26 ms·

Vibecoders Can't Build for Longevity

47 points by dominicq 6mo ago

emiliazar 6mo ago
[dead]
blinkbat 6mo ago
time will tell. you can set reasonable constraints and review the code. unless you are disqualifying that as vibecoding.
- PaulHoule 6mo ago
  I think definitionally "vibe coding" means you feel out of control, in fact I would say Karpathy is deliberately trying to bring these feelings out in people. If you are using an AI assistant with your feet on the ground, like as a coding buddy that you pair with, you're not "vibe coding"
  - cindyllm 6mo ago
    [dead]
blinkbat 6mo ago
> If you keep vibe-adding features, and somehow keep getting customers to pay for this thing, what happens once the codebase becomes so complex that an LLM cannot fit it inside its “brain”? you realize this point is well, well beyond what a human can "fit" in their brain as well? you start making shorthands and assumptions about your systems once they get too large.
- codingblink 6mo ago
  One of the main weaknesses with current AI is they don't know how to modularize unless you explicitly say it in their prompt, or they will modularize but "forget" they included a feature in file B, so they redundantly type it in file A, causing features to break further down the line. Modularizing code is important and a lot of devs will learn this, I once had 2k-line files at the beginning of my career (this was before AI) and I now usually keep files between 100 and 500 lines (but not just because of AI). While I rarely use AI on my code, if I want to type my program into a local LLM that only has between 8-32k context (depends on the LLM), I need to keep it small to allow space for my prompt and other things. Even as a human it's much easier to edit the code when it's modular. I used to like everything in one file but not anymore, since with a modular codebase you can import a function into 2 different files, so changing it in one place will change it everywhere. TLDR: Modularizing your code makes it easier for both you (as a human) and an AI assistant to review your codebase, and reduces the risk of redundant development, which AI frequently does unknowingly.
  - ting0 6mo ago
    There needs to be a better harness than what we have. It feels like we're in the stone age with Claude Code etc. Having control over the harness locally, and combining it with local inference and analysis, seems to be the way forward. The modularization and maintaining the abstraction are the main things that result in slop. That also requires deterministic memory though.
- marginalia_nu 6mo ago
  This is true, but it ignores the fact that claude constantly pushes the code toward more complexity. Any given problem has a spectrum of solutions, ranging from simple and straightforward, to the most cursed rube goldberg machine you've ever seen. Claude biases toward the latter. When working on larger code bases, especially poorly factored ones (like the one claude tends to build unsupervised), it's default mode of operation is to build a cursed rube goldberg machine. It doesn't take too long before it starts visibly floundering when you ask it to make changes to the software. Complexity management is something human software engineers do constantly. Pushing back against complexity and technical debt is the primary concern for a developer working on a brownfield project. Everything you do has to take this into account. Claude doesn't.
graphememes 6mo ago
I think the existing comments already cover it most, also, I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best. It is quite insane to me to expect someone who just started to fully build google.com and all of it's infra,security,etc.
- bluefirebrand 6mo ago
  > I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best. Maybe, but the world seems to be inviting this comparison by acting as though they are going to disrupt and replace the established experienced coders The judgement and pushback is pretty warranted
  - reverius42 6mo ago
    It's a little more nuanced than this. Claude can't actually replace an experienced coder, but in two steps: 1. Claude makes every experienced coder more productive, 2. The industry decides to hire fewer experienced coders to get the same level of productivity, We have now accomplished putting some large percentage of experienced coders out of work without actually replicating what they do. It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software.
    - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
      > It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software It's almost like they don't actually believe (or care if) it is increasing productivity and are just using it as an excuse to cut costs
      - reverius42 6mo ago
ting0 6mo ago
If you want proof that there's a serious issue with vibe-coding over the long-term, all you need to do is be a Claude Code user and see how for every release they make they either create 5 new bugs, or re-introduce 5 they've already patched 15 times over the last year. The creators of Claude can't even vibe-code well. Claude Code is one of the sloppiest, least stable tools I've ever used. Anthropic has already proudly boasted about Claude Code is entirely vibe-coded and vibe-maintained. It's not a flex. It's a signal not to trust it.
- reverius42 6mo ago
  As a user of Claude Code... I wouldn't use it to write anything mission critical like calculating the trajectory of a NASA spacecraft or something. But there's tons of software out there that's equal or lower quality to Claude Code itself, or to what you can make with Claude Code, that is useful and serving a purpose. "Quality" is always relative to what is needed, what the market will bear, etc.
- aurareturn 6mo ago
  If they want to stop feature development and focus on stability, they can. But given how few people are working on Claude Code and how many features it keeps on adding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495527), I think Claude Code is doing fine.
- coldtea 6mo ago
  Any specific example? Because in regular use, it's hassle free.
  - whattheheckheck 6mo ago
    Open code doesn't even let you press end or home to control the text cursor. And it also has buggy error messages like a 400 or 500 corrupts the whole view box sometimes
- rvz 6mo ago
  > The creators of Claude can't even vibe-code well. Claude Code is one of the sloppiest, least stable tools I've ever used Claude Code was not designed on a stable architecture and was completely vibe-coded itself on a weekend so much that the authors can't read the code and are instead more like sales focused than engineering focused other than the Bun authors who are doing the actual work. If it wasn't for the Bun developers, Claude Code itself would become completely unmaintainable.
owenpalmer 6mo ago
Wake up babe! New system prompt just dropped!
bravetraveler 6mo ago
$EMPLOYER has decided longevity matters so little that we no longer "do reliability"; ship it, boys.
mediumsmart 6mo ago
Sounds like zenthewayisthegoalcoding
pu_pe 6mo ago
The main thrust of the article is that codebases can grow too large to be manageable by LLMs. > It simply will not fit the context window, and README files are of limited use. I think many useful applications can be built without reaching current context window limits, which will certainly grow. Besides, there are many tricks that Claude Code and Codex use for getting around this problem, such as compacting and sharding a task across many agents.
bobby322 6mo ago
articles like these almost always strike me as sour grapes, people trying to make vibe coding look bad, because of job security. Is vibe code good? I would argue, for the vast amount of BS little corporate IT projects out there yes, and it's just going to improve. Is it good enough for anything serious...hell no, but it might be soon.
rcarr 6mo ago
I agree that AI today over-engineers. However with the rate that everything is improving, do people really think that it's also not going to be able to refactor and optimise the code in a year or two from now? It can already do a decent job at it today if you prompt it to.

47 points by dominicq 6mo ago

[dead]

time will tell. you can set reasonable constraints and review the code. unless you are disqualifying that as vibecoding.

PaulHoule 6mo ago
I think definitionally "vibe coding" means you feel out of control, in fact I would say Karpathy is deliberately trying to bring these feelings out in people. If you are using an AI assistant with your feet on the ground, like as a coding buddy that you pair with, you're not "vibe coding"
- cindyllm 6mo ago
  [dead]

blinkbat 6mo ago

> If you keep vibe-adding features, and somehow keep getting customers to pay for this thing, what happens once the codebase becomes so complex that an LLM cannot fit it inside its “brain”? you realize this point is well, well beyond what a human can "fit" in their brain as well? you start making shorthands and assumptions about your systems once they get too large.

codingblink 6mo ago
One of the main weaknesses with current AI is they don't know how to modularize unless you explicitly say it in their prompt, or they will modularize but "forget" they included a feature in file B, so they redundantly type it in file A, causing features to break further down the line. Modularizing code is important and a lot of devs will learn this, I once had 2k-line files at the beginning of my career (this was before AI) and I now usually keep files between 100 and 500 lines (but not just because of AI). While I rarely use AI on my code, if I want to type my program into a local LLM that only has between 8-32k context (depends on the LLM), I need to keep it small to allow space for my prompt and other things. Even as a human it's much easier to edit the code when it's modular. I used to like everything in one file but not anymore, since with a modular codebase you can import a function into 2 different files, so changing it in one place will change it everywhere. TLDR: Modularizing your code makes it easier for both you (as a human) and an AI assistant to review your codebase, and reduces the risk of redundant development, which AI frequently does unknowingly.
- ting0 6mo ago
  There needs to be a better harness than what we have. It feels like we're in the stone age with Claude Code etc. Having control over the harness locally, and combining it with local inference and analysis, seems to be the way forward. The modularization and maintaining the abstraction are the main things that result in slop. That also requires deterministic memory though.
marginalia_nu 6mo ago
This is true, but it ignores the fact that claude constantly pushes the code toward more complexity. Any given problem has a spectrum of solutions, ranging from simple and straightforward, to the most cursed rube goldberg machine you've ever seen. Claude biases toward the latter. When working on larger code bases, especially poorly factored ones (like the one claude tends to build unsupervised), it's default mode of operation is to build a cursed rube goldberg machine. It doesn't take too long before it starts visibly floundering when you ask it to make changes to the software. Complexity management is something human software engineers do constantly. Pushing back against complexity and technical debt is the primary concern for a developer working on a brownfield project. Everything you do has to take this into account. Claude doesn't.

graphememes 6mo ago

I think the existing comments already cover it most, also, I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best. It is quite insane to me to expect someone who just started to fully build google.com and all of it's infra,security,etc.

bluefirebrand 6mo ago
> I would argue that we are seeing a new emerging group of coders come into the realm of programming and we are judging them at their worst and comparing them to our best. Maybe, but the world seems to be inviting this comparison by acting as though they are going to disrupt and replace the established experienced coders The judgement and pushback is pretty warranted
- reverius42 6mo ago
  It's a little more nuanced than this. Claude can't actually replace an experienced coder, but in two steps: 1. Claude makes every experienced coder more productive, 2. The industry decides to hire fewer experienced coders to get the same level of productivity, We have now accomplished putting some large percentage of experienced coders out of work without actually replicating what they do. It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software.
  - bluefirebrand 6mo ago
    > It is, however, making me a bit crazy that the industry's response to (presumed!) increased productivity has been to cut costs rather than invest more broadly and deeply in software It's almost like they don't actually believe (or care if) it is increasing productivity and are just using it as an excuse to cut costs
    - reverius42 6mo ago

ting0 6mo ago

If you want proof that there's a serious issue with vibe-coding over the long-term, all you need to do is be a Claude Code user and see how for every release they make they either create 5 new bugs, or re-introduce 5 they've already patched 15 times over the last year. The creators of Claude can't even vibe-code well. Claude Code is one of the sloppiest, least stable tools I've ever used. Anthropic has already proudly boasted about Claude Code is entirely vibe-coded and vibe-maintained. It's not a flex. It's a signal not to trust it.

reverius42 6mo ago
As a user of Claude Code... I wouldn't use it to write anything mission critical like calculating the trajectory of a NASA spacecraft or something. But there's tons of software out there that's equal or lower quality to Claude Code itself, or to what you can make with Claude Code, that is useful and serving a purpose. "Quality" is always relative to what is needed, what the market will bear, etc.
aurareturn 6mo ago
If they want to stop feature development and focus on stability, they can. But given how few people are working on Claude Code and how many features it keeps on adding (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495527 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47495527), I think Claude Code is doing fine.
coldtea 6mo ago
Any specific example? Because in regular use, it's hassle free.
- whattheheckheck 6mo ago
  Open code doesn't even let you press end or home to control the text cursor. And it also has buggy error messages like a 400 or 500 corrupts the whole view box sometimes
rvz 6mo ago
> The creators of Claude can't even vibe-code well. Claude Code is one of the sloppiest, least stable tools I've ever used Claude Code was not designed on a stable architecture and was completely vibe-coded itself on a weekend so much that the authors can't read the code and are instead more like sales focused than engineering focused other than the Bun authors who are doing the actual work. If it wasn't for the Bun developers, Claude Code itself would become completely unmaintainable.

owenpalmer 6mo ago

Wake up babe! New system prompt just dropped!

bravetraveler 6mo ago

$EMPLOYER has decided longevity matters so little that we no longer "do reliability"; ship it, boys.

mediumsmart 6mo ago

Sounds like zenthewayisthegoalcoding

pu_pe 6mo ago

The main thrust of the article is that codebases can grow too large to be manageable by LLMs. > It simply will not fit the context window, and README files are of limited use. I think many useful applications can be built without reaching current context window limits, which will certainly grow. Besides, there are many tricks that Claude Code and Codex use for getting around this problem, such as compacting and sharding a task across many agents.

bobby322 6mo ago

articles like these almost always strike me as sour grapes, people trying to make vibe coding look bad, because of job security. Is vibe code good? I would argue, for the vast amount of BS little corporate IT projects out there yes, and it's just going to improve. Is it good enough for anything serious...hell no, but it might be soon.

rcarr 6mo ago

I agree that AI today over-engineers. However with the rate that everything is improving, do people really think that it's also not going to be able to refactor and optimise the code in a year or two from now? It can already do a decent job at it today if you prompt it to.