4 ms·

Who cleans up after the vibe-coding party?

23 points by msephton 3mo ago

msephton 3mo ago
https://archive.ph/854yJ https://archive.ph/854yJ Their assertion that cURL is used to fetch the web page you're reading seems...misplaced. Browsers almost certainly do not use libcurl to fetch web pages. Though I do agree that libcurl is ubiquitous.
- beardyw 3mo ago
  Thanks, learned something.
- samlearner 3mo ago
  Had to over-simplify things a bit on cURL to keep this legible to a general audience, particularly in the first few paragraphs. The idea is that at some point down the stack from your request, libcurl is almost certainly involved (as a dependency, or maybe installed on your internet router, for example), not that your browser is necessarily running libcurl code directly in making the request. But yes, it's slightly hand-wavy in service of the larger point ("this is a thing you use all of the time without realizing it")
  - msephton 3mo ago
    Thanks for responding! It is hard to strike the right balance; I wouldn't want to be a writer :)
tobiasdt 3mo ago
[flagged]
pier25 3mo ago
> Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development And those prices are still subsidized. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are nowhere close to generating profits.
- FabCH 3mo ago
  Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order of magnitude faster Claude-in-a-chip? This is what happened to Bitcoin ultimately, there are huge performance gains we know exist lying on the table just because they don’t exist for training. And even for training, TPUs make the first steps in that direction.
  - marginalia_nu 3mo ago
    > They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order of magnitude faster Claude-in-a-chip? This is what happened to Bitcoin ultimately, there are huge performance gains we know exist lying on the table just because they don’t exist for training. And even for training, TPUs make the first steps in that direction. Yeah this is copium if I ever saw it.
  - fragmede 3mo ago
    That's the approach https://www.cerebras.ai/ https://www.cerebras.ai/ is taking.
  - rightbyte 3mo ago
    Isn't GPUs a purpose made ASIC for parallell matrix math allready?
    - FabCH 3mo ago
      No? You can program a GPU, you can’t program ASIC. TPUs are closer to ASIC than GPUs.
  - 3836293648 3mo ago
    An ASIC won't help until models are compute bound. They're still memory bound at all levels.
pjmlp 3mo ago
In terms of software projects themselves, consulting companies do, the same that now are pushing for AI solutions, which are the trenches I find myself in. Now for the whole economic chaos, unfortunately the whole society will, but not the big tech folks.
- marginalia_nu 3mo ago
  IT outsourcing was arguably a sort of precursor to vibecoding, and consulting companies are arguably still eating well cleaning up the legendary mess it created.
  - pjmlp 3mo ago
    As someone that regularly is involved in such projects, fashion driven industry is great for consulting, which is one reason it exists in first place.
  - dzhiurgis 3mo ago
    I work in Salesforce consulting ecosystem, notorious for producing awful code (occasionally passing project until you find someone code for $1 per hour (I kid you not)). Now within last year it improved to point I can trust it produce decent quality that beats like 95% of human slop.
sriramgopalan 3mo ago
Vibecoding for anything beyond prototypes is a bad idea. Software engineering principles still matter. Good software that is maintainable and has quality in functional, non-functional, and operational axes still matters. I wrote about this a few weeks ago in my blog. As an industry, we need to move past vibecoding and into rightcoding. https://sgopalanbtg.substack.com/p/andrej-karpathy-didnt-mean-to-do https://sgopalanbtg.substack.com/p/andrej-karpathy-didnt-mea...
EdwardAF-IT 3mo ago
[flagged]

23 points by msephton 3mo ago

https://archive.ph/854yJ https://archive.ph/854yJ Their assertion that cURL is used to fetch the web page you're reading seems...misplaced. Browsers almost certainly do not use libcurl to fetch web pages. Though I do agree that libcurl is ubiquitous.

beardyw 3mo ago
Thanks, learned something.
samlearner 3mo ago
Had to over-simplify things a bit on cURL to keep this legible to a general audience, particularly in the first few paragraphs. The idea is that at some point down the stack from your request, libcurl is almost certainly involved (as a dependency, or maybe installed on your internet router, for example), not that your browser is necessarily running libcurl code directly in making the request. But yes, it's slightly hand-wavy in service of the larger point ("this is a thing you use all of the time without realizing it")
- msephton 3mo ago
  Thanks for responding! It is hard to strike the right balance; I wouldn't want to be a writer :)

tobiasdt 3mo ago

[flagged]

pier25 3mo ago

> Now, suddenly, it’s completely normal to have to pay $100 or $200 per month in order to do software development And those prices are still subsidized. OpenAI, Anthropic, etc are nowhere close to generating profits.

FabCH 3mo ago
Yes, but: 1) They are investing Loony Toons levels of money and using Loony Toons financing a lot of the time for DC buildout. Those are actual physical buildings that once built out, exist and don’t need to be built again. 2) They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order of magnitude faster Claude-in-a-chip? This is what happened to Bitcoin ultimately, there are huge performance gains we know exist lying on the table just because they don’t exist for training. And even for training, TPUs make the first steps in that direction.
- marginalia_nu 3mo ago
  > They are pointedly ignoring FPGA and ASIC. With the current model quality, would it really be so bad to burn Claude irrevocably on a chip and have a non-modifiable, cheap to mass produce, order of magnitude faster Claude-in-a-chip? This is what happened to Bitcoin ultimately, there are huge performance gains we know exist lying on the table just because they don’t exist for training. And even for training, TPUs make the first steps in that direction. Yeah this is copium if I ever saw it.
- fragmede 3mo ago
  That's the approach https://www.cerebras.ai/ https://www.cerebras.ai/ is taking.
- rightbyte 3mo ago
  Isn't GPUs a purpose made ASIC for parallell matrix math allready?
  - FabCH 3mo ago
    No? You can program a GPU, you can’t program ASIC. TPUs are closer to ASIC than GPUs.
- 3836293648 3mo ago
  An ASIC won't help until models are compute bound. They're still memory bound at all levels.

pjmlp 3mo ago

In terms of software projects themselves, consulting companies do, the same that now are pushing for AI solutions, which are the trenches I find myself in. Now for the whole economic chaos, unfortunately the whole society will, but not the big tech folks.

marginalia_nu 3mo ago
IT outsourcing was arguably a sort of precursor to vibecoding, and consulting companies are arguably still eating well cleaning up the legendary mess it created.
- pjmlp 3mo ago
  As someone that regularly is involved in such projects, fashion driven industry is great for consulting, which is one reason it exists in first place.
- dzhiurgis 3mo ago
  I work in Salesforce consulting ecosystem, notorious for producing awful code (occasionally passing project until you find someone code for $1 per hour (I kid you not)). Now within last year it improved to point I can trust it produce decent quality that beats like 95% of human slop.

sriramgopalan 3mo ago

Vibecoding for anything beyond prototypes is a bad idea. Software engineering principles still matter. Good software that is maintainable and has quality in functional, non-functional, and operational axes still matters. I wrote about this a few weeks ago in my blog. As an industry, we need to move past vibecoding and into rightcoding. https://sgopalanbtg.substack.com/p/andrej-karpathy-didnt-mean-to-do https://sgopalanbtg.substack.com/p/andrej-karpathy-didnt-mea...

EdwardAF-IT 3mo ago

[flagged]