4 ms·
The issue is, though ChatGPT and the likes definitely speed up development in one respect, they create a bottleneck in various other places.. “vibe coders” have
by jdefr89 1y ago
The issue is, though ChatGPT and the likes definitely speed up development in one respect, they create a bottleneck in various other places.. “vibe coders” have essentially no idea what the code their LLM cranked out even does and are unaware the code they generated is often riddled with bugs yet still looks plausible. Not only that, they are often trying to develop things, that for the most part you could have just googled. Of course an LlM can write your CRUD app to a pint but then try to add a novel aspect and you see it pretending to reason and make progress when in reality you’re just spinning your wheels. I do research at MIT, my day to day involves developing systems/solutions/technologies that did not previously exist. When the bulk of your work lies in novel things such as R&D the limits of LLMs become very apparent and they offer no further help.
Every single day friends of mine ( many who aren’t programmers just wanna be CEOs of the next trend) tell me about these “project” of theirs. At the beginning it amazed them. They got a GUI up displaying some numbers up in Python with just a few queries! So cool! To them this probably looks like black magic. As the project grows to anything beyond the trivial, they cannot push it further along. They can’t look at the code themselves to fix the minor issue any human would immediately see because they have no clue/haven’t read the bulk of generated code (often trash quality riddled with vulnerabilities)… They often resort to trying a million different tools and platforms, spinning in circles, praying another model can fix their abomination… You get the idea. Sorry for poor grammar typing on small phone on bus.
- kubb 1y ago> When the bulk of your work lies in novel things such as R&D the limits of LLMs become very apparent and they offer no further help. Yes, but most people here do CRUD websites, so they’re extatic.
- tuckerman 1y agoI know they are very visible on Twitter and the like but how many people are truly "vibe coding" versus just being a SWE that uses an LLM to summarize documentation, scaffold some test cases, implement some tedious data transformations, and still implement the truly interesting bits on their own? I'm not sure how to actually figure that out but it would be very interesting to know. I know IRL none of the former but am myself/know plenty of engineers who are the latter. It very well could be I'm the one with the biased sample but my experience is that I only hear about vibe coding from "influencers" and articles/comments decrying it.
- throw-vibec0d3 1y agoI made a quick throwaway to share my anecdote. I'm at a YC company. We have a dev team < 15 engineers. We all expressed concerns about going full vibe coding, so the technical co-founder hired a bunch of vibe coders and has them on a private "SEAL team" building vibe coded monstrosities without any regard to safety, integrating with our main product, hosting consistency, or anything else. I don't know if this is anyone else's experience. But I'm WAY more concerned about vibe coding than others seem to be just due to my proximity to the nonsense.
- Nikolay_p 1y agothe founders think they can do it without any real developers, they will fail. But you have a bigger problem, the tech co-founder (CTO) is an idiot, that company is not going anywhere.
- tuckerman 1y agoSorry you have to deal with that and I hope they see the ramifications of their decision soon, but if this is your technical co-founder I'd recommend looking for a new role. Can you share more about what the workflow of this new team looks like? I consider myself a strong proponent and heavy user of AI tools for development but it's still hard for me to fathom how true "vibe coding" at this scale is possible.
- throw-vibec0d3 1y agoMy founders are certainly already in this thread, so I don't want to say a whole lot more. The more specific I get, the increased likelihood I get called in for a chat today for being "unwilling to adapt." But it's far worse than you're probably expecting from a company with good investors and revenue. I expect things will go terribly wrong very soon. The PM just decided they didn't want to queue up tickets or designs anymore, so they're on this vibe coding team. We aren't even in interviews with devs going onto that team, though you can hardly call them devs (Maybe that's elitist of me. but that's how I'm feeling.) And sorry this is turning into a therapy session, but all of us devs actually like AI tooling. We're getting decent to good value out of claude code and the like. We've implemented a fairly neat little MCP for our CS team to use as a walled-garden admin tool. And yet, since we criticize things, we're branded as "non-believers" and the implication is that we are impeding the company's growth. Suffice it to say, all us career devs are already interviewing and on our way out here.
- ofjcihen 1y agoI come from the same space and I agree wholeheartedly. My current work also has me working with APIs that aren’t public so no help there either. This has me questioning the level of complexity most people on HN are working at day to day. For so many to be amazed at the ability to spontaneously generate CRUD apps that already exist in a thousand different iterations I’m guessing it’s pretty low.