5 ms·

I always find these kinds of posts interesting, to compare the velocity that people seem to get with Ai, vs what I get by just coding by hand Coincidentally I'

by 20k 5mo ago

I always find these kinds of posts interesting, to compare the velocity that people seem to get with Ai, vs what I get by just coding by hand Coincidentally I've been working on a project for about 7 months now: its a 3d MMO. Currently its playable, and people are having fun with it - it has decent (but needs work) graphics, and you can cram a few hundred people into the server easily currently. The architecture is pretty nice, and its easy to extend and add features onto. Overall, I'm very happy with the progress, and its on track to launch after probably a years worth of development In 7 months vibe coding, OP failed to produce a basic TUI. Maybe the feature velocity feels high, but this seems unbelievably slow for building a basic piece of UI like this - this is the kind of thing you could knock out in a few weeks by hand. There are tonnes of TUI libraries that are high quality at this point, and all you need to do is populate some tables with whatever data you're looking for. Its surprising that its taking so long There seems to be a strong bias where using AI feels like you're making a lot of progress very quickly, but compared to manual coding it often seems to be significantly slower in practice. This seems to be backed up by the available productivity data, where AI users feel faster but produce less

thot_experiment 5mo ago
It's more complex than that, I think the reality is that there's a lot of code that's just not that deep bro. I have some purely personal projects that have components that I don't understand anymore, I wrote that shit by hand, they still work but I haven't touched that shit in years. There's a lot of code that AI can write that's like that that helps me, the stuff I would forget about even if I wrote it by hand. I think you have to have discipline in it's use, it's a tool like any other. AI, and especially agentic AI can make you lose situational awareness over a codebase and when you're doing deep work that SUUUUCKS, but it's not useless, you just have to play to it's strengths. Though my favorite hill to die on is telling people not to underestimate it's value as autocomplete. Turns out 40 gigabytes of autocomplete makes for a fucking amazing autocomplete. Try it with llama.vim + qwen coder 30b, it feels like the editor is reading your mind sometimes and the latency is so low.
ZaoLahma 5mo ago
> There seems to be a strong bias where using AI feels like you're making a lot of progress very quickly, but compared to manual coding it often seems to be significantly slower in practice. This metric highly depends on who uses the AI to do what, where strong emphasis is on "who" and "what". In my line of work (software developer) the biggest time sinks are meetings where people need to align proposed solutions with the expectations of stakeholders. From that aspect AI won't help much, or at all, so measuring the difference of man hours spent from solution proposal to when it ends up in the test loops with and without AI would yield... very disappointing results. But for troubleshooting and fixing bugs, or actually implementing solutions once they have been approved? For me, I'm at least 10x'ing myself compared to before I was using AI. Not only in pure time, but also in my ability to reason around observed behaviors and investigating what those observations mean when troubleshooting. But I also work with people who simply cannot make the AI produce valuable (correct) results. I think if you know exactly what you want and how you want it, AI is a great help. You just tell it to do what you would have done anyway, and it does it quicker than you could. But if you don't know exactly what you want, AI will be outright harmful to your progress.
- zzzeek 5mo ago
  the venn diagram of people who say "AI produces useless results I have to 100% throw away" and people who say "I've never successfully delegated parts of large software development to junior programmers" is a circle
  - 20k 5mo ago
    Junior programmers learn and provide a wide value, AI does not
    - zzzeek 5mo ago
      I get a lot more done with lot less frustration giving my work to Claude than to a junior dev quite frankly and I've managed many groups over my career. the value of the junior dev is the hopes that they'd be a senior dev someday, I dont have a solution to that problem. But in my current capacity where the only devs I'm "managing" these days are via open source contributions, they're already gone - 100% of what I get is through their own work with LLMs (which I have to spend more time correcting than if I used the LLM myself).
21asdffdsa12 5mo ago
Seems to be baked into the GPT- produce text- aka to produce language and code is life and purpose. So the whole system is inherently internally biased towards "roll your own everything?" unless spoke too in a "Senior-dev" language, that prevents these repetitions.
chromadon 5mo ago
This struck me as odd too. 7 months? It wouldn’t take that long to write it in a new language. Another thing I don’t see mentioned is code quality. Vibe-coded code bases are an excellent example of why LLMs aren’t very good at writing code. It will often correct its own mistakes only to make them again immediately after and Inconsistent pattern use. Recently Claude has been making some “interesting” code style choices, not inline with the code base it’s currently supposed to be working on.
echelon 5mo ago
This was made in two days of vibe coding. It has flaws, but it's impressive as hell: https://tinyskies.vercel.app/ https://tinyskies.vercel.app/ It's got a fun Zelda-inspired mechanic (I won't say which one), and you'll have to unlock abilities and parts of the world over several quests and modes to "win". It's also multiplayer.
- scruple 5mo ago
  I guess? Yes. But I played for like 20 seconds and lost interest.
- 20k 5mo ago
  This ran at ~1fps for me
  - IceDane 5mo ago
    Runs smoothly for me in Zen (FF) on Linux.
- unlogic 5mo ago
  Turning didn't work for me. Impressive as hell indeed! The author is probably already busy 100xing other projects, no time to fix such a minor nuisance.
- fancythat 5mo ago
  Unless there is a way to see or check the whole prompt that made this game, it is hard for me personally to say if this is impressive or not as I don't know what percentage of this was vibe coded. I also see there is an incentive to skew the truth here, as there is a substantial prize pool and that usually makes people become very creative. In the past, I was trying to reproduce vibe coding results when I managed to get all the information from Youtube videos (model version, ide version, same input data and prompt) and never was I able to reproduce something impressive even after multiple runs of the same thing.
  - echelon 5mo ago
fancythat 5mo ago
You nailed it, I came to the same conclusion recently. When people show me what have they done with LLM, I am left unimpressed as mostly they show things that can be done manually in a very short time. I also failed to observe the rise in availability of impressive software, which coincides with the fact that LLMs are currently being used to solve simple problems, instead of important ones.
- seanw444 5mo ago
  > LLMs are currently being used to solve simple problems, instead of important ones Which is still cool. I just wish people were more honest about this.
  - fancythat 5mo ago
    Absolutely correct.
manicennui 5mo ago
This is probably because the people who feel like they receive the most benefit from LLMs never actually knew much about or were just incapable of writing good software before they started using LLMs.

by 20k 5mo ago

thot_experiment 5mo ago

It's more complex than that, I think the reality is that there's a lot of code that's just not that deep bro. I have some purely personal projects that have components that I don't understand anymore, I wrote that shit by hand, they still work but I haven't touched that shit in years. There's a lot of code that AI can write that's like that that helps me, the stuff I would forget about even if I wrote it by hand. I think you have to have discipline in it's use, it's a tool like any other. AI, and especially agentic AI can make you lose situational awareness over a codebase and when you're doing deep work that SUUUUCKS, but it's not useless, you just have to play to it's strengths. Though my favorite hill to die on is telling people not to underestimate it's value as autocomplete. Turns out 40 gigabytes of autocomplete makes for a fucking amazing autocomplete. Try it with llama.vim + qwen coder 30b, it feels like the editor is reading your mind sometimes and the latency is so low.

ZaoLahma 5mo ago

> There seems to be a strong bias where using AI feels like you're making a lot of progress very quickly, but compared to manual coding it often seems to be significantly slower in practice. This metric highly depends on who uses the AI to do what, where strong emphasis is on "who" and "what". In my line of work (software developer) the biggest time sinks are meetings where people need to align proposed solutions with the expectations of stakeholders. From that aspect AI won't help much, or at all, so measuring the difference of man hours spent from solution proposal to when it ends up in the test loops with and without AI would yield... very disappointing results. But for troubleshooting and fixing bugs, or actually implementing solutions once they have been approved? For me, I'm at least 10x'ing myself compared to before I was using AI. Not only in pure time, but also in my ability to reason around observed behaviors and investigating what those observations mean when troubleshooting. But I also work with people who simply cannot make the AI produce valuable (correct) results. I think if you know exactly what you want and how you want it, AI is a great help. You just tell it to do what you would have done anyway, and it does it quicker than you could. But if you don't know exactly what you want, AI will be outright harmful to your progress.

zzzeek 5mo ago
the venn diagram of people who say "AI produces useless results I have to 100% throw away" and people who say "I've never successfully delegated parts of large software development to junior programmers" is a circle
- 20k 5mo ago
  Junior programmers learn and provide a wide value, AI does not
  - zzzeek 5mo ago
    I get a lot more done with lot less frustration giving my work to Claude than to a junior dev quite frankly and I've managed many groups over my career. the value of the junior dev is the hopes that they'd be a senior dev someday, I dont have a solution to that problem. But in my current capacity where the only devs I'm "managing" these days are via open source contributions, they're already gone - 100% of what I get is through their own work with LLMs (which I have to spend more time correcting than if I used the LLM myself).

21asdffdsa12 5mo ago

Seems to be baked into the GPT- produce text- aka to produce language and code is life and purpose. So the whole system is inherently internally biased towards "roll your own everything?" unless spoke too in a "Senior-dev" language, that prevents these repetitions.

chromadon 5mo ago

This struck me as odd too. 7 months? It wouldn’t take that long to write it in a new language. Another thing I don’t see mentioned is code quality. Vibe-coded code bases are an excellent example of why LLMs aren’t very good at writing code. It will often correct its own mistakes only to make them again immediately after and Inconsistent pattern use. Recently Claude has been making some “interesting” code style choices, not inline with the code base it’s currently supposed to be working on.

echelon 5mo ago

This was made in two days of vibe coding. It has flaws, but it's impressive as hell: https://tinyskies.vercel.app/ https://tinyskies.vercel.app/ It's got a fun Zelda-inspired mechanic (I won't say which one), and you'll have to unlock abilities and parts of the world over several quests and modes to "win". It's also multiplayer.

scruple 5mo ago
I guess? Yes. But I played for like 20 seconds and lost interest.
20k 5mo ago
This ran at ~1fps for me
- IceDane 5mo ago
  Runs smoothly for me in Zen (FF) on Linux.
unlogic 5mo ago
Turning didn't work for me. Impressive as hell indeed! The author is probably already busy 100xing other projects, no time to fix such a minor nuisance.
fancythat 5mo ago
Unless there is a way to see or check the whole prompt that made this game, it is hard for me personally to say if this is impressive or not as I don't know what percentage of this was vibe coded. I also see there is an incentive to skew the truth here, as there is a substantial prize pool and that usually makes people become very creative. In the past, I was trying to reproduce vibe coding results when I managed to get all the information from Youtube videos (model version, ide version, same input data and prompt) and never was I able to reproduce something impressive even after multiple runs of the same thing.
- echelon 5mo ago

fancythat 5mo ago

You nailed it, I came to the same conclusion recently. When people show me what have they done with LLM, I am left unimpressed as mostly they show things that can be done manually in a very short time. I also failed to observe the rise in availability of impressive software, which coincides with the fact that LLMs are currently being used to solve simple problems, instead of important ones.

seanw444 5mo ago
> LLMs are currently being used to solve simple problems, instead of important ones Which is still cool. I just wish people were more honest about this.
- fancythat 5mo ago
  Absolutely correct.

manicennui 5mo ago

This is probably because the people who feel like they receive the most benefit from LLMs never actually knew much about or were just incapable of writing good software before they started using LLMs.