10 ms·

How do we stop vibe coding?

61 points by prohobo 2mo ago

prohobo 2mo ago
[dead]
thenatureboy 2mo ago
Economics will dictate that working bespoke on coding will simply not be profitable anymore. Great article but there is no stopping this trend at this rate.
- encyclopedism 2mo ago
  I would guess that most HN users are employees. By far the largest dictator of your day to day life is your employer. Sentences such as this one from the article "Hopefully, many developers will slowly rediscover their love for programming when they can apply it to problems that actually interest and challenge them" Simply to not understand this dynamic. The economics will dictate what will happen and NOT much else.
  - asdff 2mo ago
    If things were based on pure economics in a vacuum, there would be no good SF based tech jobs. There'd be middling salaries for developers across the country, and probably actually the bulk of the work would actually happen in say latvia or laos. Instead, we have weird layers of cultural assumptions that keep many of these jobs onshored to the bay area in particular, for no reason at all really. Even with the AI tidal wave, companies still want butts in seats in SF for some reason.
    - encyclopedism 2mo ago
      I'm not saying it's economics in a vacuum. I'm suggesting that it is LARGELY economics. > There'd be middling salaries for developers across the country, and probably actually the bulk of the work would actually happen in say latvia or laos Yes that's what happened and it's called offshoring. If you're in the US or Europe it happened to manufacturing too. It's in China for economic reasons. That doesn't mean there isn't any manufacturing going on in your country.
- krater23 2mo ago
  That is, assuming you believe "vibe coding" is actually more efficient than hand-coding. If your users simply accept bugs that can't be fixed because doing so would lead to a day-long discussion with your AI, then it is true. Human language is one of the worst ways to describe software.
throwaway6977 2mo ago
Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route. I've never been more informed or understood more about my code, pipelines, and stack than now- and its 100% due to AI reasoning about my projects, and me making an effort to learn.
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- prohobo 2mo ago
  I never said you have to turn your brain off to feel the limitations. Actually, for more complex work I think it's pretty common to spend a long time crafting some elaborate prompt, and then arguing with the agent for 10-20 turns, getting a "passable" plan, accepting it then arguing with the agent every step of the way because it's doing it wrong. It's incredibly frustrating, even with models like Fable. Even after that, I'll often find out during later sessions that some feature that was supposed to be deprecated was actually silently left in "because I wasn't sure you wanted it completely gone" or something. I agree that exploring a codebase through prompts is actually quite nice! But the mental model you get from that is almost always warped - you have to supplement that with reading the code, where 9 times out of 10 you will find some kind of discrepancy that you're unhappy with. Why not optimize that process?
  - HappySweeney 2mo ago
    Your experience is night-and-day from mine. Both myself and the AI correct and remove each other's gaps in understanding. There is never what I would call arguing. Disagreements are resolved by back and forth discussion and reaching consensus.
  - resonious 2mo ago
    This sounds like not the best workflow. If your prompt is that long, you may not be spending your time very efficiently. Splitting problems into smaller problems is huge. You want a concrete idea that you still own. Only tell an agent to do something you know it can nail - this will likely be one subsystem. The subsystems and how they talk is on you.
deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
Towaway69 2mo ago
Howabout: just turn off AI. I scanned the article, never made it to the bottom, didn’t find the point the author was trying to make. Howabout just learning to code better as a human without using AI. Just like learning a craft. Just refuse to use AI. Not possible because of peer pressure? Well then stop worrying and continue to vibe. Either stop or stop complaining but don’t make excuses or write long articles that ramble and rant … sorry but I don’t understand what’s so hard about stopping.
- boguscoder 2mo ago
  It might not be so much of a peer pressure than “industry pressure” soon. You can keep hand-crafting it all you want as a hobby, but selling your crafts will be totally different matter
  - deleted 2mo ago
    [deleted]
  - Towaway69 2mo ago
    Industry consists of humans, humans can change this collectively. It's still peer pressure. If you don't resist, don't complain. You won't be able to sell your craft, correct. That means keep your day job. If your day job requires vibe coding, then that becomes your day job. If you don't like it, quit. Live on the street and by your moral beliefs. Or else, sell your soul. That's the stark choice that plenty of folks have faced and will face. There is nothing special about being a coder anymore - welcome to the factory floor.
    - nojvek 2mo ago
      AIs aren’t magically writing good code. I still have to prompt the biggest model towards a coherent design. DRY code isn’t their strong suite. They don’t give a shit about maintainable human readable code. RLVR training rewards for achieving some objective. Even if they achieve by writing 1000 lines when a 100 suffices. There’s a ton of value in writing maintainable code for a complex production system. AIs are great at POC YOLO coding.
ls-a 2mo ago
[flagged]
- Supermancho 2mo ago
  > Vibe coding is the new way forward. Please adapt or you will lose so much This is a reaction to the title, by someone who did not read the article.
  - ActionHank 2mo ago
    Title-vibed comment
- encyclopedism 2mo ago
  It is not always the case that there is a way to adapt to a certain thing. How can the immense investment in AI pay off? AI is doing away with human intellectual input. There are 25 million developers globally, AI efficiency may mean in the future we need only 15 million. That 10 million saving is the return on investment. Those 10 million developers aren't adapting sorry.
greenoracle9 2mo ago
[dead]
jamal-kumar 2mo ago
I enjoyed the article, I think you're right that the tooling to get out of making things too automatic is definitely lacking. AI coding is cool if you have something in a certain valley of simple enough for it to get but not so complex or low level that it will screw it up, but commercial models don't really do the following yet: 1. malware development 2. anything security tooling related 3. reliable assembly 4. reliable and somewhat more obscure programming languages like blockchain programming langs or distributed programming with elixir I feel that https://maldevacademy.com https://maldevacademy.com has been keeping my skills relatively fresh, it's fun in the discord where sometimes we try using models to do this stuff and it just chokes On the other hand I "vibe coded" (Although I've heard more nuanced distinctions in terminology here about doing it right rather than just letting it rip automatically or without much thought) a fairly large and profitable software project in about a month recently that would have probably taken me over three if I hadn't used claude. In the end and as you mentioned, these things are just tools and if you're busy complaining about them rather than finding what they can't do yet and having a bit of fun with working within those limits, you might be able to find a good niche to make better use of your time and avoid the skill atrophy
- prohobo 2mo ago
  Thanks, yeah I just went with the most controversial term as the catch-all which just means: you prompt an agent as your core workflow. For me as well, I do projects for clients that would have taken me months, and I deliver them in a fraction of the time. It's amazing and totally helped cure my burnout (which I had for over a year before I found Claude Code.)
Supermancho 2mo ago
While my CONTEXT.md's are a hodgepodge of general ideals and specific do's/dont's, my AGENTS.md are demonstrable. I can instrument to observe the instructions being executed. * Delegation * Execution (better rules than rtk) * Response * Logging When I want to turn off the printf style confirmations, manually editing saves the tokens. Using RFC 2119 (language) doesn't make a substantial difference. I'm in search of something better.
- prohobo 2mo ago
  [flagged]
nadis 2mo ago
This piece is more thoughtful than the title initially led me to believe. However, I feel like it's sort of like advocating for us all being able to read/write binary (using a bit of an extreme to prove a point). While there might certainly be benefits to understanding less abstract layers, I don't think it's necessary or even necessarily helpful. That said, I don't think the answer is "turn your brain off completely" but I think that there should be tools that facilitate thoughtful ways of vibe coding with natural language, which is basically another abstraction layer from writing the code and tests yourself.
- prohobo 2mo ago
  I'm making the case that we should make tools for the higher abstraction, not a lower one. You said it yourself: why should we read/write binary? We don't, we shouldn't. It might be useful in some cases, but working with assembly is much easier. Intent is more natural to us than code, for the same reason assembly is more natural than binary.
  - nadis 2mo ago
    I'd agree with you then! I don't think that case was clearly laid out (or at least I didn't understand your argument to be as such). I'd also say that humans are historically quite bad at communicating intent (even if it comes more naturally and is communicated in natural-language), so I think tools that support human <> agent interaction and iteration are important.
arisAlexis 2mo ago
We can also go back to the telegraph
ingvay7 2mo ago
[dead]
Havoc 2mo ago
>Writing code by hand will always be around for bespoke and novel, complex work. That sentence is probably the key. There is zero chance of this stopping overall. Much like with artists 90% of the commercial stuff - copy/ads with generic guy in suit picture - will be AI that is "good enough". Less concerned about the code quality and more the labour market dynamics. If this goes anything like translation & creative space did then there is going to be a brutal shakeup where competition for remaining "real" seats gets intense
- bitexploder 2mo ago
  We now have more work, not less. Engineers can finally address security and tech debt! Surely businesses will see the value in that. Right?
  - KronisLV 2mo ago
    > Engineers can finally address security and tech debt! I’ve been gradually moving test coverage up, updating packages with CVEs (even if in some cases it’s more like a migration), fixing more bugs, writing load testing solutions, fixing badly made architectural choices and recently even migrated a codebase away from Oracle onto PostgreSQL and figured out some pretty good settings for the DB itself with the aforementioned test tool. Oh and introduced Testcontainers to actually do proper DB tests. None of this would have happened without agents that churn even while I sleep, but somehow that is still more work cause I have to iterate on their output a lot and come up with additional ProjectLint rules whenever something new comes up. It’s like burnout². Obviously I also bear the blame when the slop inevitably goes wrong despite efforts to keep it manageable, so maybe touching nothing would be better.
    - bitexploder 2mo ago
      That is what I have learned over the last year. I still only have so much mental bandwidth. I can definitely do more now, but I have become relatively disciplined about what I nudge along each week with agents and it's okay if it doesn't happen in 2 days or 3 days. The efficiency gains are there. Agentic work is horrible for stealing our attention and the way it encodes in our brain as unfinished threads that occupy mental bandwidth. I keep it all in tasks now like everything else. Even "Go prompt agent X.". I have several projects I just prompt once a day with a thinking agent. And I only work on things that have some meaningful result driven outcome that aligns with my overall goals. No more "I am doing this because I can projects" or if I do start those they are much smaller and constrained. It helps. I still feel like I could be doing more, but I think it is a fundamental misalignment of how agentic workflows hijack our brain's reward system and I am extremely cautious about it now.
trjordan 2mo ago
Man, it's wild how I have no original thoughts. I've been pulling on this thought this morning, complete with checking in on how CodeSpeak and Tessl are doing. I'll add this link to the pile: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-tools.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-too... > spec-kit created a LOT of markdown files for me to review. They were repetitive, both with each other, and with the code that already existed. Some contained code already. Overall they were just very verbose and tedious to review. [...] To be honest, I’d rather review code than all these markdown files. The hardest part of any of this extraction is that modern code is already an extremely dense representation of how the computer should work. You mostly can't change the code without changing behavior. I bet Scryer works for his use case, and it's a joy to dogfood. I also bet it fully breaks down the moment a 2nd developer, who cares about different things, joins the team.
didroe 2mo ago
I think a big issue is that the companies pushing AI want it to replace people entirely. So the software around it is designed with that mindset. I'd really like something that works more like pair programming. Where you share an editor session with the AI, and it's much more interactive. eg. It says "I'm thinking about doing X here, what do you think?". Then you give a response and it continues. Or you can see it doing something silly and immediately stop it and correct something either with a prompt or by manually editing yourself, before letting it rip again. Or just ask it "why are you doing it that way?". Maybe with some control over the speed it's going, for when you feel confident about what it's doing. Claude has made some positive changes over time where it asks you more when there are different approaches it can take. But I feel like I'm not being brought along with my mental model as much as I would like. A lot of the time it spits out a whole pile of code and then I have to go and build up the mental model after the fact, and correct a lot of what it's done. The current approach is good a lot of the time though, when you're not really changing anything architectural and just want it to bash out code while you do somehthing else.
ethagnawl 2mo ago
> ... why would we even want to do this manually? All it did was lead to burnout and cynicism. Speak for yourself. If anything is leading _me_ to burnout, it's this bullshit hype cycle.
- encyclopedism 2mo ago
  For many people coding isn't just a means to an end but a pleasure in itself. Coding by hand, the raw intellectual challenge to my mind has been one of the greatest 'jobs' you could have. Earning money for what is essentially 'solving puzzles' is amazing! With vibe coding that's out the window and a race to the bottom to remove as MUCH intellectual human input is at hand. To reiterate Human intellectual input is what AI is attempting to do away with or reduce as much as possible.
  - ethagnawl 2mo ago
    That's pretty much how I feel. I've been extremely lucky in that, for the last ~15 years, work often hasn't felt like work as a result. I also think I was (am?) _average at best_ but continually saw improvement, found new tricks, etc. and was kept engaged. If I wind up stocking shelves at Tractor Supply, like I keep threatening to (because I have no interest in feeding bots with markdown), I'm sure I'll be in for a rude awakening.
    - encyclopedism 2mo ago
      Anecdotally at least I've seen devs who have checked out by completely flipping careers or doing something zany such as living off grid. Unfortunately like most things your options are limited to your economic circumstances.
js8 2mo ago
IMHO and IME, we need new programming language(s). I started on Pascal and C/C++. Then I moved to Python. It freed my mind from types, and I was able to think more high-level about the data structures. After another decade and half, I discovered Haskell. Turns out the types were not the problem; the lack of proper type inference was. So it turned out to be a usability issue of C/C++. Writing type explicitly everywhere is just bad UX. My point is this. LLM's allow you to program and reason about code in a natural language. It clearly has some advantages over programming in traditional programming languages. But it has a significant disadvantage that natural language is not semantically sound. (And as a result, you get what people incorrectly call indeterminism of LLMs.) I believe we need better programming language in which we can also express metalogical properties of programs, as if we expressed them in natural language, but with soundness guarantees. This new language would then become the new source code. This language needs to have primitives for fuzzy and modal logic, and there need to be some algorithm that can typecheck (check if the statement is consistent) and type-infer (if the statement is inconsistent or ambigous, fill-in the likely parts, possibly interactively). We know such a formal system must exists, because a very close variant of it has already been implemented (or discovered?) within LLM. We essentially need to discover true metaprogramming - writing programs that manipulate programs. From Curry-Howard isomorphism, we know there is analogy between program execution and reasoning. So it is time to start using same language for both. (I am looking into using Triage Calculus for this.)
sgt101 2mo ago
This is what happens when you swap gatekeepers for drug pushers.
IAmGraydon 2mo ago
True vibe coding (as in, using an LLM to write software end to end without understanding what's going on under the hood) just doesn't work in the long term, so it will likely stop itself. No one who's serious creates software this way. That said, I don't understand why it seems like it has to be all or nothing. Just architect the software yourself and tell the LLM to modify small chunks of code that you understand. Or maybe not even small, but a body of code where you understand what it does and can understand what the LLM is changing. Don't tell it to implement a feature - tell it to implement a function. If you can't do this, then you're a wannabe who's using LLMs to LARP as an actual programmer.
waffletower 2mo ago
I am much later in my career, and I have established many skills that have atrophied which I have restored in need and/or desire over a span of decades. I think it is fair for younger people to be much more cautious with AI assisted coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex) and their impact upon their skills. But understand that some atrophy may not be bad and simply a symptom of focus. If you want to stay a master juggler, keep juggling. But you can also ask yourself, do I need to be master juggler? You will still be able to juggle regardless.
kimjune01 2mo ago
vibe coding becomes much more tolerable when you disambiguate your agents with goals, constraints and heuristics up front.
chandankarn 2mo ago
[flagged]

61 points by prohobo 2mo ago

[dead]

Economics will dictate that working bespoke on coding will simply not be profitable anymore. Great article but there is no stopping this trend at this rate.

encyclopedism 2mo ago
I would guess that most HN users are employees. By far the largest dictator of your day to day life is your employer. Sentences such as this one from the article "Hopefully, many developers will slowly rediscover their love for programming when they can apply it to problems that actually interest and challenge them" Simply to not understand this dynamic. The economics will dictate what will happen and NOT much else.
- asdff 2mo ago
  If things were based on pure economics in a vacuum, there would be no good SF based tech jobs. There'd be middling salaries for developers across the country, and probably actually the bulk of the work would actually happen in say latvia or laos. Instead, we have weird layers of cultural assumptions that keep many of these jobs onshored to the bay area in particular, for no reason at all really. Even with the AI tidal wave, companies still want butts in seats in SF for some reason.
  - encyclopedism 2mo ago
    I'm not saying it's economics in a vacuum. I'm suggesting that it is LARGELY economics. > There'd be middling salaries for developers across the country, and probably actually the bulk of the work would actually happen in say latvia or laos Yes that's what happened and it's called offshoring. If you're in the US or Europe it happened to manufacturing too. It's in China for economic reasons. That doesn't mean there isn't any manufacturing going on in your country.
krater23 2mo ago
That is, assuming you believe "vibe coding" is actually more efficient than hand-coding. If your users simply accept bugs that can't be fixed because doing so would lead to a day-long discussion with your AI, then it is true. Human language is one of the worst ways to describe software.

throwaway6977 2mo ago

Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route. I've never been more informed or understood more about my code, pipelines, and stack than now- and its 100% due to AI reasoning about my projects, and me making an effort to learn.

deleted 2mo ago
[deleted]
prohobo 2mo ago
I never said you have to turn your brain off to feel the limitations. Actually, for more complex work I think it's pretty common to spend a long time crafting some elaborate prompt, and then arguing with the agent for 10-20 turns, getting a "passable" plan, accepting it then arguing with the agent every step of the way because it's doing it wrong. It's incredibly frustrating, even with models like Fable. Even after that, I'll often find out during later sessions that some feature that was supposed to be deprecated was actually silently left in "because I wasn't sure you wanted it completely gone" or something. I agree that exploring a codebase through prompts is actually quite nice! But the mental model you get from that is almost always warped - you have to supplement that with reading the code, where 9 times out of 10 you will find some kind of discrepancy that you're unhappy with. Why not optimize that process?
- HappySweeney 2mo ago
  Your experience is night-and-day from mine. Both myself and the AI correct and remove each other's gaps in understanding. There is never what I would call arguing. Disagreements are resolved by back and forth discussion and reaching consensus.
- resonious 2mo ago
  This sounds like not the best workflow. If your prompt is that long, you may not be spending your time very efficiently. Splitting problems into smaller problems is huge. You want a concrete idea that you still own. Only tell an agent to do something you know it can nail - this will likely be one subsystem. The subsystems and how they talk is on you.

deleted 2mo ago

[deleted]

Towaway69 2mo ago

Howabout: just turn off AI. I scanned the article, never made it to the bottom, didn’t find the point the author was trying to make. Howabout just learning to code better as a human without using AI. Just like learning a craft. Just refuse to use AI. Not possible because of peer pressure? Well then stop worrying and continue to vibe. Either stop or stop complaining but don’t make excuses or write long articles that ramble and rant … sorry but I don’t understand what’s so hard about stopping.

boguscoder 2mo ago
It might not be so much of a peer pressure than “industry pressure” soon. You can keep hand-crafting it all you want as a hobby, but selling your crafts will be totally different matter
- deleted 2mo ago
  [deleted]
- Towaway69 2mo ago
  Industry consists of humans, humans can change this collectively. It's still peer pressure. If you don't resist, don't complain. You won't be able to sell your craft, correct. That means keep your day job. If your day job requires vibe coding, then that becomes your day job. If you don't like it, quit. Live on the street and by your moral beliefs. Or else, sell your soul. That's the stark choice that plenty of folks have faced and will face. There is nothing special about being a coder anymore - welcome to the factory floor.
  - nojvek 2mo ago
    AIs aren’t magically writing good code. I still have to prompt the biggest model towards a coherent design. DRY code isn’t their strong suite. They don’t give a shit about maintainable human readable code. RLVR training rewards for achieving some objective. Even if they achieve by writing 1000 lines when a 100 suffices. There’s a ton of value in writing maintainable code for a complex production system. AIs are great at POC YOLO coding.

ls-a 2mo ago

[flagged]

Supermancho 2mo ago
> Vibe coding is the new way forward. Please adapt or you will lose so much This is a reaction to the title, by someone who did not read the article.
- ActionHank 2mo ago
  Title-vibed comment
encyclopedism 2mo ago
It is not always the case that there is a way to adapt to a certain thing. How can the immense investment in AI pay off? AI is doing away with human intellectual input. There are 25 million developers globally, AI efficiency may mean in the future we need only 15 million. That 10 million saving is the return on investment. Those 10 million developers aren't adapting sorry.

greenoracle9 2mo ago

[dead]

jamal-kumar 2mo ago

I enjoyed the article, I think you're right that the tooling to get out of making things too automatic is definitely lacking. AI coding is cool if you have something in a certain valley of simple enough for it to get but not so complex or low level that it will screw it up, but commercial models don't really do the following yet: 1. malware development 2. anything security tooling related 3. reliable assembly 4. reliable and somewhat more obscure programming languages like blockchain programming langs or distributed programming with elixir I feel that https://maldevacademy.com https://maldevacademy.com has been keeping my skills relatively fresh, it's fun in the discord where sometimes we try using models to do this stuff and it just chokes On the other hand I "vibe coded" (Although I've heard more nuanced distinctions in terminology here about doing it right rather than just letting it rip automatically or without much thought) a fairly large and profitable software project in about a month recently that would have probably taken me over three if I hadn't used claude. In the end and as you mentioned, these things are just tools and if you're busy complaining about them rather than finding what they can't do yet and having a bit of fun with working within those limits, you might be able to find a good niche to make better use of your time and avoid the skill atrophy

prohobo 2mo ago
Thanks, yeah I just went with the most controversial term as the catch-all which just means: you prompt an agent as your core workflow. For me as well, I do projects for clients that would have taken me months, and I deliver them in a fraction of the time. It's amazing and totally helped cure my burnout (which I had for over a year before I found Claude Code.)

Supermancho 2mo ago

While my CONTEXT.md's are a hodgepodge of general ideals and specific do's/dont's, my AGENTS.md are demonstrable. I can instrument to observe the instructions being executed. * Delegation * Execution (better rules than rtk) * Response * Logging When I want to turn off the printf style confirmations, manually editing saves the tokens. Using RFC 2119 (language) doesn't make a substantial difference. I'm in search of something better.

prohobo 2mo ago
[flagged]

nadis 2mo ago

This piece is more thoughtful than the title initially led me to believe. However, I feel like it's sort of like advocating for us all being able to read/write binary (using a bit of an extreme to prove a point). While there might certainly be benefits to understanding less abstract layers, I don't think it's necessary or even necessarily helpful. That said, I don't think the answer is "turn your brain off completely" but I think that there should be tools that facilitate thoughtful ways of vibe coding with natural language, which is basically another abstraction layer from writing the code and tests yourself.

prohobo 2mo ago
I'm making the case that we should make tools for the higher abstraction, not a lower one. You said it yourself: why should we read/write binary? We don't, we shouldn't. It might be useful in some cases, but working with assembly is much easier. Intent is more natural to us than code, for the same reason assembly is more natural than binary.
- nadis 2mo ago
  I'd agree with you then! I don't think that case was clearly laid out (or at least I didn't understand your argument to be as such). I'd also say that humans are historically quite bad at communicating intent (even if it comes more naturally and is communicated in natural-language), so I think tools that support human <> agent interaction and iteration are important.

arisAlexis 2mo ago

We can also go back to the telegraph

ingvay7 2mo ago

[dead]

Havoc 2mo ago

>Writing code by hand will always be around for bespoke and novel, complex work. That sentence is probably the key. There is zero chance of this stopping overall. Much like with artists 90% of the commercial stuff - copy/ads with generic guy in suit picture - will be AI that is "good enough". Less concerned about the code quality and more the labour market dynamics. If this goes anything like translation & creative space did then there is going to be a brutal shakeup where competition for remaining "real" seats gets intense

bitexploder 2mo ago
We now have more work, not less. Engineers can finally address security and tech debt! Surely businesses will see the value in that. Right?
- KronisLV 2mo ago
  > Engineers can finally address security and tech debt! I’ve been gradually moving test coverage up, updating packages with CVEs (even if in some cases it’s more like a migration), fixing more bugs, writing load testing solutions, fixing badly made architectural choices and recently even migrated a codebase away from Oracle onto PostgreSQL and figured out some pretty good settings for the DB itself with the aforementioned test tool. Oh and introduced Testcontainers to actually do proper DB tests. None of this would have happened without agents that churn even while I sleep, but somehow that is still more work cause I have to iterate on their output a lot and come up with additional ProjectLint rules whenever something new comes up. It’s like burnout². Obviously I also bear the blame when the slop inevitably goes wrong despite efforts to keep it manageable, so maybe touching nothing would be better.
  - bitexploder 2mo ago
    That is what I have learned over the last year. I still only have so much mental bandwidth. I can definitely do more now, but I have become relatively disciplined about what I nudge along each week with agents and it's okay if it doesn't happen in 2 days or 3 days. The efficiency gains are there. Agentic work is horrible for stealing our attention and the way it encodes in our brain as unfinished threads that occupy mental bandwidth. I keep it all in tasks now like everything else. Even "Go prompt agent X.". I have several projects I just prompt once a day with a thinking agent. And I only work on things that have some meaningful result driven outcome that aligns with my overall goals. No more "I am doing this because I can projects" or if I do start those they are much smaller and constrained. It helps. I still feel like I could be doing more, but I think it is a fundamental misalignment of how agentic workflows hijack our brain's reward system and I am extremely cautious about it now.

trjordan 2mo ago

Man, it's wild how I have no original thoughts. I've been pulling on this thought this morning, complete with checking in on how CodeSpeak and Tessl are doing. I'll add this link to the pile: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-tools.html https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-too... > spec-kit created a LOT of markdown files for me to review. They were repetitive, both with each other, and with the code that already existed. Some contained code already. Overall they were just very verbose and tedious to review. [...] To be honest, I’d rather review code than all these markdown files. The hardest part of any of this extraction is that modern code is already an extremely dense representation of how the computer should work. You mostly can't change the code without changing behavior. I bet Scryer works for his use case, and it's a joy to dogfood. I also bet it fully breaks down the moment a 2nd developer, who cares about different things, joins the team.

didroe 2mo ago

I think a big issue is that the companies pushing AI want it to replace people entirely. So the software around it is designed with that mindset. I'd really like something that works more like pair programming. Where you share an editor session with the AI, and it's much more interactive. eg. It says "I'm thinking about doing X here, what do you think?". Then you give a response and it continues. Or you can see it doing something silly and immediately stop it and correct something either with a prompt or by manually editing yourself, before letting it rip again. Or just ask it "why are you doing it that way?". Maybe with some control over the speed it's going, for when you feel confident about what it's doing. Claude has made some positive changes over time where it asks you more when there are different approaches it can take. But I feel like I'm not being brought along with my mental model as much as I would like. A lot of the time it spits out a whole pile of code and then I have to go and build up the mental model after the fact, and correct a lot of what it's done. The current approach is good a lot of the time though, when you're not really changing anything architectural and just want it to bash out code while you do somehthing else.

ethagnawl 2mo ago

> ... why would we even want to do this manually? All it did was lead to burnout and cynicism. Speak for yourself. If anything is leading _me_ to burnout, it's this bullshit hype cycle.

encyclopedism 2mo ago
For many people coding isn't just a means to an end but a pleasure in itself. Coding by hand, the raw intellectual challenge to my mind has been one of the greatest 'jobs' you could have. Earning money for what is essentially 'solving puzzles' is amazing! With vibe coding that's out the window and a race to the bottom to remove as MUCH intellectual human input is at hand. To reiterate Human intellectual input is what AI is attempting to do away with or reduce as much as possible.
- ethagnawl 2mo ago
  That's pretty much how I feel. I've been extremely lucky in that, for the last ~15 years, work often hasn't felt like work as a result. I also think I was (am?) _average at best_ but continually saw improvement, found new tricks, etc. and was kept engaged. If I wind up stocking shelves at Tractor Supply, like I keep threatening to (because I have no interest in feeding bots with markdown), I'm sure I'll be in for a rude awakening.
  - encyclopedism 2mo ago
    Anecdotally at least I've seen devs who have checked out by completely flipping careers or doing something zany such as living off grid. Unfortunately like most things your options are limited to your economic circumstances.

js8 2mo ago

IMHO and IME, we need new programming language(s). I started on Pascal and C/C++. Then I moved to Python. It freed my mind from types, and I was able to think more high-level about the data structures. After another decade and half, I discovered Haskell. Turns out the types were not the problem; the lack of proper type inference was. So it turned out to be a usability issue of C/C++. Writing type explicitly everywhere is just bad UX. My point is this. LLM's allow you to program and reason about code in a natural language. It clearly has some advantages over programming in traditional programming languages. But it has a significant disadvantage that natural language is not semantically sound. (And as a result, you get what people incorrectly call indeterminism of LLMs.) I believe we need better programming language in which we can also express metalogical properties of programs, as if we expressed them in natural language, but with soundness guarantees. This new language would then become the new source code. This language needs to have primitives for fuzzy and modal logic, and there need to be some algorithm that can typecheck (check if the statement is consistent) and type-infer (if the statement is inconsistent or ambigous, fill-in the likely parts, possibly interactively). We know such a formal system must exists, because a very close variant of it has already been implemented (or discovered?) within LLM. We essentially need to discover true metaprogramming - writing programs that manipulate programs. From Curry-Howard isomorphism, we know there is analogy between program execution and reasoning. So it is time to start using same language for both. (I am looking into using Triage Calculus for this.)

sgt101 2mo ago

This is what happens when you swap gatekeepers for drug pushers.

IAmGraydon 2mo ago

True vibe coding (as in, using an LLM to write software end to end without understanding what's going on under the hood) just doesn't work in the long term, so it will likely stop itself. No one who's serious creates software this way. That said, I don't understand why it seems like it has to be all or nothing. Just architect the software yourself and tell the LLM to modify small chunks of code that you understand. Or maybe not even small, but a body of code where you understand what it does and can understand what the LLM is changing. Don't tell it to implement a feature - tell it to implement a function. If you can't do this, then you're a wannabe who's using LLMs to LARP as an actual programmer.

waffletower 2mo ago

I am much later in my career, and I have established many skills that have atrophied which I have restored in need and/or desire over a span of decades. I think it is fair for younger people to be much more cautious with AI assisted coding tools (e.g. Claude Code, Codex) and their impact upon their skills. But understand that some atrophy may not be bad and simply a symptom of focus. If you want to stay a master juggler, keep juggling. But you can also ask yourself, do I need to be master juggler? You will still be able to juggle regardless.

kimjune01 2mo ago

vibe coding becomes much more tolerable when you disambiguate your agents with goals, constraints and heuristics up front.

chandankarn 2mo ago

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