7 ms·

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 r

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.
margalabargala 2y ago
Where we are now, I wonder if is similar to the early days of compiled languages existing, back when people still somewhat commonly wrote assembly by hand and didn't trust compilers. Sure, things like Roller Coaster Tycoon exist, but but writing in a compiled language is so much faster, easier, and more broadly accessible than writing in assembly that compilers took over.
- oblio 2y ago
  My worry about this approach is: there is a reasonably popular saying that writing code is hard but debugging it is twice as hard (at least), which I think is an accurate description. LLMs will greatly increase code production, will they also increase debuggability to match?
  - TeMPOraL 2y ago
    LLMs don't just make it easy to accumulate code - they make it easy to throw code away and start again. This already enables taking a different approach to debuggability - if there's a bug and it can't be trivially solved, trash that bit of the code and write it again. It may not be broadly viable just yet, but it will be if the models keep getting cheaper and better. This is also implied in the idea of "vibe coding" - don't bother understanding the code or debugging it yourself; if it doesn't work the way you like, just say it and have the model fix it until it gets it right (or you run out of money).
    - Apocryphon 2y ago
      Sounds very maintainable and rigorously constructed
      - jryle70 2y ago
        How do you know it won't be maintainable? based on your current knowledge?
        2y ago
jmull 2y ago
Well… to be frank, this is someone not reading TFA. The article is pointing out real limitations of vibe coding today (which you appear to agree with). It does suggest AI coding won’t be viable in the future. You should probably update your comment to say something like, “spot on”.
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  Nah, the article is generalizing from a single sample of current state, ignoring the larger trajectory (that, for AI coding, went from sci-fi to reality in two years). Sure, the tools aren't perfect, so there's some art to using them now - which the author of TFA seems to be unaware of. Take for example: > You cannot ask these tools today to develop a performant React application. You cannot ask these tools to implement a secure user registration flow. It will choose to execute functions like is user registered on the client instead of the server. Of course you can ask them to do it. You can literally ask them to "write better code" (yes, with this exact phrase; see [0]), and you'll get better code. More performant, or more secure - it depends on specifics of the case. Or, you can ask them specifically to focus on security or performance, and you will typically get improvements on those axis. That's today. Next year, people will know how to prompt the models away from most common failure modes, and the models themselves will be further trained to avoid those same failure modes. In bringing specific problems up, TFA isn't making a convincing argument against future of "vibe coding" - it's literally helping in making it happen. -- [0] - https://minimaxir.com/2025/01/write-better-code/ https://minimaxir.com/2025/01/write-better-code/
  - lelandbatey 2y ago
    Ah yes, the classic "we didn't have this at all 2 years ago, so we can expect a linear increase in capability 2 years from now! Trends will of course continue!" I think you're wrong. I think AI is going to stagnate and only the surrounding tooling will improve, but not enough to get us to the promised land. Arguably we already are seeing that happen. To see the supposed "this is how all code is written now" world AI proponents keep declaring, we're going to need to see improvements to the current AI where they can operate on context windows two orders of magnitude bigger than they are now, while costs for doing so also drop accordingly. Maybe that can be done, I'm betting it can't.
dr_dshiv 2y ago
Vibe coding is 100% real. Or maybe we should call it code vibing when there is no coding ability. But I just taught 18 professionals with no coding ability to build functional software. Their minds were blown
- mentos 2y ago
  Cursor? I finally got around to trying it this week and it exceeded my expectations.
  - dr_dshiv 2y ago
    No, if you have no coding ability and no interest in learning but want to just tell the computer what you want: 1. Lovable 2. Bolt.new 3. Replit agent Or actually, I’d put Claude #1. You can make all kinds of cool stuff, just in their UI.
  - ModernMech 2y ago
    What were your expectations and how did it exceed them? I have to say, on they basis of your comment I just decided to try Cursor, and I'm sorry to report it immediately disappointed me. First thing it did was it told me it found a syntax error in code that compiles perfectly. It went ahead and added a closing brace, telling me that "I've fixed the issue by properly closing the method with its brace. The method now has valid syntax and should compile correctly". It was never broken! This seems like such a regression of tooling; we have parsers for the purpose of finding wrong syntax, and they don't just make up things like missing braces that aren't missing, and then break your code by inserting them. This seems like developing in Kafka's nightmares. Should I even bother continuing to evaluate Cursor, when it can take perfectly valid and correct code, and immediately make it worse? What other nightmares will it reveal to me, and do I even want to know? I'm kind of astounded at how bad that first impression was, couldn't have been worse really.
    - soco 2y ago
      Try refactoring anything in Cursor, that's where the shit really hits the fan. I guess all those folks claiming 100x productivity or applications made with sole vibing, are only building little proof-of concept apps, something which "works" but definitely doesn't need to follow proper requirements. Can it bootstrap an application for you? For sure, but that's just half a day sunk otherwise - all the next weeks of building up on that scaffolding cannot today be automated, or vibed.
igorkraw 2y ago
Check the actual paper on the type of sorts it actually got speedup on :-) (hint: a few percentage points on larger n,similar to what pgo might find, the big speedup is for n around 8 or so, where it basically enumerated and found a sorting network)
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
anon373839 2y ago
> This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. I don’t see this. Board games are fundamentally different from software development problems. The latter have imperfect information, unknown requirements and constraints, fuzzy success criteria, and more.
- WithinReason 2y ago
  Which means that as long as you can specify the requirements, constraints, and success criteria you can automate the coding part.
  - saint_yossarian 2y ago
    Sure, but writing those is just coding in a fuzzier and more verbose language.
  - thiht 2y ago
    So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language)
    - consumer451 2y ago
      > So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language) Not OP, but yes. But that means you don't need a dev, just someone who knows how to spec correctly in English/Jira, right? Is that likely a dev who moved on to PM? Very likely in 2025. For better or worse, the future I imagine is a Jira plugin or MCP server that can read a project, the LLM IDE client then asks questions to fill in the blanks... and out comes the app. For many years this will require a human in the loop. But will that human need to know the intricacies of the latest frontend framework? Less and less as time goes on. Disclaimer: predicting the future is hard.
      - tliltocatl 2y ago
        Trying to provide a programming tool for non-programmers has been a wet dream of some for a while. See SQL, 4GL, DRAKON (lol), VBA, no-code platforms (btw what happend with the hype? How are we not all replaced already) and the most recent but certainly not the last is LLMs. All while sometimes yielding something useful past attempts have consistently and spectacularly failed this objective. Fundamentally because non-programmers don't want to deal with this, otherwise they would have learned some damn proper PL long time ago, it's not THAT hard. And LLMs adds quite some special spice to that. How a vibe coder going to fix LLM output that fails? Without understanding the code, that is. Regarding "the latest frontend framework" the whole situation is a bit mysterious to me, because somehow everyone keep spending millions of man-hours on yet another react contraption where a static HTML would be enough. From the user perspective all this stuff brings no value, 80% of frontend stuff could have been automated long time ago or just not done at all, yet we keep reinventing the wheel. I don't see how LLMs can change the situation because there was clearly no demand for improved productivity there before.
kccqzy 2y ago
Your example of a model finding more performant sorts did not involve the use of LLMs. I've said multiple times on HN that I believe we need to look past LLMs for the next breakthrough in AI assisted coding. I don't believe LLMs can exceed humans in quality; they can only match humans in quality and beat humans in speed.
- MarkMarine 2y ago
  Yes exactly: >and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it
bigpeopleareold 2y ago
How did you build that experience? It's speculative now if people can develop equivalent experience when you're job is now to constantly guide an LLM to do the right thing. We can speculate that you see patterns and seek to correct them, but the type of hands-on experience and muscle memory is threatened to be atrophied (very much like just relying on stackoverflow for answers can atrophy your ability to seek core knowledge.)

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.

margalabargala 2y ago

Where we are now, I wonder if is similar to the early days of compiled languages existing, back when people still somewhat commonly wrote assembly by hand and didn't trust compilers. Sure, things like Roller Coaster Tycoon exist, but but writing in a compiled language is so much faster, easier, and more broadly accessible than writing in assembly that compilers took over.

oblio 2y ago
My worry about this approach is: there is a reasonably popular saying that writing code is hard but debugging it is twice as hard (at least), which I think is an accurate description. LLMs will greatly increase code production, will they also increase debuggability to match?
- TeMPOraL 2y ago
  LLMs don't just make it easy to accumulate code - they make it easy to throw code away and start again. This already enables taking a different approach to debuggability - if there's a bug and it can't be trivially solved, trash that bit of the code and write it again. It may not be broadly viable just yet, but it will be if the models keep getting cheaper and better. This is also implied in the idea of "vibe coding" - don't bother understanding the code or debugging it yourself; if it doesn't work the way you like, just say it and have the model fix it until it gets it right (or you run out of money).
  - Apocryphon 2y ago
    Sounds very maintainable and rigorously constructed
    - jryle70 2y ago
      How do you know it won't be maintainable? based on your current knowledge?
      - 2y ago

jmull 2y ago

Well… to be frank, this is someone not reading TFA. The article is pointing out real limitations of vibe coding today (which you appear to agree with). It does suggest AI coding won’t be viable in the future. You should probably update your comment to say something like, “spot on”.

TeMPOraL 2y ago
Nah, the article is generalizing from a single sample of current state, ignoring the larger trajectory (that, for AI coding, went from sci-fi to reality in two years). Sure, the tools aren't perfect, so there's some art to using them now - which the author of TFA seems to be unaware of. Take for example: > You cannot ask these tools today to develop a performant React application. You cannot ask these tools to implement a secure user registration flow. It will choose to execute functions like is user registered on the client instead of the server. Of course you can ask them to do it. You can literally ask them to "write better code" (yes, with this exact phrase; see [0]), and you'll get better code. More performant, or more secure - it depends on specifics of the case. Or, you can ask them specifically to focus on security or performance, and you will typically get improvements on those axis. That's today. Next year, people will know how to prompt the models away from most common failure modes, and the models themselves will be further trained to avoid those same failure modes. In bringing specific problems up, TFA isn't making a convincing argument against future of "vibe coding" - it's literally helping in making it happen. -- [0] - https://minimaxir.com/2025/01/write-better-code/ https://minimaxir.com/2025/01/write-better-code/
- lelandbatey 2y ago
  Ah yes, the classic "we didn't have this at all 2 years ago, so we can expect a linear increase in capability 2 years from now! Trends will of course continue!" I think you're wrong. I think AI is going to stagnate and only the surrounding tooling will improve, but not enough to get us to the promised land. Arguably we already are seeing that happen. To see the supposed "this is how all code is written now" world AI proponents keep declaring, we're going to need to see improvements to the current AI where they can operate on context windows two orders of magnitude bigger than they are now, while costs for doing so also drop accordingly. Maybe that can be done, I'm betting it can't.

dr_dshiv 2y ago

Vibe coding is 100% real. Or maybe we should call it code vibing when there is no coding ability. But I just taught 18 professionals with no coding ability to build functional software. Their minds were blown

mentos 2y ago
Cursor? I finally got around to trying it this week and it exceeded my expectations.
- dr_dshiv 2y ago
  No, if you have no coding ability and no interest in learning but want to just tell the computer what you want: 1. Lovable 2. Bolt.new 3. Replit agent Or actually, I’d put Claude #1. You can make all kinds of cool stuff, just in their UI.
- ModernMech 2y ago
  What were your expectations and how did it exceed them? I have to say, on they basis of your comment I just decided to try Cursor, and I'm sorry to report it immediately disappointed me. First thing it did was it told me it found a syntax error in code that compiles perfectly. It went ahead and added a closing brace, telling me that "I've fixed the issue by properly closing the method with its brace. The method now has valid syntax and should compile correctly". It was never broken! This seems like such a regression of tooling; we have parsers for the purpose of finding wrong syntax, and they don't just make up things like missing braces that aren't missing, and then break your code by inserting them. This seems like developing in Kafka's nightmares. Should I even bother continuing to evaluate Cursor, when it can take perfectly valid and correct code, and immediately make it worse? What other nightmares will it reveal to me, and do I even want to know? I'm kind of astounded at how bad that first impression was, couldn't have been worse really.
  - soco 2y ago
    Try refactoring anything in Cursor, that's where the shit really hits the fan. I guess all those folks claiming 100x productivity or applications made with sole vibing, are only building little proof-of concept apps, something which "works" but definitely doesn't need to follow proper requirements. Can it bootstrap an application for you? For sure, but that's just half a day sunk otherwise - all the next weeks of building up on that scaffolding cannot today be automated, or vibed.

igorkraw 2y ago

Check the actual paper on the type of sorts it actually got speedup on :-) (hint: a few percentage points on larger n,similar to what pgo might find, the big speedup is for n around 8 or so, where it basically enumerated and found a sorting network)

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

anon373839 2y ago

> This is the go community saying a computer will never best human go players. I don’t see this. Board games are fundamentally different from software development problems. The latter have imperfect information, unknown requirements and constraints, fuzzy success criteria, and more.

WithinReason 2y ago
Which means that as long as you can specify the requirements, constraints, and success criteria you can automate the coding part.
- saint_yossarian 2y ago
  Sure, but writing those is just coding in a fuzzier and more verbose language.
- thiht 2y ago
  So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language)
  - consumer451 2y ago
    > So you’re saying you can automate the coding part by… writing the code (in an inferior language) Not OP, but yes. But that means you don't need a dev, just someone who knows how to spec correctly in English/Jira, right? Is that likely a dev who moved on to PM? Very likely in 2025. For better or worse, the future I imagine is a Jira plugin or MCP server that can read a project, the LLM IDE client then asks questions to fill in the blanks... and out comes the app. For many years this will require a human in the loop. But will that human need to know the intricacies of the latest frontend framework? Less and less as time goes on. Disclaimer: predicting the future is hard.
    - tliltocatl 2y ago
      Trying to provide a programming tool for non-programmers has been a wet dream of some for a while. See SQL, 4GL, DRAKON (lol), VBA, no-code platforms (btw what happend with the hype? How are we not all replaced already) and the most recent but certainly not the last is LLMs. All while sometimes yielding something useful past attempts have consistently and spectacularly failed this objective. Fundamentally because non-programmers don't want to deal with this, otherwise they would have learned some damn proper PL long time ago, it's not THAT hard. And LLMs adds quite some special spice to that. How a vibe coder going to fix LLM output that fails? Without understanding the code, that is. Regarding "the latest frontend framework" the whole situation is a bit mysterious to me, because somehow everyone keep spending millions of man-hours on yet another react contraption where a static HTML would be enough. From the user perspective all this stuff brings no value, 80% of frontend stuff could have been automated long time ago or just not done at all, yet we keep reinventing the wheel. I don't see how LLMs can change the situation because there was clearly no demand for improved productivity there before.

kccqzy 2y ago

Your example of a model finding more performant sorts did not involve the use of LLMs. I've said multiple times on HN that I believe we need to look past LLMs for the next breakthrough in AI assisted coding. I don't believe LLMs can exceed humans in quality; they can only match humans in quality and beat humans in speed.

MarkMarine 2y ago
Yes exactly: >and the right system for optimizing (LLMs trained on “average code” probably aren’t it

bigpeopleareold 2y ago

How did you build that experience? It's speculative now if people can develop equivalent experience when you're job is now to constantly guide an LLM to do the right thing. We can speculate that you see patterns and seek to correct them, but the type of hands-on experience and muscle memory is threatened to be atrophied (very much like just relying on stackoverflow for answers can atrophy your ability to seek core knowledge.)