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Vibe coding doesn't mean that it's rebuilt from the spec from scratch each time, nor does it mean nobody looks at the application. It originally meant nobody lo

by IanCal 8mo ago

Vibe coding doesn't mean that it's rebuilt from the spec from scratch each time, nor does it mean nobody looks at the application. It originally meant nobody looked at the code at all, although that's much more diluted I feel now - things are called vibe coding that sit on a larger spectrum. My point was that "didn't look at the code, looked at the app and gave feature requests and tried the results" is a way of building applications that essentially anyone who doesn't code has been doing all along.

sarchertech 8mo ago
>rebuilt from scratch I have actually encountered multiple people proposing that. People in the camp of LLMs are the new high level compiler and code is assembly language. That’s what prompted this entire are compilers deterministic article. But ignoring whether it’s regenerated from scratch, when you ask an agent to add minor functionality, it will regularly change existing unrelated functionality. Some of that is accidental, and could theoretically be solved. For example agents when refactoring won’t copy and paste existing code, they will rewrite it from scratch and frequently change it. Some of it is a required because systems are intertwined. If the application is small enough you can get away with just trying the results to build confidence. However for any non-trivial application combinatorics explosion means that this stops working very quickly. This has been understood for decades. > My point was that "didn't look at the code, looked at the app and gave feature requests and tried the results" is a way of building applications that essentially anyone who doesn't code has been doing all along. That is not building applications. That is delegating building applications to a trusted team of humans. If that trusted team of humans are essentially junior programmers with no agency or ability to learn and improve, your app will fail. Imagine being a product manager with a team of 100 off shore junior developers that rotate out every day. You could 100% build something useful with that setup. But anything more complex than a todo app would eventually collapse under the chaos.

by IanCal 8mo ago

sarchertech 8mo ago

>rebuilt from scratch I have actually encountered multiple people proposing that. People in the camp of LLMs are the new high level compiler and code is assembly language. That’s what prompted this entire are compilers deterministic article. But ignoring whether it’s regenerated from scratch, when you ask an agent to add minor functionality, it will regularly change existing unrelated functionality. Some of that is accidental, and could theoretically be solved. For example agents when refactoring won’t copy and paste existing code, they will rewrite it from scratch and frequently change it. Some of it is a required because systems are intertwined. If the application is small enough you can get away with just trying the results to build confidence. However for any non-trivial application combinatorics explosion means that this stops working very quickly. This has been understood for decades. > My point was that "didn't look at the code, looked at the app and gave feature requests and tried the results" is a way of building applications that essentially anyone who doesn't code has been doing all along. That is not building applications. That is delegating building applications to a trusted team of humans. If that trusted team of humans are essentially junior programmers with no agency or ability to learn and improve, your app will fail. Imagine being a product manager with a team of 100 off shore junior developers that rotate out every day. You could 100% build something useful with that setup. But anything more complex than a todo app would eventually collapse under the chaos.