8 ms·

> it completely transformed my workflow, whether it’s personal or commercial projects > This has truly freed up my productivity, letting me pursue so many idea

by gyomu 8mo ago

> it completely transformed my workflow, whether it’s personal or commercial projects > This has truly freed up my productivity, letting me pursue so many ideas I couldn’t move forward on before If you're writing in a blog post that AI has changed your life and let you build so many amazing projects, you should link to the projects. Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI.

Maxion 8mo ago
A lot of more senior coders when they actively try vibe coding a greenfield project find that it does actually work. But only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally, will add unnecessary convoluted logic to the code, will leave benhind dead code, add random traces "for backwards compatibility", will avoid doing the correct thing as "it is too big of a refactor", doesn't understand that the dev database is not the prod database and avoids migrations. And so forth. I've got 10+ years of coding experience, I am an AI advocate, but not vibe coding. AI is a great tool to help with the boring bits, using it to initialize files, help figure out various approaches, as a first pass code reviewer, helping with configuring, those things all work well. But full-on replacing coders? It's not there yet. Will require an order of magnitude more improvement.
- alpineman 8mo ago
  You’re right, but on the other hand once you have a basic understanding security, architecture, etc you can prompt around these issues. You need a couple of years of experience but that’s far less then the 10-15 years of experience you needed in the past. If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching and understanding what it’s doing and learning from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly.
  - Nextgrid 8mo ago
    I find that security, architecture, etc is exactly the kind of skill that takes 10-15 years to hone. Every boot camp, training provider, educational foundation, etc has an incentive to find a shortcut and we're yet to see one. A "basic" understanding in critical domains is extremely dangerous and an LLM will often give you a false sense of security that things are going fine while overlooking potential massive security issues.
    - nneonneo 8mo ago
      Somewhere on an HN thread I saw someone claiming that they "solved" security problems in their vibe-coded app by adding a "security expert" agent to their workflow. All I could think was, "good luck" and I certainly hope their app never processes anything important...
      - nxobject 8mo ago
        Found a problem? Slap another agent on top to fix it. It’s hilarious to see how the pendulum’s swung away from “thinking from first principles as a buzzword”. Just engineer, dammit…
    - meetingthrower 8mo ago
      But if you are not saving "privileged" information who cares? I mean think of all the WordPress sites out there. Surely vibecoding is not SO much worse than some plugin monstrosity.... At the end of the day if you are not saving user info, or special sauce for your company, it's no issue. And I bet a huge portion of apps fall into this category...
  - spprashant 8mo ago
    > If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching and understanding what it’s doing and learning from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly. I don't feel like most providers keep a model for more than 2 years. GPT-4o got deprecated in 1.5 years. Are we expecting coding models to stay stable for longer time horizons?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
  - dickersnoodle 8mo ago
    This is the funniest thing I've read all week.
- dumbmrblah 8mo ago
  I agree with you in part, but I think the market is going to shift so that you won’t so many need “mega projects”. More and more, projects will be small and bespoke, built around what the team needs or answering a single question rather than forcing teams to work around an established, dominant solution.
  - izacus 8mo ago
    How much are you willing to bet on this outcome and what metrics are you going to measure it with when we come to collect in 3 years?
    - mathisfun123 8mo ago
      This is the way: make every one of these people with their wild ass claims put their money where their mouths are.
      - Dansvidania 8mo ago
        Hold up. This is a funny comment but thinking should be free. It’s when they are trying to sell you something (looking at you “all the AI CEOs”) that unsubstantiated claims are problematic. Then again the problem is that the public has learned nothing from the theranos and WeWorks and even more of a problem is that the vc funding works out for most of these hype trains even if they never develop a real business. The incentives are fucked up. I’d not blame tech enthusiasts for being too enthusiastic
        izacus 8mo ago
        I'm fine with free thinking, but a lot of these are just so repetitive and exausting because there's absolutely no backing from any of those claims or a thread of logic. Might as well talk about how AI will invent sentient lizards which will replace our computers with chocolate cake.
        shimman 8mo ago
        It's not the public, the general public would like to see tech ceo heads on spikes (first politician to jail Zuckerberg will win re-election for the rest of their short lives) but the general attitude in DC is to capitulate because they believe the lies + the election slush fund money doesn't hurt.
- WillPostForFood 8mo ago
  Don't you think it has gotten an order of magnitude better in the last 1-2 years? If it only requires another an order of magnitude improvement to full-on replace coders, how long do you think that will take?
  - frank_nitti 8mo ago
    Who is liable for the runtime behavior of the system, when handling users’ sensitive information? If the person who is liable for the system behavior cannot read/write code (as “all coders have been replaced”), does Anthropic et al become responsible for damages to end users for systems its tools/models build? I assume not. How do you reconcile this? We have tools that help engineers design and build bridges, but I still wouldn’t want to drive on an “autonomously-generated bridge may contain errors. Use at own risk” because all human structural engineering experts have been replaced. After asking this question many times in similar threads, I’ve received no substantial response except that “something” will probably resolve this, maybe AI will figure it out
    - WillPostForFood 8mo ago
      Who is responsible now when human coding errors leak user's sensitive information? I'm not seeing programmers held up as the responsible party. The companies who own the code are vaguely responsible, so it will be the same. The bridge scenario is simply addressed: Licensed Engineer has to approve designs. Permitting review process has to review designs. Not sure it matters who drafted them initially.
      - frank_nitti 8mo ago
        So perhaps this is just semantics - when we say that “coders have been completely replaced”, to me that means all humans capable of reading/writing code are replaced. In the bridge analogy this is the Licensed Engineer who actually understands and can critically evaluate a system design/implementation in depth. If the only point being made by “all coders are replaced” is that humans aren’t manually typing the code from their keyboard anymore, I don’t think there’s much interesting to argue there, typing the code was never the hard part.
- throwaw12 8mo ago
  > only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally I am using them in projects with >100kloc, this is not my experience. at the moment, I am babysitting for any kloc, but I am sure they will get better and better.
  - roywiggins 8mo ago
    It's fine at adding features on a non-vibecoded 100kloc codebase that you somewhat understand. It's when you're vibecoding from scratch that things tend to spin out at a certain point. I am sure there are ways to get around this sort of wall, but I do think it's currently a thing.
    - kaydub 8mo ago
      You just have another agent/session/context refactor as you go. I built a skribbl.io clone to use at work. We like to play eod on Friday as a happy hour and when we would play skribbl.io we would try to get screencaps of the stupid images we were drawing but sometimes we would forget. So I said I'd use claude to build our own skribbl.io that would save the images. I was definitely surprised that claude threaded the needle on the task pretty easily, pretty much single shot. Then I continued adding features until I had near parity. Then I added the replay feature. After all that I looked at the codebase... pretty much a single big file. It worked though, so we played it for the time being. I wanted to fix some bugs and add more features, so I checked out a branch and had an agent refactor first. I'd have a couple context/sessions open and I'd one just review, the other refactored, and sometimes I'd throw a third context/session in there that would just write and run tests. The LLM will build things poorly if you let it, but it's easy to prompt it another way and even if you fail that and back yourself into a corner, it's easy to get the agents to refactor. It's just like writing tests, the llms are great at writing shitty useless tests, but you can be specific with your prompt and in addition use another agent/context/session to review and find shitty tests and tell you why they're shitty or look for missing tests, basically keep doing a review, then feed the review into the agent writing the tests.
  - turnsout 8mo ago
- mettamage 8mo ago
  I wonder if you can up the 10kloc if you have a good static analysis of your tool (I vibecoded one in Python) and good tests. Sometimes good tests aren't possible since there are too many different cases but with other forms of codes you can cover all the cases with like 50 to 100 tests or so
  - andai 8mo ago
    Could you elaborate on the static analysis?
- AlexCoventry 8mo ago
  Where are you getting the 10kloc threshold from? Nice round number... Surely it depends on the design. If you have 10 10kloc modular modules with good abstractions, and then a 10k shell gluing them together, you could build much bigger things, no?
- joquarky 8mo ago
  > But only for the first ~10kloc Then let me introduce you to a useful concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns
  - qingcharles 8mo ago
    This X 100. I've learned with LLM coded apps to break stuff into very small manageable chunks so they can work on the tiny piece and not get screwed by big context. For the most part, this actually produces a cleaner codebase.
helloplanets 8mo ago
Specifics on the setup. Specifics on the projects. SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!
- fullstackchris 8mo ago
  exactly. so much text with so little actionable or notable content... actually 0
DeathArrow 8mo ago
>Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI. Maybe they don't feel like sharing yet another half working Javascript Sudoku Solver or yet another half working AI tool no one will ever use? Probably they feel amazed about what they accomplished but they feel the public won't feel the same.
- ramon156 8mo ago
  Then, in my opinion, there's nothing revolutionary about it (unless you learned something, which... no one does when they use LLMs to code)
  - xcf_seetan 8mo ago
    I am an old school c++ programmer and actually I have learned modern c++ just by using LLMs.
- ImPostingOnHN 8mo ago
  The article made it seem that the tool made them into the manager of a successful company, rather than the author of a half finished pet project
- utopiah 8mo ago
  Qualsiasi scarafaggio a bello per sua mamma (Italian proverb saying that to their mother all their kids are beautiful) That's the whole point of sharing with the rest of us. If they write for themselves, a private journal to track their progress, then there is no need to share what is actually been built. If they do though make grand claims to everybody then it would be more helpful for people who do read the piece to actually be able to see what has been produced. Maybe it's wonderful for the author but it's not the level of quality required for readers.
lostmsu 8mo ago
AI is great, harness don't matter (I just use codex). Use state of the art models. GPT-5.2 fixed my hanging WiFi driver: https://gist.github.com/lostmsu/a0cdd213676223fc7669726b3a24d50a https://gist.github.com/lostmsu/a0cdd213676223fc7669726b3a24...
- consp 8mo ago
  Fixing mediatek drivers is not the flex you think it is.
  - mitkebes 8mo ago
    It is if it's something they couldn't do on their own before. It's a magical moment when someone is able to AI code a solution to a problem that they couldn't fix on their own before. It doesn't matter whether there are other people who could have fixed this without AI tools, what matters is they were able to get it fixed, and they didn't have to just accept it was broken until someone else fixed it.
    - meetingthrower 8mo ago
      Right!? It's like me all the sudden being able to fix my car's engine. I mean, sure, there are mechanics, and it surely isn't rocket science, but I couldn't do it before and now I can!!! A miracle! Cue the folks saying "well you could DIE!!!" Not if I don't fix brakes, etc ...
  - lostmsu 8mo ago
    It was an easy fix for someone who already knows how WiFi drivers work and functions provided to them by Linux kernel. I am not one of these people though. I could have fixed it myself, but it would take a week just to get accustomed to the necessary tools.
  - lostmsu 8mo ago
    The goalposts are moving by so fast they look like atom thick planks to me.
topheroo 8mo ago
To be fair, AI probably wrote the blog post from a short prompt, which would explain the lack of detail.
- andrethegiant 8mo ago
  This is 100% the case.
falloutx 8mo ago
If you look at his github you can see he is in the first week of giving into the vibes. The first week always leads to the person making absurd claims about productivity.
gnachman 8mo ago
Here’s mine https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snortfolio/id6755617457 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snortfolio/id6755617457 30kloc client and server combined. I built this as an experiment in building an app without reading any of the code. Even ops is done by claude code. It has some minor bugs but I’ve been using it for months and it gets the job done. It would not have existed at all if I had to write it by hand.
almostlikelying 8mo ago
Grifters gotta grift. There is so much money on the line and everyone is trying to be an influencer/“thought leader” in the area. Nobody is actually using AI for anything useful or THEY WOULDNT BE TALKING ABOUT IT. They’d be disrupting everything and making billions of dollars. Instead this whole AI grift reads like “how to be a millionaire in 10 days” grifts by people that aren’t, in fact, millionaires.

by gyomu 8mo ago

Maxion 8mo ago

A lot of more senior coders when they actively try vibe coding a greenfield project find that it does actually work. But only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally, will add unnecessary convoluted logic to the code, will leave benhind dead code, add random traces "for backwards compatibility", will avoid doing the correct thing as "it is too big of a refactor", doesn't understand that the dev database is not the prod database and avoids migrations. And so forth. I've got 10+ years of coding experience, I am an AI advocate, but not vibe coding. AI is a great tool to help with the boring bits, using it to initialize files, help figure out various approaches, as a first pass code reviewer, helping with configuring, those things all work well. But full-on replacing coders? It's not there yet. Will require an order of magnitude more improvement.

alpineman 8mo ago
You’re right, but on the other hand once you have a basic understanding security, architecture, etc you can prompt around these issues. You need a couple of years of experience but that’s far less then the 10-15 years of experience you needed in the past. If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching and understanding what it’s doing and learning from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly.
- Nextgrid 8mo ago
  I find that security, architecture, etc is exactly the kind of skill that takes 10-15 years to hone. Every boot camp, training provider, educational foundation, etc has an incentive to find a shortcut and we're yet to see one. A "basic" understanding in critical domains is extremely dangerous and an LLM will often give you a false sense of security that things are going fine while overlooking potential massive security issues.
  - nneonneo 8mo ago
    Somewhere on an HN thread I saw someone claiming that they "solved" security problems in their vibe-coded app by adding a "security expert" agent to their workflow. All I could think was, "good luck" and I certainly hope their app never processes anything important...
    - nxobject 8mo ago
      Found a problem? Slap another agent on top to fix it. It’s hilarious to see how the pendulum’s swung away from “thinking from first principles as a buzzword”. Just engineer, dammit…
  - meetingthrower 8mo ago
    But if you are not saving "privileged" information who cares? I mean think of all the WordPress sites out there. Surely vibecoding is not SO much worse than some plugin monstrosity.... At the end of the day if you are not saving user info, or special sauce for your company, it's no issue. And I bet a huge portion of apps fall into this category...
- spprashant 8mo ago
  > If you spend a couple of years with an LLM really watching and understanding what it’s doing and learning from mistakes, then you can get up the ladder very quickly. I don't feel like most providers keep a model for more than 2 years. GPT-4o got deprecated in 1.5 years. Are we expecting coding models to stay stable for longer time horizons?
- deleted 8mo ago
  [deleted]
- dickersnoodle 8mo ago
  This is the funniest thing I've read all week.
dumbmrblah 8mo ago
I agree with you in part, but I think the market is going to shift so that you won’t so many need “mega projects”. More and more, projects will be small and bespoke, built around what the team needs or answering a single question rather than forcing teams to work around an established, dominant solution.
- izacus 8mo ago
  How much are you willing to bet on this outcome and what metrics are you going to measure it with when we come to collect in 3 years?
  - mathisfun123 8mo ago
    This is the way: make every one of these people with their wild ass claims put their money where their mouths are.
    - Dansvidania 8mo ago
      Hold up. This is a funny comment but thinking should be free. It’s when they are trying to sell you something (looking at you “all the AI CEOs”) that unsubstantiated claims are problematic. Then again the problem is that the public has learned nothing from the theranos and WeWorks and even more of a problem is that the vc funding works out for most of these hype trains even if they never develop a real business. The incentives are fucked up. I’d not blame tech enthusiasts for being too enthusiastic
      - izacus 8mo ago
        I'm fine with free thinking, but a lot of these are just so repetitive and exausting because there's absolutely no backing from any of those claims or a thread of logic. Might as well talk about how AI will invent sentient lizards which will replace our computers with chocolate cake.
      - shimman 8mo ago
        It's not the public, the general public would like to see tech ceo heads on spikes (first politician to jail Zuckerberg will win re-election for the rest of their short lives) but the general attitude in DC is to capitulate because they believe the lies + the election slush fund money doesn't hurt.
WillPostForFood 8mo ago
Don't you think it has gotten an order of magnitude better in the last 1-2 years? If it only requires another an order of magnitude improvement to full-on replace coders, how long do you think that will take?
- frank_nitti 8mo ago
  Who is liable for the runtime behavior of the system, when handling users’ sensitive information? If the person who is liable for the system behavior cannot read/write code (as “all coders have been replaced”), does Anthropic et al become responsible for damages to end users for systems its tools/models build? I assume not. How do you reconcile this? We have tools that help engineers design and build bridges, but I still wouldn’t want to drive on an “autonomously-generated bridge may contain errors. Use at own risk” because all human structural engineering experts have been replaced. After asking this question many times in similar threads, I’ve received no substantial response except that “something” will probably resolve this, maybe AI will figure it out
  - WillPostForFood 8mo ago
    Who is responsible now when human coding errors leak user's sensitive information? I'm not seeing programmers held up as the responsible party. The companies who own the code are vaguely responsible, so it will be the same. The bridge scenario is simply addressed: Licensed Engineer has to approve designs. Permitting review process has to review designs. Not sure it matters who drafted them initially.
    - frank_nitti 8mo ago
      So perhaps this is just semantics - when we say that “coders have been completely replaced”, to me that means all humans capable of reading/writing code are replaced. In the bridge analogy this is the Licensed Engineer who actually understands and can critically evaluate a system design/implementation in depth. If the only point being made by “all coders are replaced” is that humans aren’t manually typing the code from their keyboard anymore, I don’t think there’s much interesting to argue there, typing the code was never the hard part.
throwaw12 8mo ago
> only for the first ~10kloc. After that the AI, no matter how well you try to prompt it, will start to destroy existing features accidentally I am using them in projects with >100kloc, this is not my experience. at the moment, I am babysitting for any kloc, but I am sure they will get better and better.
- roywiggins 8mo ago
  It's fine at adding features on a non-vibecoded 100kloc codebase that you somewhat understand. It's when you're vibecoding from scratch that things tend to spin out at a certain point. I am sure there are ways to get around this sort of wall, but I do think it's currently a thing.
  - kaydub 8mo ago
    You just have another agent/session/context refactor as you go. I built a skribbl.io clone to use at work. We like to play eod on Friday as a happy hour and when we would play skribbl.io we would try to get screencaps of the stupid images we were drawing but sometimes we would forget. So I said I'd use claude to build our own skribbl.io that would save the images. I was definitely surprised that claude threaded the needle on the task pretty easily, pretty much single shot. Then I continued adding features until I had near parity. Then I added the replay feature. After all that I looked at the codebase... pretty much a single big file. It worked though, so we played it for the time being. I wanted to fix some bugs and add more features, so I checked out a branch and had an agent refactor first. I'd have a couple context/sessions open and I'd one just review, the other refactored, and sometimes I'd throw a third context/session in there that would just write and run tests. The LLM will build things poorly if you let it, but it's easy to prompt it another way and even if you fail that and back yourself into a corner, it's easy to get the agents to refactor. It's just like writing tests, the llms are great at writing shitty useless tests, but you can be specific with your prompt and in addition use another agent/context/session to review and find shitty tests and tell you why they're shitty or look for missing tests, basically keep doing a review, then feed the review into the agent writing the tests.
- turnsout 8mo ago
mettamage 8mo ago
I wonder if you can up the 10kloc if you have a good static analysis of your tool (I vibecoded one in Python) and good tests. Sometimes good tests aren't possible since there are too many different cases but with other forms of codes you can cover all the cases with like 50 to 100 tests or so
- andai 8mo ago
  Could you elaborate on the static analysis?
AlexCoventry 8mo ago
Where are you getting the 10kloc threshold from? Nice round number... Surely it depends on the design. If you have 10 10kloc modular modules with good abstractions, and then a 10k shell gluing them together, you could build much bigger things, no?
joquarky 8mo ago
> But only for the first ~10kloc Then let me introduce you to a useful concept: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_concerns
- qingcharles 8mo ago
  This X 100. I've learned with LLM coded apps to break stuff into very small manageable chunks so they can work on the tiny piece and not get screwed by big context. For the most part, this actually produces a cleaner codebase.

helloplanets 8mo ago

Specifics on the setup. Specifics on the projects. SHOW ME THE MONEY!!!

fullstackchris 8mo ago
exactly. so much text with so little actionable or notable content... actually 0

DeathArrow 8mo ago

>Somehow 90% of these posts don't actually link to the amazing projects that their author is supposedly building with AI. Maybe they don't feel like sharing yet another half working Javascript Sudoku Solver or yet another half working AI tool no one will ever use? Probably they feel amazed about what they accomplished but they feel the public won't feel the same.

ramon156 8mo ago
Then, in my opinion, there's nothing revolutionary about it (unless you learned something, which... no one does when they use LLMs to code)
- xcf_seetan 8mo ago
  I am an old school c++ programmer and actually I have learned modern c++ just by using LLMs.
ImPostingOnHN 8mo ago
The article made it seem that the tool made them into the manager of a successful company, rather than the author of a half finished pet project
utopiah 8mo ago
Qualsiasi scarafaggio a bello per sua mamma (Italian proverb saying that to their mother all their kids are beautiful) That's the whole point of sharing with the rest of us. If they write for themselves, a private journal to track their progress, then there is no need to share what is actually been built. If they do though make grand claims to everybody then it would be more helpful for people who do read the piece to actually be able to see what has been produced. Maybe it's wonderful for the author but it's not the level of quality required for readers.

lostmsu 8mo ago

AI is great, harness don't matter (I just use codex). Use state of the art models. GPT-5.2 fixed my hanging WiFi driver: https://gist.github.com/lostmsu/a0cdd213676223fc7669726b3a24d50a https://gist.github.com/lostmsu/a0cdd213676223fc7669726b3a24...

consp 8mo ago
Fixing mediatek drivers is not the flex you think it is.
- mitkebes 8mo ago
  It is if it's something they couldn't do on their own before. It's a magical moment when someone is able to AI code a solution to a problem that they couldn't fix on their own before. It doesn't matter whether there are other people who could have fixed this without AI tools, what matters is they were able to get it fixed, and they didn't have to just accept it was broken until someone else fixed it.
  - meetingthrower 8mo ago
    Right!? It's like me all the sudden being able to fix my car's engine. I mean, sure, there are mechanics, and it surely isn't rocket science, but I couldn't do it before and now I can!!! A miracle! Cue the folks saying "well you could DIE!!!" Not if I don't fix brakes, etc ...
- lostmsu 8mo ago
  It was an easy fix for someone who already knows how WiFi drivers work and functions provided to them by Linux kernel. I am not one of these people though. I could have fixed it myself, but it would take a week just to get accustomed to the necessary tools.
- lostmsu 8mo ago
  The goalposts are moving by so fast they look like atom thick planks to me.

topheroo 8mo ago

To be fair, AI probably wrote the blog post from a short prompt, which would explain the lack of detail.

andrethegiant 8mo ago
This is 100% the case.

falloutx 8mo ago

If you look at his github you can see he is in the first week of giving into the vibes. The first week always leads to the person making absurd claims about productivity.

gnachman 8mo ago

Here’s mine https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snortfolio/id6755617457 https://apps.apple.com/us/app/snortfolio/id6755617457 30kloc client and server combined. I built this as an experiment in building an app without reading any of the code. Even ops is done by claude code. It has some minor bugs but I’ve been using it for months and it gets the job done. It would not have existed at all if I had to write it by hand.

almostlikelying 8mo ago

Grifters gotta grift. There is so much money on the line and everyone is trying to be an influencer/“thought leader” in the area. Nobody is actually using AI for anything useful or THEY WOULDNT BE TALKING ABOUT IT. They’d be disrupting everything and making billions of dollars. Instead this whole AI grift reads like “how to be a millionaire in 10 days” grifts by people that aren’t, in fact, millionaires.