4 ms·

The secret is that it doesn't work. None of these people have built real software that anyone outside their bubble uses. They are not replacing anyone, they are

The secret is that it doesn't work. None of these people have built real software that anyone outside their bubble uses. They are not replacing anyone, they are just off in their own corner building sand castles.

causalmodels 9mo ago
It is fine to have criticisms of this, I have many, but saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true.
- anonymous908213 9mo ago
  Yegge obviously built real software in the past. He has not built real software wherein he never looked at the code, as he is now promoting.
  - causalmodels 9mo ago
    Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it. Honestly I don't get the hostility. Yegge is running an experiment. I don't think it will work, but it will be interesting and informative to watch.
    - anonymous908213 9mo ago
      The 'experiment' isn't the issue. The problem is the entire culture around it. LLM tools are being shoved into everything, LLMs are soaking up trillions in investment, engineers are being told over and over that everything has changed and this garbage is making us obsolete, software quality is decreasing where wide LLM usage is being mandated (eg. Microsoft). Gas Town does not give the vibe of a neutral experiment but rather looks be a full-on delve into AI psychosis with the way Yegge describes it. To be clear, I think LLMs are useful technology. But the degree of increasing insanity surrounding it is putting people off for obvious reasons.
      - causalmodels 9mo ago
        I share the frustration with the hype machine. I just don't think a guy with a blog is an appropriate target for our frustration with corporate hype culture.
    - WesolyKubeczek 9mo ago
      > Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it. Not really new. Back in the day companies used to outsource their stuff to the lowest bidder agencies in proverbial Elbonia, never looked at the code, and then panickedly hired another agency when the things visibly were not what was ordered. Case studies are abound on TheDailyWTF for the last two decades. Doing the same with agents will give you the same disastrous results for comparably the same money, just faster. Oh and you can't sue them, really. Maybe it's better, who knows.
      - causalmodels 9mo ago
        Fair point on the Elbonia comparison. But we can't sue the SQLite maintainers either, and yet we trust them with basically everything. The reason is that open source developed its own trust mechanisms over decades. We don't have anything close to that with LLMs today. What those mechanisms might look like is an open question that is getting more important as AI generated code becomes more common.
        WesolyKubeczek 9mo ago
        > But we can't sue the SQLite maintainers either, and yet we trust them with basically everything. But you don’t pay them any money and don’t enter into contractual relationship with them either. Thus you can’t sue them. Well, you can try, of course, but. You could sue an Elbonian company, though, for contract breach. LLMs are like usual Elbonian quality with two middlemen but quicker, and you only have yourself to blame when they inevitably produce a disaster.
    - direwolf20 9mo ago
      The experiment is fine if you treat it as an experiment. The problem is the state of the industry where it's treated as serious rather than silly — possibly even by Steve himself.
- swiftcoder 9mo ago
  > saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true I mean... I feel like it's somewhat telling that his wikipedia page spends half its words on his abrasive communication style, and the only thing approximating a product mentioned is a (lost) Rails-on-Javascript port, and 25 years spent developing a MUD on the side. Certainly one doesn't get to stay a staff-level engineer at Google without writing code - but in terms of real, shipping software, Yegge's resume is a bit light for his tenure in BigTech
asadm 9mo ago
no that's not true. I rarely now write a SINGLE line of code both at work or at home. Even simple config switches, I ask codex/gemini to do it. You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do.
- mahogany 9mo ago
  > You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do. This thread is about vibe coding _without_ looking at the code.
azan_ 9mo ago
> The secret is that it doesn't work. I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).
- radlad 9mo ago
  My partner is a radiologist and I'd love to hear more about what you built. The engineer in me is also curious how much this cost in credits?
  - kaydub 9mo ago
    It CAN be cheap. I built a clinical pharmacist "pocket calculator" kinda app for a specific function. It was like $.60 in claude credits I think. Built with flutter + dart. It's a simple tool suite and I've only built out one of the tools so far. Now to be fair, that $.60 session was just the coding. I did some brainstorming in chatgpt and generated good markdown files (claude.md, gemini.md, agents.md) before I started.
- anonymous908213 9mo ago
  And yet I notice you haven't mentioned publishing it and undercutting the market. You could make a lot of money out-competing the existing option if what you produced was production-grade software. I'm guessing the actual case is that you only needed a small subset of the functionality of the paid software, and the LLM stitched together a rough unpolished proof-of-concept that handled your exact specific use case. Which is still great for you! But it's not the future of coding. The world still needs real engineers to make real software that is suitable for the needs of many, and this doesn't replace that.
  - jcims 9mo ago
    >The world still needs real engineers to make real software that is suitable for the needs of many, and this doesn't replace that. I think azan_ is demonstrating that shipping products 'suitable for the needs of many' is going to have to compete with 'slopping software for the needs of one'.
ryandrake 9mo ago
Just because they're one-off tools that only one person uses doesn't mean it's not "real software". I'm actually pretty excited about the fact that it's now feasible for me to replace all my BloatedShittyCommercialApps that I only use 5% of with vibe-coded bespoke tools that only do the important 5%, just for me to use. If that makes it a "sand castle" to you, fine, but this is real software and I'm seeing real benefit here.
- enraged_camel 9mo ago
  The whole "real software" thing is a type of elitism that has existed in our field for a long time, and AI is the new battleground on which it is wielded.
- nicoburns 9mo ago
  > I'm actually pretty excited about the fact that it's now feasible for me to replace all my BloatedShittyCommercialApps that I only use 5% of with vibe-coded bespoke tools that only do the important 5%, just for me to use. Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different? Vibe coded software seems to have a similar problem to "Undefined Behaviour", in that just because it works sometimes doesn't mean that it will always work. And there's no limit on what it might do when it doesn't work (the proverbial "nasal demons") - it might well wipe your entire harddrive, not just corrupt it's own data. You can of course mitigate this by manually reviewing the software, but then you lose at least some of the productivity benefit.
  - ryandrake 9mo ago
    > Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different? It might. It probably won't though. I don't see any code in it that deletes files. And, unlike BloatedShittyCommercialApp (and its cousin, BloatedDoEverythingOpenSourceApp), the code is going to be relatively small and if I do have doubts I can easily check to see what it's doing. I can build it quickly. I can patch it quickly. I don't have to file a bug to someone and beg him to look at it. I don't have to worry that the next release is going to break stuff I want and add stuff I don't want. I recently moved my home theater PC from Kodi to a tiny bespoke vibed video player app, that basically just wraps libVLC with a minimal Android GUI. It's like 3000 lines of code total. I can practically keep the entire app in my head. If I need to fix something, it's 5 minutes in my dev terminal and then adb install. Ever tried to find and fix a bug in Kodi? The goddamn thing takes forever to even build, let alone debug. And that's even open source. I don't even have a remote chance of getting a bug fixed in professionally-built proprietary software.
_zoltan_ 9mo ago
Of course it works. I haven't looked at code for my internal development in months. I don't know why people keep repeating this but it's wrong. It works.

causalmodels 9mo ago

It is fine to have criticisms of this, I have many, but saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true.

anonymous908213 9mo ago
Yegge obviously built real software in the past. He has not built real software wherein he never looked at the code, as he is now promoting.
- causalmodels 9mo ago
  Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it. Honestly I don't get the hostility. Yegge is running an experiment. I don't think it will work, but it will be interesting and informative to watch.
  - anonymous908213 9mo ago
    The 'experiment' isn't the issue. The problem is the entire culture around it. LLM tools are being shoved into everything, LLMs are soaking up trillions in investment, engineers are being told over and over that everything has changed and this garbage is making us obsolete, software quality is decreasing where wide LLM usage is being mandated (eg. Microsoft). Gas Town does not give the vibe of a neutral experiment but rather looks be a full-on delve into AI psychosis with the way Yegge describes it. To be clear, I think LLMs are useful technology. But the degree of increasing insanity surrounding it is putting people off for obvious reasons.
    - causalmodels 9mo ago
      I share the frustration with the hype machine. I just don't think a guy with a blog is an appropriate target for our frustration with corporate hype culture.
  - WesolyKubeczek 9mo ago
    > Ok but this entire idea is very new. Its not an honest criticism to say no one has tried the new idea when they are actively doing it. Not really new. Back in the day companies used to outsource their stuff to the lowest bidder agencies in proverbial Elbonia, never looked at the code, and then panickedly hired another agency when the things visibly were not what was ordered. Case studies are abound on TheDailyWTF for the last two decades. Doing the same with agents will give you the same disastrous results for comparably the same money, just faster. Oh and you can't sue them, really. Maybe it's better, who knows.
    - causalmodels 9mo ago
      Fair point on the Elbonia comparison. But we can't sue the SQLite maintainers either, and yet we trust them with basically everything. The reason is that open source developed its own trust mechanisms over decades. We don't have anything close to that with LLMs today. What those mechanisms might look like is an open question that is getting more important as AI generated code becomes more common.
      - WesolyKubeczek 9mo ago
        > But we can't sue the SQLite maintainers either, and yet we trust them with basically everything. But you don’t pay them any money and don’t enter into contractual relationship with them either. Thus you can’t sue them. Well, you can try, of course, but. You could sue an Elbonian company, though, for contract breach. LLMs are like usual Elbonian quality with two middlemen but quicker, and you only have yourself to blame when they inevitably produce a disaster.
  - direwolf20 9mo ago
    The experiment is fine if you treat it as an experiment. The problem is the state of the industry where it's treated as serious rather than silly — possibly even by Steve himself.
swiftcoder 9mo ago
> saying that Yegge hasn't built real software is just not true I mean... I feel like it's somewhat telling that his wikipedia page spends half its words on his abrasive communication style, and the only thing approximating a product mentioned is a (lost) Rails-on-Javascript port, and 25 years spent developing a MUD on the side. Certainly one doesn't get to stay a staff-level engineer at Google without writing code - but in terms of real, shipping software, Yegge's resume is a bit light for his tenure in BigTech

asadm 9mo ago

no that's not true. I rarely now write a SINGLE line of code both at work or at home. Even simple config switches, I ask codex/gemini to do it. You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do.

mahogany 9mo ago
> You always have to review overall diff though and go back to agent with broader corrections to do. This thread is about vibe coding _without_ looking at the code.

azan_ 9mo ago

> The secret is that it doesn't work. I have 100% vibecoded software that I now use instead of commercial implementation that cost me almost 200 usd a month (tool for radiology dictation and report generation).

radlad 9mo ago
My partner is a radiologist and I'd love to hear more about what you built. The engineer in me is also curious how much this cost in credits?
- kaydub 9mo ago
  It CAN be cheap. I built a clinical pharmacist "pocket calculator" kinda app for a specific function. It was like $.60 in claude credits I think. Built with flutter + dart. It's a simple tool suite and I've only built out one of the tools so far. Now to be fair, that $.60 session was just the coding. I did some brainstorming in chatgpt and generated good markdown files (claude.md, gemini.md, agents.md) before I started.
anonymous908213 9mo ago
And yet I notice you haven't mentioned publishing it and undercutting the market. You could make a lot of money out-competing the existing option if what you produced was production-grade software. I'm guessing the actual case is that you only needed a small subset of the functionality of the paid software, and the LLM stitched together a rough unpolished proof-of-concept that handled your exact specific use case. Which is still great for you! But it's not the future of coding. The world still needs real engineers to make real software that is suitable for the needs of many, and this doesn't replace that.
- jcims 9mo ago
  >The world still needs real engineers to make real software that is suitable for the needs of many, and this doesn't replace that. I think azan_ is demonstrating that shipping products 'suitable for the needs of many' is going to have to compete with 'slopping software for the needs of one'.

ryandrake 9mo ago

Just because they're one-off tools that only one person uses doesn't mean it's not "real software". I'm actually pretty excited about the fact that it's now feasible for me to replace all my BloatedShittyCommercialApps that I only use 5% of with vibe-coded bespoke tools that only do the important 5%, just for me to use. If that makes it a "sand castle" to you, fine, but this is real software and I'm seeing real benefit here.

enraged_camel 9mo ago
The whole "real software" thing is a type of elitism that has existed in our field for a long time, and AI is the new battleground on which it is wielded.
nicoburns 9mo ago
> I'm actually pretty excited about the fact that it's now feasible for me to replace all my BloatedShittyCommercialApps that I only use 5% of with vibe-coded bespoke tools that only do the important 5%, just for me to use. Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different? Vibe coded software seems to have a similar problem to "Undefined Behaviour", in that just because it works sometimes doesn't mean that it will always work. And there's no limit on what it might do when it doesn't work (the proverbial "nasal demons") - it might well wipe your entire harddrive, not just corrupt it's own data. You can of course mitigate this by manually reviewing the software, but then you lose at least some of the productivity benefit.
- ryandrake 9mo ago
  > Aren't you worried that they'll work fine for 3 weeks then delete all your data when you hold them slightly different? It might. It probably won't though. I don't see any code in it that deletes files. And, unlike BloatedShittyCommercialApp (and its cousin, BloatedDoEverythingOpenSourceApp), the code is going to be relatively small and if I do have doubts I can easily check to see what it's doing. I can build it quickly. I can patch it quickly. I don't have to file a bug to someone and beg him to look at it. I don't have to worry that the next release is going to break stuff I want and add stuff I don't want. I recently moved my home theater PC from Kodi to a tiny bespoke vibed video player app, that basically just wraps libVLC with a minimal Android GUI. It's like 3000 lines of code total. I can practically keep the entire app in my head. If I need to fix something, it's 5 minutes in my dev terminal and then adb install. Ever tried to find and fix a bug in Kodi? The goddamn thing takes forever to even build, let alone debug. And that's even open source. I don't even have a remote chance of getting a bug fixed in professionally-built proprietary software.

_zoltan_ 9mo ago

Of course it works. I haven't looked at code for my internal development in months. I don't know why people keep repeating this but it's wrong. It works.