8 ms·

“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

• Trasmatta 2y ago
  The more I work with LLMs and try things like "vibe coding" the less worried I am about AI taking my job any time soon. In the right contexts, I find LLMs can speed up my work a lot. But it's nowhere close to being able to replace what I do.
  • varenc 2y ago
    Speeding up your work does lead to job loss. If some developers can suddenly be 3x as productive than a company doesn't need as many engineers.
    • cmdli 2y ago
      The job loss depends on the average speed up, however. If the AI is only effective in 10% of tasks (the basic stuff), then that 3x improvement goes down to 1.3x.
      • toogan 2y ago
        > The job loss depends on the average speed up, That's such a economical fallacy that I'd expect the HN crowd to have understood this ages ago. Compare the average productivity of somebody working in a car factory 80 years ago with somebody today. How many person-hours did it take then and how many does it take today to manufacture a car? Did the number of jobs between then and now shrink by that factor? To the contrary. The car industry had an incredible boom. Efficiency increase does not imply job loss since the market size is not static. If cost is reduced then things are suddenly viable which weren't before and market size can explode. In the end you can end up with more jobs. Not always, obviously, but there are more examples than you can count which show that.
        • ekidd 2y ago
          This is all broadly true, historically. Automating jobs mostly results in creating more jobs elsewhere. But let's assume you have true, fully general AI. Further assume that it can do human-level cognition for $2/hour, and it's roughly as smart as a Stanford grad. So once the AI takes your job, it goes on to take your new job, and the job after that, and the job after that. It is smarter and cheaper than the average human, after all. This scenario goes one of three ways, depending on who controls the AI: 1. We all become fabulously wealthy and no longer need to work at all. (I have trouble visualizing exactly how we get this outcome.) 2. A handful of billionaires and politicians control the AI. They don't need the rest of us. 3. The AI controls itself, in which case most economic benefits and power go to the AI. The last historical analog of this was the Neanderthals, who were unable (for whatever reason) to compete with humans. So the most important question is, how close actually are we to this scenario? Is impossible? A century away? Or something that will happen in the next decade?
          • toogan 2y ago
            > But let's assume you have true, fully general AI. Very strong assumption and very narrow setting that is one of the counter examples. AI researchers in the 80s already told you that AI is around the corner in the next 5 years. Didn't happen. I wouldn't hold my breath this time either. "AI" is a misnomer. LLMs are not "intelligence". They are a lossy compression algorithm of everything that was put into their training set. Pretty good at that, but that's essentially it.
    • c0redump 2y ago
      Or it just leads to 3x more stuff being made. This conclusion isn’t nearly as trivial as you’re making it out to be.
    • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
      Only if that company has a finite wish list for their software. That is rarely the case.
    • dghlsakjg 2y ago
      That assumes a static demand for development services, which has, more or less, never happened since computing became a thing. Python, and other high level languages made a lot of development much faster, but it never lead to reduced engineering needs. Cloud made deploying services massively easier, and as a result we actually have a lot more people working in infrastructure. Faster development mostly leads to expanded economic viability for new types of software. The real question is what becomes economically feasible if development costs are halved.
      • jetrink 2y ago
        Jevon's Paradox: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jevons_paradox "In 1865, the English economist William Stanley Jevons observed that technological improvements that increased the efficiency of coal use led to the increased consumption of coal in a wide range of industries. He argued that, contrary to common intuition, technological progress could not be relied upon to reduce fuel consumption."
        • ModernMech 2y ago
          It's the same reason widening the road doesn't lead to less traffic.
    • simonw 2y ago
      Alternatively: if LLMs make devs 3x productive that means companies can get 3x the value out of an engineering hire, so they should hire more. (Unless that company somehow has no substantial engineering backlog, which I've yet to encounter anywhere I've ever worked.)
      • varenc 2y ago
        This definitely feels true for tech companies where the prospect of more more productive engineers improves their bottom line. The same sort of companies that have a near infinite appetite for talented engineers. But there's a lot of coders in industries whose core business isn't technology. Knapheide for example, a truck outfitting company where my brother codes. I'd imagine in those companies, being able to do the same work with fewer engineers and less cost would lead to fewer hires. Technology isn't their core product and they aren't being held back by software.
        • simonw 2y ago
          I actually think we may see the opposite happen with those kinds of companies too. At the moment, a truck outfitting company building a customer CRM optimized for their workflow is an absurd idea: they would need a team of a dozen developers working for a year before they could even get a feel for if it was a feasible project or not. Add LLM assistance and maybe a team of three developers could get to an initial working version in three months. At that point, companies that had previously ruled out custom software development entirely may find that it makes sense for them - growing the demand for software engineers as a whole.
          • varenc 2y ago
            I guess I'm skeptical how much of an impact better software could have on the business success a truck outfitting company? But maybe I'm being overly skeptical. I bet if I really got in the weeds there I'd see tons of opportunities were better/more software could really accelerate things. Thanks for checking my pessimism!
  • bobxmax 2y ago
    I work at a company relatively well-known in Startup-land and I've replaced a product team which had 9 devs 2 years ago with 2 devs with AI. Devs are just coping so hard around LLMs its hard to watch. OTOH the few engineers who have embraced it are excelling.
    • pton_xd 2y ago
      You likely should have replaced those devs years ago. Kudos to LLMs helping you figure that out though.
      • bobxmax 2y ago
        Nope. They were talented devs who all (well, most) landed in great companies after. We just didn't need them anymore because LLMs and tools like cursor are insanely good.
    • stavros 2y ago
      I'd like to come back to this in a year to see how maintainable the codebase is.
      • bobxmax 2y ago
        Guess what happens when you can suddenly build features ahead of schedule? You can make them bulletproof instead of cutting corners. Our code is better and more robust than it's ever been. Our rate of user-reported bugs have dropped more than 50% since we started "vibe" coding 6-ish months ago.
    • jgilias 2y ago
      After all these years 10x devs have become a reality.
    • barbazoo 2y ago
      > I've replaced a product team which had 9 devs 2 years ago with 2 devs with AI. Totally believable bro
  • jgilias 2y ago
    I feel exactly the same. On the other hand, the “speed up my work a lot” part is important, and shouldn’t be overlooked. Like, if someone reads this article and figures they don’t need to learn to use AI for their coding job, that’s the wrong conclusion to make.
    • Trasmatta 2y ago
      Agreed, I feel that a developer who refuses to learn to work with AI tools will inevitably fall behind those that do. But I don't see AI being able to replace a developer who can work WITH AI anytime soon (at least on anything non trivial).
  • dataflow 2y ago
    > But it's nowhere close to being able to replace what I do. I'm increasingly worried that that's not the same bar employers will have.
  • hollerith 2y ago
    Wait 10 years, though.
    • cmdli 2y ago
      I heard the same thing about self driving cars. AI advancements aren’t predictable, and it’s easy to understand or overestimate.
    • nextts 2y ago
      This is what is really interesting. What will they do in 10 years. Will you need to learn mathematics to Phd level to produce code that an LLM cannot produce. Will we all become business analysts (Will AI do that too?). I don't think BA is a step down or up. It is probably interesting I did think of going down that path. People laugh at coders like we are the only manual loom operators when everyone's job, even PotUS can replaced by the AI we can dream will exist. My thoughts: buy SPX so you own a sliver of the new overlords.
  • TrackerFF 2y ago
    Now think where we were 5 years ago, and where we will be in the next 5-10 years. A lot of kids are going to enroll college to study CS, computer engineering, software engineering, etc. - and will not finish their degrees until 3-5 years. They might just find themselves redundant (junior positions, that is)
  • minimaxir 2y ago
    The only defense of vibe coding I'll make is that LLMs are very good at identifying decent implementations of business logic, such as workflows I may not have otherwise considered or found on StackOverflow. That then becomes a decent starting point for future iteration, but would never trust the "vibe" of the code itself even if that's what all the AI hypesters are doing. Despite developing LLMs for years I haven't actually used them much in day-to-day work, but asking Claude 3.7 Sonnet my coding questions has been a superior experience to just Googling them (particularly if there are specific functional requirements/constraints)
  • jevndev 2y ago
    I feel like a lot of people are forgetting how good llms are at small isolated tasks because of how much better they've gotten at larger tasks. The best experiences I've had with llms all involve sketching out the interfaces for components I need and letting it fill in the implementation. That mentality also rewards choices that lead to good/maintainable code. you give functions good names so the AI knows what to implement. You make the code you ask it to generate as small as possible to minimize the chance of it hallucinating/going off the rails. You stub simple apis for the same reason. And (unsurprisingly) small, well defined functions are extremely testable! Which is a great trait to have for code that you know can very well be wrong. In time the AI will be good enough design whole applications in this vibe-code-y way... But all of the examples I've seen so far indicate that even the best publicly available models aren't there. It seems like every example I've seen has the developer bickering with the ai about something it just won't get right - often wasting more time than they were slightly more hands on. Until the tech gets over that I'll stick to it being the "junior developer I give a uml diagram to so they can figure out the messy parts".
• bobxmax 2y ago
  Vibe Coding is a trigger word for devs who insist it's a pointless exercise because it doesn't do 100% of the job. Devs don't seem to realize that's not the point - the point is you can hire less devs if you're only worried about the remaining 20%. Also this article is immensely distracting.
  • cmdli 2y ago
    Currently, AIs emulate a less skilled, junior developer. They can certainly get you up and running, but adding junior developers doesn’t speed up a lot of projects. What we are seeing is people falling into the “mythical man month” trap, where they believe that adding another coding entity will reduce the amount of work humans do, but that isn’t how most projects come out. To put it simply, it doesn’t matter if AI does 80% of the work if that last 20% takes 5x longer. As long as you need a human in the loop who understands the code, that human is going to have to spend the normal amount of time understanding the problem.
    • tibbar 2y ago
      Honestly, I'm not sure if there is any correspondence between an AI and a particular skill level of developer. A junior developer won't know most of the things an AI does; but unlike an AI, they can be held accountable for a particular assignment. I feel like AI is more like "a skilled consultant who doesn't know that much about your situation and refuses to learn more than the bare minimum, but will spend an arbitrary amount of time on self-contained questions or tasks, without checking the output too carefully." Which is exactly as useful yet infuriating as it sounds.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • toogan 2y ago
      Indeed. My roommate has just been put on a new project at his workplace. No AI involved anywhere. But he inherited a half-done project. Code is even 90% done. But he is spending so much time trying to understand all that existing code, noting down the issues it has which he'll need to fix. It's not just completing the remaining 10%. It's understanding and fixing and partially reworking the existing 90%. Which he has to do, since he'll be responsible for the thing once released. It's approaching a point where just building it from scratch on his own would have been more time efficient. It seems to me that LLM output creates a similar situation.
• mr_mitm 2y ago
  > "Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept. But to produce something reliable, secure, and worth spending money on, you’ll need experienced humans to do the hard work not possible with today’s models. This would have been clear from Karpathy's full statement: > It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing.
  • softwaredoug 2y ago
    Exactly. People have gotten too worked up about this idea without reading the original intention.
• musicale 2y ago
  "ever since I started to share how I built my SaaS using Cursor" random thing are happening, maxed out usage on api keys, people bypassing the subscription, creating random shit on db as you know I'm not technical so this is taking me longer that usual to figure out - (leo, 2025)
  • nextts 2y ago
    That one is almost a meme on Linked In. For fun I hope it is a long troll (like a long con but for trolling) And most of linked in (as the algo show me!) is basically this HN post in 100 words or the polar opposite saying how software engineers have had their chips.
  • sureglymop 2y ago
    Well I checked out the Saas' website and not even the navigation on the landing page worked correctly. Very confidence inspiring!
  • DonHopkins 2y ago
    What does "I'm not technical" actually mean? It sounds like a euphemism for: I don't want to work hard. I don't care about the details. I don't want to learn new things. I want somebody else to do my homework. I don't want to put in the effort it takes to succeed. I cheated my way through school instead of learning from classes. I've always had everything handed to me on a silver platter, and I expect that to continue. I want to put more effort into yapping on Twitter and getting followers that actually doing any work.
    • _factor 2y ago
      Or I’m in a different industry and it’s ridiculous to require years of schooling for a skill that’s not my primary interest? Or maybe the numbers looked jumbled and they really didn’t enjoy STEM classes? You sound arrogant. Have you ever paid for artwork? You may not have said “I’m not artistic,” but the same criticisms apply in reverse.
      • 2y ago
• pinkerpell 2y ago
  try writing next.js 15 using AI, and you understand how far we are away from getting replaced by it.
• 18172828286177 2y ago
  > ever since I started to share how I built my SaaS using Cursor > random thing are happening, maxed out usage on api keys, people bypassing the subscription, creating random shit on db This has to be a troll no?
  • ehutch79 2y ago
    Sadly, there's a good chance it's not. They're basically advertising they have a poorly coded, insecure app.
• minimaxir 2y ago
  The reference to Claude Plays Pokemon isn't applicable to the discussion of vibe coding, although the suggestion that AI agents can fix the issues with vibe coding is funny in an ironic way given the disproportionate hype around both. The issues with Claude Plays Pokemon (an overview here: https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/why-anthropics-claude-still-hasnt-beaten-pokemon/ https://arstechnica.com/ai/2025/03/why-anthropics-claude-sti... ) is essentially due to the 200k context window being finite, which is why it has to use an intermediate notepad. In the case of coding assistants like Cursor, the "notepad" is self-documenting with the code itself, sometimes literally with excessive code comments. The functional constraints of code are also more defined both implicitly and optionally explicitly: For Pokemon Red, the 90's game design doesn't often give instructions on where to go for the next objective, which is why the run is effectively over after getting Lt. Surge's badge as the game becomes very nonlinear. Although, both vibe coding and Claude Plays Pokemon both rely on significant amounts of optimism around the capabilities around LLMs.
• noosphr 2y ago
  Hot take: Vibe coding is going to be the new Excel of technical debt. Most tech savvy places will avoid it, most good programmers will never encounter it. A bunch or us will make a career out of fixing the mess it makes after it explodes. My first real job was doing just that at a broker trader which lost 10m on a trade made by an Excel spreadsheet that used a stale yahoo finance API to get exchange rates.
  • jaza 2y ago
    Oh god. Fixing an excel spreadsheet full of crazy macros was my first job too. The nightmares still haunt me.
• Etheryte 2y ago
  At this point in time, we're following the time corporate got on the outsourcing craze step for step. It had all the hype, hands off, cheaper for the same work, faster to market, every other argument you've all certainly heard. Then the reality hit. The whole discussion around LLM coding agents feels indistinguishable.
  • booleandilemma 2y ago
    My first job in the industry was cleaning up a large codebase created overseas by indian developers. Maybe the new kids today will break into the industry by cleaning up messes that have been generated by AI.
    • exe34 2y ago
      the next version of AI will simply make it into a bigger mess.
      • amarcheschi 2y ago
        Now, now, not with this mindset. You have to ask the Ai to fix the mess, and if it doesn't, try again!
        • mdaniel 2y ago
          AIUI one should be sure to include a grandmother dying if that div doesn't get centered
        • kolektiv 2y ago
          As if the person struggling with the mess will have the requisite skill levels to even recognise a mess!
          • dragonelite 2y ago
            Ooh but don't you know we just need an extra language with abstractions that can be compiled into prompting statements. Maybe something like sql.
• clvx 2y ago
  > For now, they are worth evaluating and discussing, but are not ready for us to delegate the precise task of creating reliable, secure, and scalable software that powers our society. The good thing about vive coding is it avoids the software development lifecycle completely from the user perspective in a platform that has an integrated SDLC which means from defining idea to ensure visibility in changes to a runtime where the user can see it. In my mind, modifying without a hassle in a controlled environment is what users look for. Software development assisted by AI will be a thing for engineers but Vive coding is aimed for users outside of engineering. I sadly see only a handful of companies being able to pull this off.
  • BowBun 2y ago
    The thing is the SDLC exists to harden software to a point where you can run a business on it. It didn't appear because people were bored. This feels more like a comparison to a Figma or other prototyping tool than something that can produce quality software.
• axegon_ 2y ago
  I hate how what is effectively a stupid meme phrase became an actual term in a few days. > "Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept. But to produce something reliable, secure, and worth spending money on, you’ll need experienced humans to do the hard work not possible with today’s models. The problem is that 80% of the job is a proof of concept at best. 80% is effectively a QA walking into a bar[1]. [1] https://barrypopik.com/blog/a_software_tester_walks https://barrypopik.com/blog/a_software_tester_walks
  • mdaniel 2y ago
    And that's not even getting into the class of testers which try to order ';--drop table beers;-- beers, <script>alert(1)</script> beers or <![ENTITY q1 "&q0;"><![ENTITY q2 "&q1;&q1;&q1;">&q2; style beers
  • Mountain_Skies 2y ago
    Makes me wonder how organic or astroturfed the name is. That a bunch of influencers all started using it at the same time makes me think someone is pushing it, perhaps because a focus group (or LLM) decided 'vibe' was a warm and fuzzy way of pushing the latest iteration of 'move fast and break things'.
  • dragonelite 2y ago
    80% mark means you just finished the happy flow and written 30% of the code bases. Now you need to handle the unhappy parts and need to write extra test code for covering all those edge cases.
    • axegon_ 2y ago
      Precisely, now you need to finish off the remaining 70%, which is where most of the work that is required truly lies, with or without all the AI bollocks. Whether it takes 2 or 8 days of work to get those 30% done, it's not much of a difference if you need several months(or in some cases years) to get a project to a tolerable "production" state. I'd much rather spend 8, as opposed to an AI-generated codebase which will shoot itself in the head because someone scrolled over it and thought "lgtm".
• CrzyLngPwd 2y ago
  New silver bullets are the same as old silver bullets, but these are easy to fire at your own feet.
• carlosdp 2y ago
  Ok first of all, > There's a trend on social media where many repeat Andrej Karpathy's words: "give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists." This belief — like many flawed takes humanity holds — comes from laziness, inexperience, and self-deluding imagination. I'm going to go ahead and give the author the benefit of the doubt that they aren't literally saying Andrej Karpathy is "lazy and inexperienced", because that claim is obviously absurd. In general though, I think the author is missing the actual point Karpathy was making! Let's look at his detailed criticisms for the typescript agent run, for example: > Regularly clones TypeScript interfaces instead of exporting the original and importing it. > Reinvents components all the time with the same structure without searching the code base for an existing copy of that component. These are only problems for human codebases. You're not vibing if you are expecting agents to write code the way humans would. Duplicating interfaces and implementations is inefficient, and would be a nightmare, in a human codebase. But, the code will still work! So if an AI agent is managing the codebase, who cares if it duplicates things all the time? Maybe it'll see that it did that later and decide to consolidate things, maybe it won't. It doesn't affect the actual outcome of the code, unless you actually look at the code as a human, which is not "vibe coding." > When told to fix styles with precise details, it will alter the wrong component entirely. > When told specifically where there are many duplicated components and instructed to refactor, will only refactor the first instance of that component in the file instead of all instances in all files. > When told to refactor code, fails to search for the breaks it caused even when told to do so. You're thinking about the code again, gotta stop doing that if you actually want to ~vibe code~. Refactoring code isn't a thing when you're vibe coding, English is your programming language now, the Typescript (or w/e language) is the assembly. You wouldn't spend much time observing the assembly output of your compiler (especially for web dev), so why are you observing the code output of your agent? If you don't want to vibe code, that's fine, nobody is forcing you to. But if you're going to do it, grade it on the metric that Andrej was actually claiming: that you can get working results on a lot of software projects today by telling coding agents to make some code do something, and then just keep running it with "fix this bug" until it works, and it'll often get to a working result. He never claimed that the code outputted would be beautiful, from a human perspective, or well formatted, or well architected, or efficient.
• k__ 2y ago
  "Like the NFT crowd, there is a bubble of unreality they cling to justifying their perception of the world." Seems like someone is quite bitter about new stuff.
  • toogan 2y ago
    .. new stuff that quite obviously won't be able to live up to its hype. Indeed. Or would you argue that NFTs actually did live up to the BS that was ascribed to them in some circles during their hype?
    • k__ 2y ago
      Obviously not. But "some circles" ascribe BS to any new technology.
      • MyOutfitIsVague 2y ago
        And some circles hand wave away all criticism of any new thing as luddism. This article is a bit more balanced, though, and clearly isn't criticising use of AI in programming, but specifically the "Jesus take the wheel" style of vibe coding. It's the same old "if you write code as cleverly as you possibly can, you are not smart enough to debug it", but to the next level, where people are writing code that they aren't even smart enough to read.
  • DonHopkins 2y ago
    Sounds like you're bitter about NFTs being a spectacular failure shilled by charlatans. How much did you lose?
  • rsynnott 2y ago
    Or, like, is familiar with hype-driven bubbles?
• toogan 2y ago
  I mean ... most code out there is pretty bad, so LLM assistants contributing pretty bad code just keeps the mean where it is. And obviously it has to be, how can anybody expect an LLM to produce output with quality that's higher than its training input? Expecting that is appealing to magic or some consciousness that doesn't actually exist or just plain anthropomorphising. If you are working at a place where that quality level is standard -- and let's face it, a large number of companies produce average or below-average quality code (by definition) -- then using an LLM assistant isn't that bad. At least if such an assistant doesn't have some extra flaws beyond producing the best summary of its training data, which is exactly what an LLM does. It actually justifiably replaces developers in such an average-or-below place. But if you are aiming for the top end of the quality scale then there is no way this can be achieved by LLM output. Purely on principle. This shouldn't even be a controversial opinion. I'm quite surprised every time this is questioned or even just debated.
  • nextts 2y ago
    "Bad" is doing s lot of work in your sentence. Do you mean slow? Or buggy? Or unmaintainable? Or unextendable? Uses patterns the tech lead hates? Hard to read? High cyclomatic complexity? Doesn't meet requirements? Security issues? Uses out of date libraries? Too much reliance on 3rd party code? Too much NIH? ... I think "one shot ready for production code" is what AI cannot do yet. Which is why I am not worried for another 12 months at least :)
    • toogan 2y ago
      Any badness metric you like. LLMs average over that since their training input does.
• simonw 2y ago
  Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding (but vibe coding rocks) - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ I wrote this because I was worried that "vibe coding" was being misinterpreted to mean "any time an LLM outputs code", as opposed to the intended definition of code where you deliberately don't review the code and see how far you can get.
• sfjailbird 2y ago
  This brilliant piece of satire from Steve Yegge got buried for some reason: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43446695 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43446695 Judging by the comments, most people couldn't even tell it was satire, which goes to show how absurd the hype is right now (and probably why it was buried).
  • throwaway382948 2y ago
    He works for a company who tries to sell coding agents. He's absolutely trying to pump it up and induce FOMO. If you can't see that because he hides it behind a layer of humor, that's on you.
    • Apocryphon 2y ago
      For the long-time HN crowd this must be like finding out, say, Richard Garriott is a blockchain bro now.
• rtfeldman 2y ago
  I think the bigger "AI hype vs. Reality" gap is about the productivity numbers people casually throw around, like "10x as productive" or even 100x. For example, here are YC partners quoting a company in a batch claiming "100x speedup" in coding performance compared to the previous month: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=1837s https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IACHfKmZMr8&t=1837s You can tell this claim is false, because that level of productivity increase would be glaringly obvious to an outside observer; it wouldn't need to be self-reported. A YC summer batch is 84 days culminating in Demo Day. So a 100x speed improvement would be like a team spending less than 1 day of coding and ending up with something that's on par with Demo Day in terms of functionality. Maybe the design would be wrong, but that wrong design would be just as fully-featured as a Demo Day app. So if 100x were true, the partners in that video would be talking about how the new batch dynamic is "They get breakfast with a customer, learn something new, have an epiphany, and then later the same day they have their entire app rewritten based on what they learned, and that scratch-rewrite is already at a Demo Day level of functionality." The partners aren't talking about that dynamic because it's not happening. So clearly the self-reported 100x is inaccurate. Even 10x would result in partners saying "Whoa, in this batch people have a Demo Day-quality app in production by the end of week 1 instead of week 12." The partners have a huge sample size on how much teams get done in what time period, so it would be glaringly obvious to them if this batch were shipping 10x as fast as previous batches. That external observation would be the headline if it were what the partners were actually seeing. Since that's not the headline, it's clearly not what they're seeing, so 10x can't be the number either.
  • __gcd 2y ago
    To be fair if your benchmark is against demo day, at some point Amdahl's law kicks in regardless of how many multiples you have on engineering. Not sure if I believe the multiple of 10x or 100x anyway, but a better metric is “number of customer feedback loops” is a better metric than “can complete one (1) demo day in X time”. My (non YC) impression is that people are hitting more loops. Also multiples “up” versus “down” are not symmetric. Airplanes are around 10x faster than cars, but that doesn’t mean I’ll be getting to work in 60 seconds.
    • 2y ago
• 01100011 2y ago
  If you believe in vibe coding, surely you are holding a massive short position in every major software company, no? I mean, surely, any day now, a bored student will vibe code a full replacement for a major software package and destroy the income of the SW giants one by one, right? Wake me up when someone vibe codes a Chrome replacement, or an iOS replacement, or MS Office... Except we know this won't happen anytime soon because we all know vibe coding isn't very useful beyond toy projects that leverage complex libraries written by actual developers.
• redleggedfrog 2y ago
  I'll share a new wrinkle that casts more shade on the coding LLMs. We have a fair number of offshore resources that are used for dev. They developers are fully integrated into the team, are in all the stand-ups, and substitute for the usual role of junior programmers. They don't get the grunt-work shoveled on them, they get the same work as everyone else, they're just expected to not be as fast. In 6 months 2 out of 4 of them been sacked, and surprise, not because we could replace their work with LLM output, but because their use of LLMs was so unrestrained and scattershot the pull requests they submitted had become nightmares. One thing mentioned in the article about unit test creation was something we saw as well. Perhaps this is partly due to working an existing code base where the LLM loses some of its advantage, and certainly some of it was cultural in that progress was thought more important than actual manageable code. The two sacked fellows where told, literally, from my own mouth, multiple times, "You cannot just ask Copilot to write you code, paste the entire thing into Visual Studio with no thought of what has changed, with the end goal of just compiling and meeting the single set of acceptance criteria on your story. You're breaking other things and introducing bugs." It went on deaf ears, and now they're gone. They were nice people, I didn't know how to get through to them, but they were convinced the LLMs were the way to go. I use LLMs to help write code every day, and I wouldn't want to be without it, but I'm fairly surgical about it. Most of the time Copilot gives you a page of say, React code, or EF Core queries, you have to be really careful about anything you didn't explicitly ask for. Honestly, there is a time savings, but there is not a quality increase. The benefit is subverted by the time it takes to figure out how to ask correctly, the time to vet the output, and the time to fix the little tiny insidious bugs it can introduce. So, don't go vibe coding and lose your job, is something to think about. I have to admit that it has worn me down meeting these interesting people from far-flung locations only to watch them flounder and get let go.
  • vunderba 2y ago
    I've been contracting for a fairly largish company (around 300 devs split across ~40 teams). The US based company was bought out by private equity about a year ago and many senior/lead engineers were forced out and contracted out to cheaper overseas labor. The company has been relatively ambivalent about the usage of code assistant AI, but during PR reviews it has become very apparent that its seen widespread adoption among the outsourced dev teams purely because of code duplication. Our company has a fairly large number of repositories and bespoke libs for utility type functionality. In the past, a programmer might have internally said to themselves, "There's no way that somebody hasn't already written this stupid function X or method Y", and they'd take a few minutes to search or reach out to see if it exists within an organization. Instead during some of the recent code reviews, there has been a huge uptick in core functionality that is very obviously being spit out by the LLM. At best its just extra unnecessary code. At worst it will introduce new bugs since our custom functions often handle business domain specific edge cases that an LLM simply wouldn't know about.
• trashtensor 2y ago
  I've been messing with this for a few days now so I'm not going to claim to be any sort of expert but as someone who has been coding for more than 20 years I do appreciate the set it and forget it nature of being able to throw q developer or whatever at a relatively simple problem that I'm curious about and let it crank away for half an hour while i'm working on something else. I've tried it on a couple of reasonably small and well defined problems, mainly focusing on python, and it works surprisingly well. It'll run the scripts and fix errors and can suggest prompt improvements. I've also tried it in a large codebase with much less success, so YMMV. Also it is important to be able to review the code because it could be the case that it looks mostly correct but has some subtle errors in it that can mislead you. For example I was trying a couple of different ways of computing some indices that have a bunch of variables and one way had a mask that made no sense involved. "Vibe coding" without being able to check the work of an LLM is almost certain to go poorly, IOW.
• SkyPuncher 2y ago
  > Cursor has some sort of "concise mode" (archived) that they'll turn on when there is high load where the model will still be rated at the normal price but behaves in a useless manner. This mode will omit details, drop important findings, and corrupt the output that is being produced. This is a real problem that I have experienced on and off. It's getting to the point where everyone on my team is actively looking for alternatives. Generally, I've found Cursor works correctly after business hours. But, it's increasingly giving absolutely useless responses during business hours. ----- That being said, I agree with many of the author's observations. However, for me, it's not really a breaker. It's not much different than working with an intern or junior engineer. If you ask them to do too much all at once, they come up with bad solutions. Plus, they have a tendency to make "dumb" decisions. For me, I've found solutions for nearly all of the listed issue. Much of it comes down to being diligent during code review (like you should). For example, the Typescript issue, I come back later to have it fix it. Specs are the one that still baffles me. It's absolutely terrible at writing proper specs. In particular, it falls into a really bad cycle whenever there are errors. I don't have a solution for this one.
  • dkh 2y ago
    > Generally, I've found Cursor works correctly after business hours. Interestingly the times I've experienced the most weirdness were during extremely not normal business hours (from the California perspective). For 3 nights in a row last week, I found myself coding at/after 2:30am during what were apparently periods of excessive load on Claude Sonnet. When asking Cursor to do things, it would fail, tell me about the high load, and encourage me to try again soon. Well, I just kept clicking the button over and over again, thinking it would eventually be able to handle the request properly, and otherwise continue presenting the error. Not the case! Incorrect/hilarious things Cursor/Claude did at points during those nights: - repeat the inquiry back to me in full, then do nothing at all after that - confidently assert it had located the bug I was looking for, then direct me towards the entire codebase - assert that it had done what I asked, and request that I approve the changes it wanted to make to my code, which were... nothing, none whatsoever - (possibly the most hilarious) begin to answer questions in borderline leetspeak, randomly substituting numbers in place of letters in words, before eventually devolving into total gibberish Mostly just annoying due to the wasted time, though it's possible the entertainment value negated it. I don't expect miracles from Cursor to begin with, nor do I give it wide latitude to change very much in my projects, so the risk of damage wasn't really any worse then than at any other time. Of course, I am not a team working against deadlines on critical projects, just a guy screwing around at 2:30am.
• brentm 2y ago
  I have to say I am extremely sick of this term.
  • browningstreet 2y ago
    Vibe coding is the new HODL Similar energy
    • nextts 2y ago
      Vibe gambling
      • benatkin 2y ago
        Vibe cooking Everybody can vibe cook. - Vercel
        • Izkata 2y ago
          Remember, glue is a great way to keep cheese from sliding off pizza!
      • DonHopkins 2y ago
        Vibe Day Trading
        • benatkin 2y ago
          Vibe Forex
    • Apocryphon 2y ago
      Vibe posting
    • cedws 2y ago
      Similar energy because it’s similar people. Horseshit salesmen trying to get rich off the next hype wave, and to get suckers to hold their bags.
• mentalgear 2y ago
  The biggest give-away is: When you look at the companies making these claims and their jobs page shows they are actively hiring developers.
  • mdaniel 2y ago
    Not to mention the fact that those training clusters are not going to supervise themselves (or, maybe I just think that because I haven't had enough koolaid; where's the AWS Console MCP endpoint?)
• jocoda 2y ago
  My, very limited experience with LLM assisted coding is that it depends... For basic frameworks done in something like Python it is very good, but not perfect, yet. But the iteration cycle to get to where you want to be is still faster than doing the whole job manually and I see this as a big win. For more esoteric fast changing languages/frameworks it has me chasing my tail in a chain of code updates where each fix breaks something in the n-1th, or n-2th version. Sometimes it's deprecated code, or it halucinates functions that would be valid if your were using a a different language of framework. And sometimes simple coding errors. But it will get better, a lot better. The main benefit is that it will let a invested non programmer client build a functional framework prototype and then combine that with a list missing features that a more skilled programmer can flesh out to a first cut solution. For the first time we 'might' get better requirements with an actual working model instead of having the implementor doing most of the requirements as a first pass from a high level hand wavy requirement. I think we're going to see some amazing tools for this. What I don't see it doing is creating original algorithms to solve things being done for the first time.
  • falkensmaize 2y ago
    "But it will get better, a lot better." I see statements like this a lot when talking about AI in general. People seem to think it is a foregone conclusion that no limit to LLM model improvement and capability exists. What causes you to believe this and what evidence do you have to back it up?
    • tokioyoyo 2y ago
      Because compared to a year ago, it's much better. Compared to two years ago, it almost didn't exist. Compared to three years ago, nobody was actually talking about it.
      • the_snooze 2y ago
        https://xkcd.com/605/ https://xkcd.com/605/
• rafaelmn 2y ago
  I mean shouldn't Jensen be shitting his pants about this? Vibe code the CUDA away and bye bye margins ?
  • mdaniel 2y ago
    That one would be extra awesome because by the time anyone realized there was some subtle stats bug in the resulting kernels, it'd have vaporized $10MM in cloud training opex
• mellosouls 2y ago
  Please can everybody who dislikes LLMs stop conflating "vibe coding" (fun, see how far you can get without actually coding but not intended for serious projects as per karparthy's original tweet) with the grifter version that sells it without the cautionary note, or with LLM tool usage as a whole class. They are 3 different things, and neither of the first two represent anything more than a subset of the capabilities of the latter. If you don't like LLMs that's cool, but at least take some time to understand the context here.
• mentalgear 2y ago
  This should be called "vape coding". Strongly agree with the article, and happy to see so many lucid people, comments and articles on HN that thoroughly deconstruct the "vibe coding" illusion. Also, Andrej Karpathy really disappointed pushing such brittle BS as a revolution.
  • cendyne 2y ago
    I love this. Vape coding should catch on.
• alecco 2y ago
  I think it's a good thing. Let them experience our little hell. They'll come out appreciating our craft more once they get through :)
  • MoonGhost 2y ago
    And when it finally works..? I suspect (vibe) coding can be significantly improved by multi-step structural approach. Including coding, review, testing in a loop. Fully automatic. Like Chain of Thoughts helps solving logical tasks. This can be done today. The main limitation here is affective context window. I.e. big project doesn't fit. The solution is splitting, separating, and documenting. Brief doc instead of the whole code in prompt. With this developers need to level up to architects, get more domain knowledge.
• MarkMarine 2y ago
  This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. We already have examples of a model finding more performant sorts [0], given the right incentives and time, and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it) the computer will best us at creating things for the computer. Is “vibe coding” real today? Not in my experience, with even Claude code. My hand has to be firmly on the tiller, using my experience and skill to correct its mistakes and guide it. But I can see the current trajectory of improvement, and I’m sure it’ll get there. [0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphadev-discovers-faster-sorting-algorithms/ https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/alphadev-discovers-fas...
  • MR4D 2y ago
    I think it’s partially there: For creating website (not apps) it absolutely is there. This is just the first rung on the ladder though. It’s not doing Linux kernel development yet, but that time will come eventually. In between are all the other rungs. AI will climb them one by one.
    • brulard 2y ago
      For me it is very much hit or miss. I use claude sonnet with Cline. Sometimes I'm blown away that it can create a new page with CRUD functionality, nice UI etc. in one go. Another time it struggles to create a simple web page. Yesterday I needed a very simple landing page. My prompt was something along `Very dark grainy background with centered "name of the page" text.`. It couldn't get neither the background, nor the centering right. Later when it got one right, it screwed up the second. I had to give up after consuming ~$1.5 because we were not getting closer to the result.
      • banana_dick_8 2y ago
        [flagged]
      • MR4D 2y ago
        That’s fair. Grok3 has been amazing, but it keeps on wanting me to do dark mode for an app I’m creating. When I finally said yes, it wasn’t able to get dark ode to work, despite multiple tries. Was funny tbh.
• jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
  Making the arguing that these tools have flaws seem like a losing battle. Soon those flaws will be fixed[1] and youll have to find new flaws to complain about. Eventually hopefully you'll realize that you just don't like feeling displaced. [1] it's unbelievable what a difference in quality 1 year made for chat gpt
  • id00 2y ago
    Why are you so certain that flaws will be fixed? Seems like there is a giant leap between a machine spewing words based on probability and actual deep understanding of the code it's suppose to write
    • oblio 2y ago
      Until this knowledge is widespread, a lot of devs better hold on to their current good jobs.
    • aoeusnth1 2y ago
      Because ai is following a predicable trend of exponentially increasing task length @50% probability: https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1902384481111322929 https://x.com/METR_Evals/status/1902384481111322929 If we are the top of an s-curve, the recent samples on that curve would be below the trend line, not above it.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • jxjnskkzxxhx 2y ago
      A "machine spewing words based on probability" is an implementation detail. I'm not making a grandiose prediction about the future. All I'm saying is that these machines are improving super fast. I'm also stricken by the superficiality of analysis like "oh it's just probabilities" from so many devs; might as well say "it's magnets".
      • id00 2y ago
        In my comment I was questioning the certainty that those fundamental flaws will be fixed. I'm one of those people who don't believe that iterating over LLM will make that giant leap. You can call it an implementation detail but it's like both a wheel and a wing can take your over some distance but the difference between them is staggering. Wheel will never send you flying (normally)
• ohgr 2y ago
  Vibe coding is my favourite fad so far. Much like the last few fads I’m going to make so much money out of cleaning up afterwards it’s unreal. Really this whole industry is on another fucking planet. I hate it but it’s so easy to make money.
• dfps 2y ago
  100x would mean after one month, people'd say 'I just did 10 years of work.' Is anyone saying that yet?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• d4rkn0d3z 2y ago
  "Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept." But 80% of the functionality is only 10% of the work. The last 20% of the functionality remains and will require 90% of the work.
• liendolucas 2y ago
  This idea that now everyone with little knowledge can code is absurd. For sure everyone can code: with hours of dedication, sitting down and trying things out, learning and improving from errors and past experiences. There is no other way round. I don't know how the next generation of coders is going to be like, but my advice still stands: read books, realiable sources, do your homework and "vibe coders" will become so irrelevant that will be extinguished by their own ignorance. Don't get fooled by number crunching programs that seem to "program".
• jfengel 2y ago
  I finally gave in and clicked on the article so I could find out what "vibe coding" is. You learn something new every day. Some days that thing does not piss you off. Today is not that day.
• jeffreyrogers 2y ago
  Most programmers are already doing a form of vibe coding when they, for example, let an ORM write their database queries for them. I think a decent number of Rails and Django devs probably would struggle to write raw SQL queries from scratch. Mostly I see vibe coding as an extension of that, and it's not necessarily a bad thing since it lets you spend more time focusing on the actual problem you're solving rather than on implementing it. Of course, I haven't seen a single vibe-coded thing that I'd want to spend money paying for yet, but that's probably more reflective of the difficulty of making something people want than whether or not you use vibe coding to do it.
• gooseus 2y ago
  I've been "Vibe-TDDing" all afternoon and I'll tell you what, vibe tests are better than no tests. And so long as you have some decent-to-solid understanding of coding and testing (this is non-trivial, I've been coding for professionally for ~20 years) then you can direct the machine to put up decent guardrails first, and then you can kinda go nuts and let shit grow, prune it back, repeat. Basically, if you know what code/tests ought to look and act like, then you can significantly reduce the negative externalities of having LLMs do your coding for you.
  • bardak 2y ago
    I think it comes down to the fact that LLMs are powerful tools but just like a really good saw can be extremely helpful to a talented carpenter to an untrained person it useless unless they actually learn to do the job
  • MattPalmer1086 2y ago
    Yes, agreed. I just ressurected an old code base that I had never finished, as I really couldn't be bothered to test it properly. It would have been several weeks or even months doing this thankless task in my spare time, so wasn't going to happen. Just for fun, I asked the AI assistant in IntelliJ (free trial) to write most of the tests for me. I was actually blown away. The tests were largely really good. In many cases they were more thorough than I would have bothered with. Even when it didn't manage to write good tests on its own, the AI complete as I was writing them myself was incredibly useful. Most of the time it would predict the line I was going to write next, just press tab to accept. I did have to review the tests, and there were a few minor mistakes I had to correct. The entire process took about 4 hours - and I was trying it out for the first time. So this is a massive time saver for me, and lets me take on coding in future I would simply not have had the patience to complete.
• tippytippytango 2y ago
  Whether vibe coding works for you depends on how tight your requirements are.
• Pozzi1 2y ago
  [dead]
• bglazer 2y ago
  Over the last week I tried to use a combination of Claude and OpenAI o3-mini to do a direct conversion of about 500 lines of uncommented academic modeling code from Matlab to Python. I can’t stress enough how badly these models performed. Nearly every consequential line had some variety of off by one or logic error, often very subtle. I didn’t try cursor or the more agentic systems, but I would be astounded if they properly rigged up a test harness, inspected the output and were able to respond to the runtime errors. I’d be happy to share the code if anyone wants to surprise me. This is exactly the kind of semi-mechanical, low added value work that would greatly benefit from automation, and they really fell on their faces. I really benefit from these models on greenfield tasks where I can delegate minor drudge work, but in this case I honestly think they actually increased the difficulty.
  • ikiris 2y ago
    As a counter to this, I had grok build an entire set of micro services and all I had to clean up was some format strings. It blew me away. Did in an hour what should have taken a week.
    • hu3 2y ago
      nice. did you use grok web interface or some ide + grok?
      • ikiris 2y ago
        I use cursor, and if there’s a nice interface for cursor to use grok I don’t know about it. Which leads to pain if I try to have the built in options try to fix things because they’re nowhere near as competent currently.
    • raffael_de 2y ago
      i'm not sure if you can compare run of the mill micro services with "uncommented academic modeling code from Matlab".
      • 2y ago
• scoofy 2y ago
  Wait... is this really a thing? Do people think that they can actually have an LLM write code for anything but a simple program for them?
• DonHopkins 2y ago
  If you cuss at Claud enough it will cuss back at you! What's the best trash talk you've been able to get it to produce? >OH SHIT you're right! We have duplicate mouse handling: >HOLY SHIT. Let me analyze what's happening: >HOLY SHIT. NOW I get it. We're calculating the SAME THING in TWO different places: >You're absolutely right - I fucked up by removing the loading material completely. Looking at the diffs in shame, here's what needs to be fixed:
• rasz 2y ago
  ThePrimeagen is doing some kind of vibe coding ad on twitch right now trying to build game in 7 days. There are 10x coders in the room and two days later they are struggling with hilarious basics like off by 1 errors while tweaking something that could be described as donkey.bas.
• llm_nerd 2y ago
  Saw this submission earlier in the day and chuckled. The whole "vibe coding" thing is hilarious, and I say this as someone who heavily leverages AI in my coding tasks. Moments ago just saw this ad at the front of HN- https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/domu-technology-inc/jobs/hwWsGdU-vibe-coder-ai-engineer https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/domu-technology-inc/jo... I honestly am not sure if this ad is a joke. I assume not, which is hilarious. Put in you 12-16 hour days for hilariously bad pay, and your onboarding will be doing one of the most pathetic, deadbeat jobs possible which is making collection calls. And your "vibe coding" is to use voice agents to...make collection calls. Must be pretty grim pickings if this trash is getting advertised on here.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• hackburg 2y ago
  [dead]
• DonHopkins 2y ago
  Is it just me, or has anyone else noticed that: 1) Cursor has been crashing several times an hour for me recently. 2) Cursor seems to ignore .cursorrules files. I'm using the json format that's supposed to let you filter on file name patterns (although how that works for cross-cutting agent stuff I don't know). 3) Cursor is obsessed with making sketchy iffy defensive code checking for the most recent symptom and trying to guess and shart its way out of it instead of addressing the real problem? And it's extremely hard to talk it out of doing that, I have to keep reminding it and admonishing it to cut it the fuck out, fail instead of mitigate, address the root cause not the symptoms, and stop trying to close the barn door after all the horses have escaped. It's as of it was only trained on Stack Overflow and PHP manual page discussions.
  • kledru 2y ago
    (3) Cursor does not do the coding, it delegates that task to whatever model you have picked. In more recent versions, it does pick the model automatically, which is not necessarily what I would prefer. Some of the models it delegates to may have been trained the way you suggested here, others are more sophisticated. The fact that none of the models is controlled by the Cursor crew quite naturally means that it will have quirks talking to newer models.
• Hippocrates 2y ago
  It makes me feel very secure in my job that so many engineers ITT are downplaying the ability and productivity of AI coding tools. You can pry cursor out of my cold dead hands. If you aren't seeing a 10x boost, then you must not have tried it lately, or haven't got the experience to prompt well. What it excels at: - Boilerplate code that's been written 1000x, which can saps your time and enthusiasm for the meaty problems beyond that. - Complex DSA work. It has been demonstrated millions of times in training material. - Simple and tedious tasks like making dummy data for tests and struct literals. - Tightly scoped refactors. Where does it falter? - Mapping your product/business to the code or abstractions needed. I think this is where junior devs struggle to leverage it. - Doing large scale multi-file refactors without proper specifics, guidance, and context. It also can't write a huge project from scratch. Humans are still need to fit the pieces all together or provide guidance. I think this gap closes soon. Code quality simply isn't a problem IME. If it didn't one-shot your dream abstraction, you probably weren't specific enough in the prompt. Most human-written code is also junk, so pointing out a minor gaffes isn't really a dunk on AI. It's still a massive productivity booster if wielded by even a half-competent engineer.
  • thunky 2y ago
    The things you mentioned it does well on are things that help you avoid tedium, but I don't think that's what's most important to businesses. The things you mentioned it does poorly at are the things that matter most. To pile on: if a large part of our job is purely mechanical, then there is a bigger problem with our engineering processes and AI can't fix that.
    • Hippocrates 2y ago
      > if a large part of our job is purely mechanical, then there is a bigger problem with our engineering processes and AI can't fix that. It is! And AI is fixing precisely that. What businesses actually care about (well, 99% of them where code is written) is shipping fast and solving the immediate problem, NOT code quality and craft. It goes against what I want to believe as an engineer. Most problems are not new, they are not hard, they are not sensitive. You will need to start with a good understanding of the business need. It's not that the AI can't code to this. I will often stub out an abstraction, explain inputs/outputs in detail, provide sample data etc. That's all. There are frighteningly few showstopper problems with AI coding at this point, and it's moving so quickly. We're not at the point where non-engineers are capable engineers with AI, but if you are an engineer not using AI extensively, you are being lapped.
• djaouen 2y ago
  wtf is vibe coding lfmao