6 ms·

As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.

by retired 4mo ago

AussieWog93 4mo ago
I'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts.
aspenmartin 4mo ago
Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.
- ares623 4mo ago
  if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?
  - aspenmartin 4mo ago
    Good thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai https://epoch.ai (like the first box) Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant: 3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50 So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch. One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption.
- zzzeek 4mo ago
  You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.
  - aspenmartin 4mo ago
    Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad? Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?
    - zzzeek 4mo ago
      I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.
- zombot 3mo ago
  Great that you know the future when nobody else can.
  - aspenmartin 3mo ago
    No, I just have a prior that’s informed by real information and evidence and that’s quite strong. - scaling laws exist - downstream perf trends also exist (epoch capability index) - gpt4 to gpt5 leap in capabilities every 16-18 months - actual adoption and retention and engagement numbers are out of this world - RL with verifiable rewards will get you to super human performance even with poor sample efficiency - zero evidence of a plateau I don’t know the future I am just skeptically looking at the data. What data are you looking at?
api 4mo ago
I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.
- jerf 4mo ago
  I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time. By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.
  - marcus_holmes 4mo ago
    My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time) The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it. And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services). And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.
    - jerf 3mo ago
      Yeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process. I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week I set up a new project and the AI chewed through a lot of boring boilerplate and setup and configuration in about 30 minutes that would have taken me at least a tedious week just a year ago. Anyone who is leaving that on the table is going to find it hard to compete. I still had to go over it line-by-line, and make quite a few changes here and there, but it was also way, way faster to do that then to do it all from scratch. My position has been to encourage the skeptics to give it an honest try (no deliberately picking something you pretty much know it can't do, or withholding info from it so it fails) but at the same time, hold on to the skepticism, it helps you use it properly. Excessive trust in the AI is definitely a problem right now.
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
zzzeek 4mo ago
Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work
deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
marcus_holmes 4mo ago
I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life. Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.
joeyguerra 4mo ago
I already get hired to replace/fix code built by humans.

As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.

by retired 4mo ago

As a consultant I am looking forward to being hired by companies to get rid of all the vibe code and to replace it with beautiful maintainable artisanal code.

AussieWog93 4mo ago

I'm waiting for Fable to come back online so that it can do the refactor while I sleep, for peanuts.

aspenmartin 4mo ago

Idk if someone paying attention to how 2025 and 2026 have gone thinks that by 2028 we will be backing off of agenting coding that is wild. Like the other comment says: future models refactor the code of older models.

ares623 4mo ago
if you were paying attention you would've noticed that between 2025 and 2026 the pricing of these things have somewhat changed. How does the extrapolation look with that?
- aspenmartin 4mo ago
  Good thing we have reams of data on this, holding performance constant the cost goes down 10-40x per year: https://epoch.ai https://epoch.ai (like the first box) Also, frontier token prices have remained roughly constant: 3.5 sonnet: $3/$15 3.7 sonnet: $3/$15 Opus 4: $15/$75 (opus tier) opus 4.1: same Opus 4.5: $5/$25 Opus 4.6 (same) 4.7 (same) 4.8 (Same) Fable: $10/$50 So Fable is cheaper than Opus 4 was at launch. One thing that has increased quite significantly? Spending and adoption.
zzzeek 4mo ago
You can use LLMs heavily without ever actually "vibe coding". I do think to the degree "vibe coding" continues to exist there will always be work to do in turning some portion of vibe coded work into more robust production quality code. You can still use LLMs to do this you just have to maintain control over architectural choices.
- aspenmartin 4mo ago
  Yea it’s hard for me to think of what the end state equilibrium is. A pile of vibe coded junk today is bad. You need humans. But we’ve made such a ridiculous amount of progress in such a short amount of time and, most importantly, this shows no sign of slowing down or plateauing. So will we hit a point where “vibe coding” is just all there is? Where human intervention is bad, just as hand tuning assembly is bad? Is there a level of abstraction where human involvement will always be necessary? If so where?
  - zzzeek 4mo ago
    I think it's not going to be a straight line upwards, it's going to get weirder. LLMs are still riffing on what we humans have done. If we stop giving them good examples because we aren't architecting anymore I don't really know what's going to happen. Probably some kind of meta architecture that emerges from lots of agents working in parallel but I worry it might have a strong house of cards theme to it.
zombot 3mo ago
Great that you know the future when nobody else can.
- aspenmartin 3mo ago
  No, I just have a prior that’s informed by real information and evidence and that’s quite strong. - scaling laws exist - downstream perf trends also exist (epoch capability index) - gpt4 to gpt5 leap in capabilities every 16-18 months - actual adoption and retention and engagement numbers are out of this world - RL with verifiable rewards will get you to super human performance even with poor sample efficiency - zero evidence of a plateau I don’t know the future I am just skeptically looking at the data. What data are you looking at?

api 4mo ago

I wonder if people said this about compilers. Some day they’ll replace all that compiler generated junk with hand crafted ASM. This reminds me of that. The spec is the new high level language. Code is ASM. ASM is like CPU microcode.

jerf 4mo ago
I entered the programming world circa 1995. There were indeed still some holdouts. A few of them were even good enough to hold out up to that point and write some code that would have been hard to replicate with the compilers of the time. By the 200xs they were gone. Interestingly, I would say what killed them in the early 2000s wasn't actually compilers, it was the interpreted languages. Others may disagree. Even if they were dog slow by comparison, scripting languages made some things so much easier to program that it didn't matter. And then it prompted static languages to up their game to try to match that. By the time that process played out, people writing only in assembler couldn't keep up anymore.
- marcus_holmes 4mo ago
  My first job in tech was writing desktop applications in VB3 (1994, so around the same time) The company also had an AS400 with a collection of COBOL programmers. They were utterly scathing of the new toy language for doing toy things on PCs. There was no way that VB would ever be a "real" language or that anyone would do anything "real" with it. And yeah, in terms of serious computing, that's probably true. But the industry leapt at the new tools and tooling, and COBOL faded to obscurity (though there are still AS400s out there, and some of the code they wrote is still managing vast swathes of our essential services). And all of that was less of a revolution in the industry than the last 12 months have been.
  - jerf 3mo ago
    Yeah, the process I described was several years. Depending on how you measure this could well be a 15-20 year process overall, but even what I witnessed was at least 5 years, and that was already the tail end of an ongoing process. I'm a little reluctant to go too triumphalist on the "adapt or be left behind" bandwagon, because I think that loses some very important nuances as well... but on the other hand, last week I set up a new project and the AI chewed through a lot of boring boilerplate and setup and configuration in about 30 minutes that would have taken me at least a tedious week just a year ago. Anyone who is leaving that on the table is going to find it hard to compete. I still had to go over it line-by-line, and make quite a few changes here and there, but it was also way, way faster to do that then to do it all from scratch. My position has been to encourage the skeptics to give it an honest try (no deliberately picking something you pretty much know it can't do, or withholding info from it so it fails) but at the same time, hold on to the skepticism, it helps you use it properly. Excessive trust in the AI is definitely a problem right now.

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

zzzeek 4mo ago

Sure but I'd still use an LLM to do the grunt work

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

marcus_holmes 4mo ago

I saw this play out in Y2K, and yes, I was also looking forward to getting paid an absolute fortune to refactor all those old VB applications at their end of life. Now, no. All that work will be done by an LLM. I'm afraid we don't get to play at being the returning heroes like those old COBOL dudes did.

joeyguerra 4mo ago

I already get hired to replace/fix code built by humans.