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It's been my experience that strongly opinionated frameworks are better for vibe coding regardless of the type system. For example if you are using rails vibe

It's been my experience that strongly opinionated frameworks are better for vibe coding regardless of the type system. For example if you are using rails vibe coding is great because there is an MCP, there are published prompts, and there is basically only one way to do things in rails. You know how files are to be named, where they go, what format they should take etc. Try the same thing in go and you end up with a very different result despite the fact that go has stronger typing. Both Claude and Gemini have struggled with one shotting simple apps in go but succeed with rails.

topato 1y ago
This is pretty anecdotal, but it feels like most of the published rails source code you find online (and by extension, an LLM has found) is from large, stable, and well-documented code.
- rafamvc 1y ago
  Claude code with rails is amazing. Should out to Obie for the Claude on rails. Works phenomenally well.
EGreg 1y ago
Basically it's like this: the more constraints you have, the more freedom you have to "vibe" code and if someone actually built AI for writing tests, catching bugs and iterating 24/7 then you'd have something even cooler
- delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
  > if someone actually built AI for writing tests, catching bugs and iterating 24/7 This is called a nightly CI/CD pipeline. Run a build and run all tests and run all coverage at midnight, failed/regressed tests and reduced coverage automatically are assigned to new tickets for managers to review and assign.
  - progbits 1y ago
    Post-merge tests, once a day? Who does that, we are not in 90s anymore. Run all the tests and coverage on every PR, block merge on it passing. If you think that's too slow then you need to fix your tests.
    - justacrow 1y ago
      We go through maybe 10k CPU hours in our nightly pipeline. Doing that for every PR in a team of 70 people is unsustainable from a cost standpoint. The existing tests aren't optimal, but it's not going to be possible to cut it by 1-2 orders of magnitude by "fixing the tests" We obviously have smaller pre-merge tests as well.
      - klibertp 1y ago
        > We obviously have smaller pre-merge tests as well. This. I feel like trying to segregate tests into "unit" and "integration" tests (among other kinds) did a lot of damage in terms of prevalent testing setups. Tests are either fast or slow. Fast ones should be run as often as possible, with really fast ones every few keystrokes (or on file save in the IDE/editor), normal fast ones on commit, and slow ones once a day (or however often you can afford, etc.). All these kinds of tests have value, so going without covering both fast and slow cases is risky. However, there's no need for the slow tests to interrupt day-to-day development. I seem to remember seeing something like `<slowTest>` pragma in GToolkit test suites, so at least a few people seem to have had the same idea. The majority, however, remains fixated on unit/integration categorization and end up with (a select few) unit tests taking "1-2 orders of magnitude" too long, which actually diminishes the value of those tests since now they're run less often.
      - EGreg 1y ago
        Pssht, so little? With AI you're supposed to have a huge data center and pay them thousands of dollars to process many, many tokens. That way you are doing it right, 24/7. How else are we going to cover these costs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwGVa-6DxJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwGVa-6DxJM
delifue 1y ago
In my experience Gemini can one-shot go apps. Determining it requires sound eval instead of anecdotes.
- Tostino 1y ago
  I'd really like to know what type of apps you're actually one-shotting with an AI. Seriously, can you please give me some example code or something because it seems like anything past a trivial program that doesn't actually do what you specified is far beyond their capabilities.
  - bobro 1y ago
    if AI could really one-shot important, interesting apps, shouldn’t we be seeing them everywhere? where’s the surge of new apps that are so trivial to make? who’s hiding all this incredible innovation that can be so easily generated?
    - jdiff 1y ago
      If AI could really accelerate or even take over the majority of work on an established codebase, we should be seeing a revolution in FOSS libraries and ecosystems. The gap has been noted many times, but so far all anyone's been able to dig up are one-off, laboriously-tended-to pull requests. No libraries or other projects with any actual downstream users.
      - qcnguy 1y ago
        It's taken over my mature codebase just fine. I'm not in the business of spending tokens on open source projects though.
        jdiff 1y ago
        But plenty of maintainers are in the business of spending mass amounts of time, energy, and actual money on open source projects. Some make a business out of it. Some are sponsored by their employer to spend paid work hours on FOSS projects. If LLMs could help them, some significant number would. But if there are any instances of this, I have not seen them, and seemingly neither has anyone I've posed the question to, or any passersby.
siva7 1y ago
In comparison a completely unopinionated framework like fastapi, which got a popularity boost in the early a.i. surge, is a mess to work with if you are vibe coding. Most popular frameworks follow the principle of having no clear way how to do things and leave it up to the developer. Opinionated frameworks got out of fashion after rails but it turns out those are significantly better suited for a.i. assisted development.
- yurishimo 1y ago
  That's an interesting assertion you make there about opinionated frameworks. Do you have a source for that? From my perspective, opinionated frameworks have only gotten more popular. Rails might not be the darling of every startup in existence anymore but I think that's largely down to other languages coming in and adopting the best parts of Rails and crafting their own flavor that plays to the strengths of their favorite programming language. Django, Laravel, Spring Boot, Blazor, Phoenix, etc etc. While a lot of people here on this platform like to tinker and are often jumping to a new thing, most of my colleagues have no such ideas of grandeur and just want something that works. Rails and it's acolytes work really well. I'm curious to know what popular frameworks you're referencing that don't fit into this Rails-like mold?
  - siva7 1y ago
    I'm not familiar with all frameworks you listed, but i've worked extensively with spring boot and i can assert you that it's not a opinionated framework (as in one way how to do things correctly). Blazor and Phoenix are niche frameworks that don't have wide adoption outside this site. Django has a shared history/competition with Rails but it's also not widely popular.
    - ailef 1y ago
      > We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss Spring Boot is definitely opinionated (this is taken from their home page). Maybe not as much as RoR, but saying it isn't at all sounds very strange to me, having worked with it for a few years too...
globular-toast 1y ago
Well yeah, it's like how a 5 year old can talk about what they want in their sandwich but will probably struggle to describe the flavours and textures they enjoy in detail.
hkt 1y ago
I've been using flask and the results are remarkable. Remarkable to the point where I've one-shotted rather good things that I'm now using daily.
debugnik 1y ago
Weird, I thought Go was one of the go-to examples in HN for languages that LLMs work well with, precisely because it's opinionated and has many standard libs. Not that I've tried, my attempts at vibe coding felt disappointing, but I think this contradicts the zeitgeist?
- Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
  I work in both ruby and go. There is no comparison ai is way better with ruby (rails).
  - paffdragon 1y ago
    Is that specific to using Rails or it is good with plain Ruby as well?
    - Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
      Rails, I haven't tried at all with plain ruby, but I doubt. I think formulaic = static typing for AI
  - sharperguy 1y ago
    Hmm I can imagine that while LLMs are good at producing working code in Go they might not be as good at structuring larger applications, compared to building on opinionated frameworks. I imagine there could be some presets out there that guide the vibe-coding engines to produce a particular structure in other languages for better results.
mhluongo 1y ago
Have you considered that instead, whatever LLM has the most examples of are what it's best at? Perhaps there's more well-structures Rails code in training than Go?
brokegrammer 1y ago
My experience has been the opposite with Rails because of open-ended patterns with Hotwire. Sure, Rails itself is opinionated but Hotwire provides multiple ways to do the same thing, which confuses LLMs. For example, recently I tried building a form that allows creating related objects inline using modals. Claude 4 Sonnet got quite confused by that request, no matter how much help I provided. It managed in the end but the solution left a lot to be desired for. It can build the same feature using React on it's own with basic instructions. Same thing with other libraries like HTMX. Using TypeScript with React, and opinionated tools like Tanstack Query helps LLMs be way more productive because it can fix errors quickly by looking at type annotations, and using common patterns to build out user interactions.
- dmix 1y ago
  I find Claude works extremely well at generating Stimulus controller code. Likely a lack of documentation and git repos with larger Hotwire codebase patterns that it was trained on.
liveoneggs 1y ago
it sounds like you should have just been writing configuration this whole time?
newswasboring 1y ago
This isn't a fully formed thought, but could this be mitigated by giving LLMs your opinions? I am using copilot in more of a pair programming manner and for everything I want to make I give a lot of my opinions in the prompt. My changes are never too large though, a hundred lines of diff at most.

topato 1y ago

This is pretty anecdotal, but it feels like most of the published rails source code you find online (and by extension, an LLM has found) is from large, stable, and well-documented code.

rafamvc 1y ago
Claude code with rails is amazing. Should out to Obie for the Claude on rails. Works phenomenally well.

EGreg 1y ago

Basically it's like this: the more constraints you have, the more freedom you have to "vibe" code and if someone actually built AI for writing tests, catching bugs and iterating 24/7 then you'd have something even cooler

delta_p_delta_x 1y ago
> if someone actually built AI for writing tests, catching bugs and iterating 24/7 This is called a nightly CI/CD pipeline. Run a build and run all tests and run all coverage at midnight, failed/regressed tests and reduced coverage automatically are assigned to new tickets for managers to review and assign.
- progbits 1y ago
  Post-merge tests, once a day? Who does that, we are not in 90s anymore. Run all the tests and coverage on every PR, block merge on it passing. If you think that's too slow then you need to fix your tests.
  - justacrow 1y ago
    We go through maybe 10k CPU hours in our nightly pipeline. Doing that for every PR in a team of 70 people is unsustainable from a cost standpoint. The existing tests aren't optimal, but it's not going to be possible to cut it by 1-2 orders of magnitude by "fixing the tests" We obviously have smaller pre-merge tests as well.
    - klibertp 1y ago
      > We obviously have smaller pre-merge tests as well. This. I feel like trying to segregate tests into "unit" and "integration" tests (among other kinds) did a lot of damage in terms of prevalent testing setups. Tests are either fast or slow. Fast ones should be run as often as possible, with really fast ones every few keystrokes (or on file save in the IDE/editor), normal fast ones on commit, and slow ones once a day (or however often you can afford, etc.). All these kinds of tests have value, so going without covering both fast and slow cases is risky. However, there's no need for the slow tests to interrupt day-to-day development. I seem to remember seeing something like `<slowTest>` pragma in GToolkit test suites, so at least a few people seem to have had the same idea. The majority, however, remains fixated on unit/integration categorization and end up with (a select few) unit tests taking "1-2 orders of magnitude" too long, which actually diminishes the value of those tests since now they're run less often.
    - EGreg 1y ago
      Pssht, so little? With AI you're supposed to have a huge data center and pay them thousands of dollars to process many, many tokens. That way you are doing it right, 24/7. How else are we going to cover these costs? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwGVa-6DxJM https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cwGVa-6DxJM

delifue 1y ago

In my experience Gemini can one-shot go apps. Determining it requires sound eval instead of anecdotes.

Tostino 1y ago
I'd really like to know what type of apps you're actually one-shotting with an AI. Seriously, can you please give me some example code or something because it seems like anything past a trivial program that doesn't actually do what you specified is far beyond their capabilities.
- bobro 1y ago
  if AI could really one-shot important, interesting apps, shouldn’t we be seeing them everywhere? where’s the surge of new apps that are so trivial to make? who’s hiding all this incredible innovation that can be so easily generated?
  - jdiff 1y ago
    If AI could really accelerate or even take over the majority of work on an established codebase, we should be seeing a revolution in FOSS libraries and ecosystems. The gap has been noted many times, but so far all anyone's been able to dig up are one-off, laboriously-tended-to pull requests. No libraries or other projects with any actual downstream users.
    - qcnguy 1y ago
      It's taken over my mature codebase just fine. I'm not in the business of spending tokens on open source projects though.
      - jdiff 1y ago
        But plenty of maintainers are in the business of spending mass amounts of time, energy, and actual money on open source projects. Some make a business out of it. Some are sponsored by their employer to spend paid work hours on FOSS projects. If LLMs could help them, some significant number would. But if there are any instances of this, I have not seen them, and seemingly neither has anyone I've posed the question to, or any passersby.

siva7 1y ago

In comparison a completely unopinionated framework like fastapi, which got a popularity boost in the early a.i. surge, is a mess to work with if you are vibe coding. Most popular frameworks follow the principle of having no clear way how to do things and leave it up to the developer. Opinionated frameworks got out of fashion after rails but it turns out those are significantly better suited for a.i. assisted development.

yurishimo 1y ago
That's an interesting assertion you make there about opinionated frameworks. Do you have a source for that? From my perspective, opinionated frameworks have only gotten more popular. Rails might not be the darling of every startup in existence anymore but I think that's largely down to other languages coming in and adopting the best parts of Rails and crafting their own flavor that plays to the strengths of their favorite programming language. Django, Laravel, Spring Boot, Blazor, Phoenix, etc etc. While a lot of people here on this platform like to tinker and are often jumping to a new thing, most of my colleagues have no such ideas of grandeur and just want something that works. Rails and it's acolytes work really well. I'm curious to know what popular frameworks you're referencing that don't fit into this Rails-like mold?
- siva7 1y ago
  I'm not familiar with all frameworks you listed, but i've worked extensively with spring boot and i can assert you that it's not a opinionated framework (as in one way how to do things correctly). Blazor and Phoenix are niche frameworks that don't have wide adoption outside this site. Django has a shared history/competition with Rails but it's also not widely popular.
  - ailef 1y ago
    > We take an opinionated view of the Spring platform and third-party libraries so you can get started with minimum fuss Spring Boot is definitely opinionated (this is taken from their home page). Maybe not as much as RoR, but saying it isn't at all sounds very strange to me, having worked with it for a few years too...

globular-toast 1y ago

Well yeah, it's like how a 5 year old can talk about what they want in their sandwich but will probably struggle to describe the flavours and textures they enjoy in detail.

hkt 1y ago

I've been using flask and the results are remarkable. Remarkable to the point where I've one-shotted rather good things that I'm now using daily.

debugnik 1y ago

Weird, I thought Go was one of the go-to examples in HN for languages that LLMs work well with, precisely because it's opinionated and has many standard libs. Not that I've tried, my attempts at vibe coding felt disappointing, but I think this contradicts the zeitgeist?

Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
I work in both ruby and go. There is no comparison ai is way better with ruby (rails).
- paffdragon 1y ago
  Is that specific to using Rails or it is good with plain Ruby as well?
  - Fire-Dragon-DoL 1y ago
    Rails, I haven't tried at all with plain ruby, but I doubt. I think formulaic = static typing for AI
- sharperguy 1y ago
  Hmm I can imagine that while LLMs are good at producing working code in Go they might not be as good at structuring larger applications, compared to building on opinionated frameworks. I imagine there could be some presets out there that guide the vibe-coding engines to produce a particular structure in other languages for better results.

mhluongo 1y ago

Have you considered that instead, whatever LLM has the most examples of are what it's best at? Perhaps there's more well-structures Rails code in training than Go?

brokegrammer 1y ago

My experience has been the opposite with Rails because of open-ended patterns with Hotwire. Sure, Rails itself is opinionated but Hotwire provides multiple ways to do the same thing, which confuses LLMs. For example, recently I tried building a form that allows creating related objects inline using modals. Claude 4 Sonnet got quite confused by that request, no matter how much help I provided. It managed in the end but the solution left a lot to be desired for. It can build the same feature using React on it's own with basic instructions. Same thing with other libraries like HTMX. Using TypeScript with React, and opinionated tools like Tanstack Query helps LLMs be way more productive because it can fix errors quickly by looking at type annotations, and using common patterns to build out user interactions.

dmix 1y ago
I find Claude works extremely well at generating Stimulus controller code. Likely a lack of documentation and git repos with larger Hotwire codebase patterns that it was trained on.

liveoneggs 1y ago

it sounds like you should have just been writing configuration this whole time?

newswasboring 1y ago

This isn't a fully formed thought, but could this be mitigated by giving LLMs your opinions? I am using copilot in more of a pair programming manner and for everything I want to make I give a lot of my opinions in the prompt. My changes are never too large though, a hundred lines of diff at most.