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It's a very accurate and relatable post. I think one corollary that's important to note to the anti-AI crowd is that this project, even if somewhat spaghettifie

It's a very accurate and relatable post. I think one corollary that's important to note to the anti-AI crowd is that this project, even if somewhat spaghettified, will likely take orders of magnitude less time to perfect than it would for someone to create the whole thing from scratch without AI. I often see criticism towards projects that are AI-driven that assumes that codebase is crystalized in time, when in fact humans can keep iterating with AI on it until it is better. We don't expect an AI-less project to be perfect in 0.1.0, so why expect that from AI? I know the answer is that the marketing and Twitter/LinkedIn slop makes those claims, but it's more useful to see past the hype and investigate how to use these tools which are invariably here to stay

kaoD 7mo ago
> this project, even if somewhat spaghettified, will likely take orders of magnitude less time to perfect than it would for someone to create the whole thing from scratch without AI That's a big leap of faith and... kinda contradicts the article as I understood it. My experience is entirely opposite (and matches my understanding of the article): vibing from the start makes you take orders of magnitude more time to perfect. AI is a multiplier as an assistant, but a divisor as an engineer.
- airstrike 7mo ago
  vibing is different from... steering AI as it goes so it doesn't make fundamentally bad decisions
  - 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
    Both of these are not really the right way to use AI to code with. There are two basic ways to code with AI that work: 1. Autocomplete. Pretty simple; you only accept auto-completes you actually want, as you manually write code. 2. Software engineering design and implementation workflow. The AI makes a plan, with tasks. It commits those plans to files. It starts sub-agents to tackle the tasks. The subagents create tests to validate the code, then writes code to pass the tests. The subagents finish their tasks, and the AI agent does a review of the work to see if it's accurate. Multiple passes find more bugs and fix them in a loop, until there is nothing left to fix. I'm amazed that nobody thinks the latter is a real thing that works, when Claude fucking Code has been produced this way for like 6 months. There's tens of thousands of people using this completely vibe-coded software. It's not a hoax.
    - airstrike 7mo ago
      #2 does not negate my steering suggestion, so I'm not sure how you can conclude nobody thinks it's a real thing that works also Claude Code is notoriously poorly built, so I wouldn't tout it as SOTA
      - 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
        I have worked at companies from startups to fortune 500. They all have garbage code. Who cares? It works anyway. The world is held together with duct tape, and it's unreasonably effective. I don't believe "code quality" can be measured by how it looks. The only meaningful measure of its quality is whether it runs and solves a user's problem. Get the best programmer in the world. Have them write the most perfect source code in the world. In 10 years, it has to be completely rewritten. Why? The designer chose some advanced design that is conceptually superior, but did not survive the normal and constant churn of advancing technology. Compare that to some junior sysadmin writing a solution in Perl 5.x. It works 30 years later. Everyone would say the Perl solution was of inferior quality, yet it provides 3x more value.
        airstrike 7mo ago
        I hear you about "it just works" mattering infinitely more than some arbitrary code quality metric but I'm not judging Claude Code by how it looks. I kinda like the aesthetics. I'm talking about how slow, resource hungry and finnicky/flickery it is. it's objectively sloppy
    - zozbot234 7mo ago
      > when Claude fucking Code has been produced this way for like 6 months And people can look at the results (illegally) because that whole bunch of code has been leaked. Let's just say it's not looking good. These are the folks who actually made and trained Claude to begin with, they know the model more than anyone else, and the code is still absolute garbage tier by sensible human-written code quality standards.
      - 7mo ago

kaoD 7mo ago

> this project, even if somewhat spaghettified, will likely take orders of magnitude less time to perfect than it would for someone to create the whole thing from scratch without AI That's a big leap of faith and... kinda contradicts the article as I understood it. My experience is entirely opposite (and matches my understanding of the article): vibing from the start makes you take orders of magnitude more time to perfect. AI is a multiplier as an assistant, but a divisor as an engineer.

airstrike 7mo ago
vibing is different from... steering AI as it goes so it doesn't make fundamentally bad decisions
- 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
  Both of these are not really the right way to use AI to code with. There are two basic ways to code with AI that work: 1. Autocomplete. Pretty simple; you only accept auto-completes you actually want, as you manually write code. 2. Software engineering design and implementation workflow. The AI makes a plan, with tasks. It commits those plans to files. It starts sub-agents to tackle the tasks. The subagents create tests to validate the code, then writes code to pass the tests. The subagents finish their tasks, and the AI agent does a review of the work to see if it's accurate. Multiple passes find more bugs and fix them in a loop, until there is nothing left to fix. I'm amazed that nobody thinks the latter is a real thing that works, when Claude fucking Code has been produced this way for like 6 months. There's tens of thousands of people using this completely vibe-coded software. It's not a hoax.
  - airstrike 7mo ago
    #2 does not negate my steering suggestion, so I'm not sure how you can conclude nobody thinks it's a real thing that works also Claude Code is notoriously poorly built, so I wouldn't tout it as SOTA
    - 0xbadcafebee 7mo ago
      I have worked at companies from startups to fortune 500. They all have garbage code. Who cares? It works anyway. The world is held together with duct tape, and it's unreasonably effective. I don't believe "code quality" can be measured by how it looks. The only meaningful measure of its quality is whether it runs and solves a user's problem. Get the best programmer in the world. Have them write the most perfect source code in the world. In 10 years, it has to be completely rewritten. Why? The designer chose some advanced design that is conceptually superior, but did not survive the normal and constant churn of advancing technology. Compare that to some junior sysadmin writing a solution in Perl 5.x. It works 30 years later. Everyone would say the Perl solution was of inferior quality, yet it provides 3x more value.
      - airstrike 7mo ago
        I hear you about "it just works" mattering infinitely more than some arbitrary code quality metric but I'm not judging Claude Code by how it looks. I kinda like the aesthetics. I'm talking about how slow, resource hungry and finnicky/flickery it is. it's objectively sloppy
  - zozbot234 7mo ago
    > when Claude fucking Code has been produced this way for like 6 months And people can look at the results (illegally) because that whole bunch of code has been leaked. Let's just say it's not looking good. These are the folks who actually made and trained Claude to begin with, they know the model more than anyone else, and the code is still absolute garbage tier by sensible human-written code quality standards.
    - 7mo ago