3 ms·

Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite

by Havoc 5mo ago

LatencyKills 5mo ago
I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look. He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly. It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operate on that data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute. These are the type of issues that worry me about vibe coding.
- sokoloff 5mo ago
  What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request. Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itches, while everything is fresh in his mind and he can clarify or learn “hmm, that’s not actually what I want” and the cost is some tokens and the occasional job that runs in 3 hours instead of not existing at all.
  - LatencyKills 5mo ago
    He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long. I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer. He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.
    - noisy_boy 5mo ago
      > my friend thought he just needed a faster computer. Another contributing factor to rising consumer electronics prices due to vibed up coding is just what we needed.
    - Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
      Finding out that one's boss cannot estimate work time is a blessing if an engineer is wise enough to use that. "Yes boss, this task will take me all of June to do" (finish it in two days, enjoy a relaxing June)
    - Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
      > Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet. Don't worry, I'm sure IT would never give this manager priveleged access to systems permissions.
- WithinReason 5mo ago
  > It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute. You could have done it with Claude in 1 minute :) It probably never occurred to the VP to ask Claude for performance optimizations
- esikich 5mo ago
  People have done this long before vibe coding was a thing. I've seen this everywhere. Not every business employs devs or can afford to. So people hack things together with powershell or python. It has always been this way.
Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
Dude I will just include a skills.md for optimisation, and include a line in my prompt saying "also make the code really well optimized". Problem Solved sunglasses emoji
ReptileMan 5mo ago
LLMs are quite good at optimization. Here is a simple prompt - rewrite this crap from electron to rust + whatever time tested ui framework. And now we have 80% less ram usage.
- Havoc 5mo ago
  To be fair electron to rust would probably work even with LLM ram overhead

Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite

by Havoc 5mo ago

Amused by all the comments about optimisation. If anything the vibe coding era will lead to the opposite

I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look. He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly. It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operate on that data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute. These are the type of issues that worry me about vibe coding.

sokoloff 5mo ago
What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request. Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itches, while everything is fresh in his mind and he can clarify or learn “hmm, that’s not actually what I want” and the cost is some tokens and the occasional job that runs in 3 hours instead of not existing at all.
- LatencyKills 5mo ago
  He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long. I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer. He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.
  - noisy_boy 5mo ago
    > my friend thought he just needed a faster computer. Another contributing factor to rising consumer electronics prices due to vibed up coding is just what we needed.
  - Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
    Finding out that one's boss cannot estimate work time is a blessing if an engineer is wise enough to use that. "Yes boss, this task will take me all of June to do" (finish it in two days, enjoy a relaxing June)
  - Schlagbohrer 5mo ago
    > Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet. Don't worry, I'm sure IT would never give this manager priveleged access to systems permissions.
WithinReason 5mo ago
> It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute. You could have done it with Claude in 1 minute :) It probably never occurred to the VP to ask Claude for performance optimizations
esikich 5mo ago
People have done this long before vibe coding was a thing. I've seen this everywhere. Not every business employs devs or can afford to. So people hack things together with powershell or python. It has always been this way.

Schlagbohrer 5mo ago

Dude I will just include a skills.md for optimisation, and include a line in my prompt saying "also make the code really well optimized". Problem Solved sunglasses emoji

ReptileMan 5mo ago

LLMs are quite good at optimization. Here is a simple prompt - rewrite this crap from electron to rust + whatever time tested ui framework. And now we have 80% less ram usage.

Havoc 5mo ago
To be fair electron to rust would probably work even with LLM ram overhead