisting of unnecessary changes, excessive boilerplate, half-finished experiments, and things that clearly haven't been tested properly. This was the case long before LLMs, AI just makes it ever more tempting for people to act this way. - trying to avoid or gently negotiate political games over who is in control of the project, or who gets to makes technical decisions

fragmede 1y ago
if we have to put numbers on it, I'm attempting projects I wouldn't have, because the startup cost was too high, so does that make me infinity times more productive on that project because the denominator otherwise would have been zero?

andai 1y ago

> For the record, I now have about 32 Claude agents continuously running in tmux windows that I can ssh to, so all day long I can just check via laptop or phone and keep plugging along. What's the cost of 32Cph?

ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
The same $200/month Max plan as anyone else. It just gets rate limited sometimes but who cares, you just go back to the fun part of doing your own coding until it's back.
seblon 1y ago
How the hell he's using so much argents at the same time. Is it for 32 different "issues" like feature 1, 2, 3, ...?

simonw 1y ago

This piece is excellent - it's full of ideas and tips that I have not seen in other similar tutorials. Worth spending some time with, especially if you are still skeptical of the value that can be unlocked by AI-assisted programming. (A minor disagreement: it's using a definition of "vibe coding" that applies to any form of ai-assisted programming. I prefer to define vibe coding with its original definition from all the way back in February where it only refers to code that is generated through prompting without any review.)

isaacremuant 1y ago

I use LLMs, just like i use Google and other things but I don't vibe code as defined like the original meaning and I feel that all these people who are trying to tell me how good they are with it are yet to explain how on earth code is the most complex thing. Coding is the easy part. Knowing what to code, how to work with people, how to interact with the real world and with chaos, with bad data, with poor integrations, and entropy. I'm all for making AI and coding better and helping people do that and think. I'm not impressed by anyone who doesn't show me they can think about the problems we face better and faster, and keep doing it without slowing down to a halt or making it someone's else's problem. Everyone else is just talking themselves up or selling something, neither of which are useful to me.

renodino 1y ago

My recent vibe code experience made me realize it's almost exactly like being a tech lead managing offshore development. I learned early on that the key to leading successful offshore projects is precise, detailed specifications, and very rigorous code review and testing. Now I'm using the exact same discipline to "vibe" code. I really think there needs to be a different term for professional solution engineering using LLMs (like "prompt engineering" but for coding) to differentiate from casual prototyping or simple web UI hacking by non-devs that uses "vibe" coding.

ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
> I really think there needs to be a different term for professional solution engineering using LLMs (like "prompt engineering" but for coding) to differentiate from casual prototyping or simple web UI hacking by non-devs that uses "vibe" coding. Yeah, maybe it needs another name because yes when you say you're vibe coding everyone imagines some 20 year old kid with sunglasses spitting out Javascript and calling it Python. While the tools are the same, the understanding and the discipline is very different. I think "tech lead managing offshore development" is an excellent analogy.

afro88 1y ago

> The moment you see it go off the rails, just throw it out. That problem is too hard for Claude, it’s for you now. Or, any of: - the problem was too big in scope and needed a stepped plan to refer to and execute step by step - your instructions weren't clear enough - the context you provided was missing something crucial it couldn't find agentically, or build knowledge of (in which case, document that part of the codebase first) - your rules/AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md needs some additions or tweaking - you may need a more powerful model to plan implementation first Just throwing away and moving on is often the wrong choice and you'll get better at using these tools slower. If you're still within the "time it would have taken me to do it myself" window, think about what caused it to go off the rails or fail spectacularly and try giving it another go (not following up, throw away current results and chat and try again with the above in mind)

polishdude20 1y ago
I totally agree. I've recently been using Cursor to help create a new react project with a lot of functionality. I realized I need to have it do more smaller steps that I get to have lots of input on rather than say "this is the big picture now go forth".

jpollock 1y ago

I've just spent the better part of two weeks trying to convince a LLM to automate some programming for me. We use feature flags. However, cleaning them up is something rarely done. It typically takes me ~3minutes to clean one up. To clean up the flag: 1) delete the test where the flag is off 2) delete all the code setting the flag to on 3) anything getting the value of the flag is set to true 4) resolve all "true" expressions, cleaning up if's and now constant parameters. 5) prep a pull request and send it for review This is all fully supported by the indexing and refactoring tooling in my IDE. However, when I prompted the LLM with those steps (and examples), it failed. Over and over again. It would delete tests where the value was true, forget to resolve the expressions, and try to run grep/find across a ginormous codebase. If this was an intern, I would only have to correct them once. I would correct the LLM, and then it would make a different mistake. It wouldn't follow the instructions, and it would use tools I told it to not use. It took 5-10 minutes to make the change, and then would require me to spend a couple of minutes fixing things. It was at the point of not saving me any time. I've got a TONNE of low-hanging fruit that I can't give to an intern, but could easily sick a tool as capable as an intern on. This was not that.

polishdude20 1y ago
Which LLM? How are you prompting it? I've been using Cursor for the last few months and notice that for tasks like this, it helps to give examples of the code you're looking for, tell it more or less how the feature flags are implemented and also have it spit out a list of files it would modify first.
- jpollock 1y ago
  I gave it explicit ordering, instructions on what tools to _not_ use, and before/after examples from the codebase. A full page of instructions. After iterating on that for a while, I did a bunch manually (90) and then gave the LLM a list of pull requests as examples, and asked _it_ to write the prompt. It still failed. Finally, I broke the problem up and started to ask it to generate tools to perform each step. It started to make progress - each execution gave me a new checkpoint so it wouldn't make new mistakes.

bgwalter 1y ago

The author's 200 GitHub packages not withstanding, the startups he is involved in are both founded on machine learning, so I don't consider him unbiased. It is always the founder type who is trying to peddle fantasies like this: Vibe coding turns any individual into the CTO leading a team of 20, 30, 50, 60 interns. How much does his new hobby cost? On my $200/month Claude 20x Max subscription I used enough tokens for about $5,200 of compute in the first month. This is obviously not sustainable, but hey, it’s a startup world and VCs are paying for it right now.

wsintra2022 1y ago

Let’s just call it like it is, Vibe coding takes away the thinking of the execution of steps to solve the problem and offloads that part of our mind to a text generator with intelligent emergent properties. If you enjoy keeping the intelligence sharp for laying out the steps to solve the problem and executing the steps then don’t vibe code. If you don’t mind the engineering skills atrophy then go ahead and vibe code. But know this. You will lose the skills.

ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
> If you don’t mind the engineering skills atrophy then go ahead and vibe code. But know this. You will lose the skills. I don't see why it's an either or. As explained in the article, I'm still coding all day. Just some trivial PRs are getting done and tidied up while I'm doing so. You still have to do all of the code review, and you still have to solve all of the hard problems, you just do less of the refactoring by hand.

polotics 1y ago

This appears to me to be a surprisingly low-effort article. Nothing about managing context length and starting tasks from a good context, managing .md files and structuring repos, very anthropomorphising which does not help, nothing about tools to use to build the right context, no comparison of different approaches, what kind of MCP and/or RAG to get agents to look at documentation.

Ethee 1y ago
The article clearly isn't directed at how expert programmers are 'supposed' to use AI, though we see at least one of those a day on the front page of HN now. The first paragraph makes it pretty obvious that the author is trying to convince people who have completely disregarded AI, for one reason or another, to give it another try in a more meaningful way. Telling the reader how the author configures his AI isn't going to convince those people, as they likely are already very aware of how these tools 'work' the problem is in the 'how to use them' department which has nothing to do with what MCP tool you're using.
ChrisRackauckas 1y ago
That's kind of the whole point. Setting up a few MCPs etc. is really a minor thing in the grand scheme of things. Sure, I have setup context7, Sequential Thinking, etc. and my Claude.md has a lot of details in it, but that only improves the accuracy so much. My whole point is that if the mindset is "I need this to be very accurate for it to work", then you're already putting too much effort into it. I personally have not found any of that time worth it. For any PR I had to put effort into, I could have done it quicker myself. So I learned those things and they just didn't have a payoff for my work. They did really well in some things like front end development, devops, and stuff of that sort, but if it's the normal kind of problem that is my "here's my actual hard problem of the day", i.e. something where I would need to start white boarding a new algorithm and semi-prove some numerical stability result before throwing code, the LLMs just fail to ever come up with anything new enough to get a solution. But, slamming down commands for it on only easy problems in order to get 90% of a PR done and just finishing it yourself? That can get you 6 PRs in instead of 3, where you did the hard 3 and just looked at the transcripts for another 15, and tossed all but the 3 that looked good. Using Claude like that takes about half an hour out of your day and you get a good benefit, and that is what I am pointing to as a very useful approach. I personally don't think any amount of MCP servers will make "Claude, find me a novel algorithmic improvement in this space and code it up" work, but hey if that works for you that's great. But reviewing and checking the proofs would likely make it not worth it for what I'm doing.

theusus 1y ago

This looks like rambling than a guide.

nphardon 1y ago

I think the idea that it's important to know how to code is going to be seriously challenged. I know I feel like the learning process and insight I gain is important, but I wonder if it is, beyond the subjective. Like I'm sure the grad students working for Euler learned a ton generating logarithmic tables by hand, but it proved to be useless in the end. Could having a solid grasp on memory management/access in C be the same? I think this is why obsolescence can be hard to predict. Like if in 30 years all code is run and managed by ai bots, then all this debate about "it's important to know how to code!" will seem really silly.

mangamadaiyan 1y ago
> Could having a solid grasp on memory management/access in C be the same? Perhaps not when the code is getting written (by yourself or by an AI). When you're dealing with a memory leak in production (yes, they can and do happen), or worse -- if you're dealing with a drop in performance -- good luck with the vibe debugging. Maybe there will be a time not too far off in the future when the stochastic cockatoos become sentient enough to do all of this by themselves, it's sure as hell not happening tomorrow. Oh, and logarithmic tables were still a useful thing as late as forty odd years ago :)

percentcer 1y ago

I like programming. It's fun, and sometimes it even requires creativity. There are plenty of times when it's not that fun, and doesn't require any creativity (because whatever it is has been done by someone else a thousand times over), and you just want a result. Vibecoding is great for _that_ stuff (think little throw-away scripts, shell one liners, tool plugins, etc) I generally don't get great results from LLM code because most of my work is in C++ (which I'm guessing is underrepresented in the training data?), but when I point it towards some well-worn javascript thing I've had real successes! Most recent example is this little chrome plugin I had it whip up in one shot (https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/favicon-tab-grouper/hmgbdbenimanjdnjcngocojmikpljffo https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/favicon-tab-grouper...) because I couldn't find the exact functionality I needed in other plugins. Works perfectly for my needs, took less than five minutes to spin up, and I use it all the time. If you're looking to get started with vibecoding stuff, try making plugins that provide niche functionality for your hyper-specific workflows.

dimtass 1y ago

After 25 years in embedded, embedded Linux, devops and cloud security I don’t care about coding anymore. I’ve done almost everything in so many programming languages and assembly that I can’t even count. Every programming task seems like a repetitive task. But architecture and solving a real problem wow, this still kicks in me. So, LLMs are my pals that we spend so much time in planning and go to every single small detail and in such depth that it’s hard to explain the mental erection. Just give it a prompt to try to contradict every step and make it hard for you and try to convince it that it’s wrong. I can spend hours just building the plan and the idea. Then I have the solution and it’s just boring to write the code. I know I can write the code and I’ve already done it before. So, I just create a full plan with specs and a water flow to do list and let it do the job. I check if it does it right and keep it on track not to over engineer things (they tend to do that a lot) and just enjoy the outcome. I would say I do vibe-planning before vibe-coding.