4 ms·

I have been seeing a lot of so-called self proclaimed vibe-coders swearing by LLMs making them 10x or 100x devs, but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects

by h4ch1 1y ago

I have been seeing a lot of so-called self proclaimed vibe-coders swearing by LLMs making them 10x or 100x devs, but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects hitting the markets. Whenever I see said projects, on Github or non-technical friends vibe coding their next new startups asking for a code review, all I can see is boilerplate hell, 100s of lines of redundancies, problems that could've been solved using 5-6 procedures being blown out to 4-5 directories with 20-30 procedures, basically over-engineered beyond belief. The positive part of this is people who would've never thought of programming/writing code are beginning to do so but their confidence is highly misplaced because they simply don't understand what's going on to a certain degree and don't possess the necessary knowledge nor skillset to review the generated code. A successful compile or output on the web browser is not a very good metric for projects. Great writeup that captures the current state of affairs. ---- Tangential, but hi Nommy :) glad to see you out there, remember competing against you back in school; those web dev comps used to be the shit. Think Exun 2013 was when we went head to head making that fake currency haha.

crinkly 1y ago
I’m currently enjoying a competitor in our market make a wonderful mistake in this area. They want all in on vibe coding and AI and announced to their customers that they’d rewrite their 25 year old rotting platform using it in 12 months. 6 months late and I know a clean up contractor who is making bank there with no hope of recovering it apparently. They saw it as a way out from their cheap assery, lack of talent and lowest bidding outsourcer over the years and it’s a dead end. I wonder how many other projects are in this situation.
- h4ch1 1y ago
  Selling shovels during a gold rush seems to be an enticing avenue honestly. Think I need to scope out some projects like this haha.
  - faangguyindia 1y ago
    and you'll fail, mostly because top projects in space have moat, ClaudeCode, Codex etc...
lm28469 1y ago
I'm freelancing on a project that's been mostly vibe coded by one dude, who's a good dev as far as I can tell, the product is definitely profitable, 70k+ mrr with a very small team and almost no expense, that being said for every feature I implement I find 1 to 3 broken features due to obvious vibe coding errors
lelanthran 1y ago
Depends on the language maybe. I have had considerable trouble getting C99 code from any LLM that adheres to some basic safety conventions present in all my code. The biggest issue is generated functions have multiple return paths making it more difficult to visually spot cleanup errors. My usual code has a single cleanup label that frees all resources and, if error is still set to true, cleans up the return value as well. Even when tired this convention makes it dead simple for me to spot errors. So I've been writing most of my C projects by hand. SQL otoh, LLMs are great.
- h4ch1 1y ago
  True, they're a great tool and shine in some areas. I especially use LLMs to work as a search engine for me before I start a new project; I use it to critique my implementation plan, I use it to find things that already exist to avoid reinventing the wheel, and I use it as a reviewer while building out my spec/design documents. Both of which I first write by hand then use it to format, give me "ideas" which I cherry pick depending on the scope of the project. YMMV. Also in the same vein as SQL, I've seen Gemini is pretty good at generating formulae in Google Sheets; I used it to create an optimal player rota for a 24 hr online endurance race me and my friends were participating in using parameters like player_strength, the time slots they were fine with taking up, in order to min-max fatigue and consistency. Pretty fun.
  - faangguyindia 1y ago
    >Both of which I first write by hand then use it to format, give me "ideas" which I cherry pick depending on the scope of the project. YMMV. If the most critical part is provided by LLM how is least critical part written by you proof of LLM being inferior at writing code?
    - lelanthran 1y ago
      >> I use it as a reviewer while building out my spec/design documents. Both of which I first write by hand then use it to format, give me "ideas" > If the most critical part is provided by LLM how is least critical part written by you proof of LLM being inferior at writing code? That quote you quoted seems to say that he uses it to reformat his spec/design documents. Nothing about code. He further goes on to say he cherry picks the best of the spec/design elements from that documents. How did you get "It writes my code" from the paragraph you quoted?
faangguyindia 1y ago
I'll show my project. Here's my LLM coding method https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/Od8CsIkRVI https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/Od8CsIkRVI Here's my project: https://aretecodex.pages.dev https://aretecodex.pages.dev I've many other projects which I've built with the same method, implementing 10-15 features a day on some Ofc i cannot show all projects here but those who think LLM coding doesn't work, well....
- h4ch1 1y ago
  I replied to your comment sometime back on another thread; this method of yours is simply spec based development, there's nothing groundbreaking about it that serves as a silver bullet and people have been doing it since the advent of LLMs, to the point this is Kiro's main selling point. Also not to shit on your project or anything, but I can whip that up in 10-15 minutes using something like Hugo/Astro, using just their bootstrapping commands. I'd like to see if you have any examples of things that are hard to do being done by LLMs than just a SSG blog. Also I never said "LLM coding doesn't work", read my comment. I just meant the cost of maintaining a pure vibe-coded system outweighs its' potential benefits.
  - faangguyindia 1y ago
    >but I can whip that up in 10-15 minutes using something like Hugo/Astro, using just their bootstrapping commands. You just looked at wiki part, not the tools section it seems: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/ https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/ sure you may be able to clone but you lack domain knowledge to actually make these. And here it clone claude code cli, https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1ngmyqq/i_ran_claudecode_in_while_loop_and_asked_it_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1ngmyqq/i_ran_c... Show me your projects.
- jappwilson 1y ago
  I am sorry, but this project is ass! I mean I vibe coded a react flow based node editor with llm integration and I thought that was weak. I don't know why you think this project is a masterpiece, what gives?
malux85 1y ago
This is what I have seen as well, enormously bloated codebases, with perhaps 5-10x as much code as there should be. Also really whacky implementations, things like every page load, sucking up a bunch of MD files, inserting them into an SQL database, and then querying that database to render the page, so every single page load is a total reconstruction of the database. That’s just one example of 10 I could give right now. Vibe coding might get you a janky zero to one, but the problem is that the price that you pay for that speed, is something so tangled, so messy, that the LLMs themselves cannot even get you to “two” I actually like LLM coding and I find it helpful in many cases, but vibe coding (meaning where people don’t really understand the implementation and just hit accept) generates huge amounts of very low quality code, which isn’t just a matter of aesthetics, but has real product quality and security implications
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  >This is what I have seen as well, enormously bloated codebases, with perhaps 5-10x as much code as there should be. I've seen the same thing happen when you outsource to third world countries. So which one is worst? LLM can be prompted to write bloated codebase, it can be prompted to write lean one. It depends on skill set of the guy driving LLM.
  - malux85 1y ago
    Yeah I agree 100%! The quality of the llm output is very highly dependent on the abilities of the human driving it
aurareturn 1y ago
but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects hitting the markets. In a single day, I vibe coded an internal tool for my team to run unit, integration tests. It has a professional looking UI, a few nice to have features that usually never get built, and a server component that connects to our app APIs. In the past, it would have taken me at least 1-2 weeks to build this. It was actually never going to get built because of that. But vibe coding finally let us complete the project.

by h4ch1 1y ago

crinkly 1y ago

I’m currently enjoying a competitor in our market make a wonderful mistake in this area. They want all in on vibe coding and AI and announced to their customers that they’d rewrite their 25 year old rotting platform using it in 12 months. 6 months late and I know a clean up contractor who is making bank there with no hope of recovering it apparently. They saw it as a way out from their cheap assery, lack of talent and lowest bidding outsourcer over the years and it’s a dead end. I wonder how many other projects are in this situation.

h4ch1 1y ago
Selling shovels during a gold rush seems to be an enticing avenue honestly. Think I need to scope out some projects like this haha.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  and you'll fail, mostly because top projects in space have moat, ClaudeCode, Codex etc...

lm28469 1y ago

I'm freelancing on a project that's been mostly vibe coded by one dude, who's a good dev as far as I can tell, the product is definitely profitable, 70k+ mrr with a very small team and almost no expense, that being said for every feature I implement I find 1 to 3 broken features due to obvious vibe coding errors

lelanthran 1y ago

Depends on the language maybe. I have had considerable trouble getting C99 code from any LLM that adheres to some basic safety conventions present in all my code. The biggest issue is generated functions have multiple return paths making it more difficult to visually spot cleanup errors. My usual code has a single cleanup label that frees all resources and, if error is still set to true, cleans up the return value as well. Even when tired this convention makes it dead simple for me to spot errors. So I've been writing most of my C projects by hand. SQL otoh, LLMs are great.

h4ch1 1y ago
True, they're a great tool and shine in some areas. I especially use LLMs to work as a search engine for me before I start a new project; I use it to critique my implementation plan, I use it to find things that already exist to avoid reinventing the wheel, and I use it as a reviewer while building out my spec/design documents. Both of which I first write by hand then use it to format, give me "ideas" which I cherry pick depending on the scope of the project. YMMV. Also in the same vein as SQL, I've seen Gemini is pretty good at generating formulae in Google Sheets; I used it to create an optimal player rota for a 24 hr online endurance race me and my friends were participating in using parameters like player_strength, the time slots they were fine with taking up, in order to min-max fatigue and consistency. Pretty fun.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  >Both of which I first write by hand then use it to format, give me "ideas" which I cherry pick depending on the scope of the project. YMMV. If the most critical part is provided by LLM how is least critical part written by you proof of LLM being inferior at writing code?
  - lelanthran 1y ago
    >> I use it as a reviewer while building out my spec/design documents. Both of which I first write by hand then use it to format, give me "ideas" > If the most critical part is provided by LLM how is least critical part written by you proof of LLM being inferior at writing code? That quote you quoted seems to say that he uses it to reformat his spec/design documents. Nothing about code. He further goes on to say he cherry picks the best of the spec/design elements from that documents. How did you get "It writes my code" from the paragraph you quoted?

faangguyindia 1y ago

I'll show my project. Here's my LLM coding method https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/Od8CsIkRVI https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/s/Od8CsIkRVI Here's my project: https://aretecodex.pages.dev https://aretecodex.pages.dev I've many other projects which I've built with the same method, implementing 10-15 features a day on some Ofc i cannot show all projects here but those who think LLM coding doesn't work, well....

h4ch1 1y ago
I replied to your comment sometime back on another thread; this method of yours is simply spec based development, there's nothing groundbreaking about it that serves as a silver bullet and people have been doing it since the advent of LLMs, to the point this is Kiro's main selling point. Also not to shit on your project or anything, but I can whip that up in 10-15 minutes using something like Hugo/Astro, using just their bootstrapping commands. I'd like to see if you have any examples of things that are hard to do being done by LLMs than just a SSG blog. Also I never said "LLM coding doesn't work", read my comment. I just meant the cost of maintaining a pure vibe-coded system outweighs its' potential benefits.
- faangguyindia 1y ago
  >but I can whip that up in 10-15 minutes using something like Hugo/Astro, using just their bootstrapping commands. You just looked at wiki part, not the tools section it seems: https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/ https://aretecodex.pages.dev/tools/ sure you may be able to clone but you lack domain knowledge to actually make these. And here it clone claude code cli, https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1ngmyqq/i_ran_claudecode_in_while_loop_and_asked_it_to/ https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1ngmyqq/i_ran_c... Show me your projects.
jappwilson 1y ago
I am sorry, but this project is ass! I mean I vibe coded a react flow based node editor with llm integration and I thought that was weak. I don't know why you think this project is a masterpiece, what gives?

malux85 1y ago

This is what I have seen as well, enormously bloated codebases, with perhaps 5-10x as much code as there should be. Also really whacky implementations, things like every page load, sucking up a bunch of MD files, inserting them into an SQL database, and then querying that database to render the page, so every single page load is a total reconstruction of the database. That’s just one example of 10 I could give right now. Vibe coding might get you a janky zero to one, but the problem is that the price that you pay for that speed, is something so tangled, so messy, that the LLMs themselves cannot even get you to “two” I actually like LLM coding and I find it helpful in many cases, but vibe coding (meaning where people don’t really understand the implementation and just hit accept) generates huge amounts of very low quality code, which isn’t just a matter of aesthetics, but has real product quality and security implications

faangguyindia 1y ago
>This is what I have seen as well, enormously bloated codebases, with perhaps 5-10x as much code as there should be. I've seen the same thing happen when you outsource to third world countries. So which one is worst? LLM can be prompted to write bloated codebase, it can be prompted to write lean one. It depends on skill set of the guy driving LLM.
- malux85 1y ago
  Yeah I agree 100%! The quality of the llm output is very highly dependent on the abilities of the human driving it

aurareturn 1y ago

but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects hitting the markets. In a single day, I vibe coded an internal tool for my team to run unit, integration tests. It has a professional looking UI, a few nice to have features that usually never get built, and a server component that connects to our app APIs. In the past, it would have taken me at least 1-2 weeks to build this. It was actually never going to get built because of that. But vibe coding finally let us complete the project.