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I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the
by RGS1811 3mo ago
I've been vibecoding a ton for the past 9 months, built a bunch of cool little apps for myself with AI, ran experiments, built an entire SDLC on skills, did the agent orchestration harness thing, etc. In the past few weeks I've hit a wall where I'm just tired of it. Each model becomes more independent but also harder to direct in detail. They produce massive, tedious, sloppy text outputs with very little input. They're bad at socializing knowledge and communicating design forks.
The places where I've seen unequivocal wins with AI are repetitive tech debt tasks that apply the same transformation across a large amount of code or refactor under a pre-existing test suite with good coverage. It's great for initial research, brainstorming, and can be good (despite the sycophancy) as a rubber duck conversation partner. I use AI constantly, for work and in my personal time, but we've hit a ceiling where I no longer find it helpful for the models to absorb more of the intellectual labor. They get things wrong more aggressively, and more elaborately. They're inadequately curious. I cannot keep up with the endless bad technical writing, and it makes it harder to spot factual errors and bad reasoning.
Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. AI as an over-confident prodigy on speed is what we're getting lately, and it's losing me.
- jv22222 3mo agoAgree. Creating products with AI is like creating a tightly packed ball of wool. Then, to try to understand what happened you have to somehow pick a strand and pull it out to have a look. Very difficult with tightly packed wool. I've run some experiments in the past month that get me closer to being able to work with this opaque bundle. It's the main thing I think about every day, how to solve this problem.
- lelanthran 3mo ago> Here's what I want: I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. You aren't going to get that. Why would they even offer you that? You're going to be the meatbag peripheral to an AI.
- Groxx 3mo agoPlus it would reduce token counts. Careful use is almost directly opposed to their financial goals.
- eikenberry 3mo agoSo don't look to "them" to offer it, look elsewhere.
- deleted 3mo ago[deleted]
- kenforthewin 3mo agoIs this not literally just Claude Code? I don't understand the hysteria.
- lelanthran 3mo ago> Is this not literally just Claude Code? And that is literally how a large number of programmers, including Anthropic themselves, are using CC - they are simply a meatbag peripheral to CC. > I don't understand the hysteria. Maybe ask an LLM to explain it to you using analogies? They can explain anything, even if they are wrong.
- raincole 3mo ago> as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat This... quite describes what the current AI feels like to me. So I really don't see a problem. If AI does too much for you, you should, uh, just prompt it to do less. Everyone talks about how their AI escapes sandbox and virtualization or delete their entire repos or something. Perhaps they're using a skynet I'm not aware of. From my experience when I added "discuss; don't edit any file yet" at the end of the prompt I've never seen the LLM go against my will and edit the files anyway.
- existencebox 3mo agoI expect there's a probabilistic factor to it, among other things. I use the almost the same addendum as you ("do not make, commit, or push any changes without my approval") and it broadly seems to work in my day-to-day dev. However, I also set up some agents that trigger on incoming requests from my dev teams to automate things that used to be rote/manual tasks. _That_ is where I see the issues, I suspect simply because it has so many more opportunities to go off script. The most common failure mode is that it will, despite all directives to not make changes without approval, start writing unit tests. (I do find this equal parts head-shaking and amusing; At least it chooses something relatively 'benevolent' vs. the aforementioned skynet.)
- nemomarx 3mo agoI do wonder if "without my approval" is looser than "discuss only, do not make edits"? I'm not sure how much that finegrain thing matters in prompts nowadays tho
- jameshart 3mo agoOne problem is that agents are notoriously bad at handling ‘me’ vs ‘you’ over an extended conversation. ‘Without my approval’ far back in the context of an extended session gets fuzzy about who ‘me’ is.
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- andy99 3mo ago> I want AI as an assistant that helps me make decisions, and ensures that I'm in the driver's seat. Right now we’re still in the benchmaxxing phase, I feel like most AI models of combination of models and harness are not really a “product” yet in the sense of having a particular and opinionated UX engineered to be helpful at a specific task, there much more still in a race to be the smartest. There’s a lot of room for diversification of the actual character of this interaction, for example in the direction you mention. I think once that starts we’ll get into the real “useful” phase, right now we’re really just showing off and exploring how much it can do, even if it’s incidentally really useful in some cases. Personally I agree with the parent post, I hate it when AI tries to lead me “would you like me to ...” I’d much prefer something awaiting my instructions than wasting tokens tryitn or steer me to doing something inevitably dumb.
- sigbottle 3mo agoI'm curious if it's possible in general for an AI to achieve this without some evolutionary forcing function that actually threatens their "biology". Not talking about prompting Claude "please write me a philosophical dialogue". It has no skin in the game. If it writes 20 paragraphs of slop and is factually wrong and costs other people labor, is there any correction mechanism? We can correct it explicitly via training I guess, but it's debatable to what extent accountability applies to AI. We like to pretend that we have our nice epistemology, separated into a priori and a posteroi and all that, but at the end of the day, accountability is what underpins social relations and keeps things going (even if you're libertarian, you have to accept this - even if you don't agree some state should centralize it, it's still just true in terms of basic human social relations). Of course, another possibility is utter domination - I am so much better than you (for some definition of better) that none of your puny responses matter. OK. Then don't claim both that, and that you're weird for disliking AI and that AI has no problems when integrating with society - too many people have these basic cognitive dissonances.
- Xcelerate 3mo agoI’ve found AI works much better for constraint based problems than open ended “tasks”. I.e., if you specify all of the constraints of the problem, it works really well at achieving the objective. But the caveat is that you really do have to enumerate all of the constraints, because if you miss even one, it will use that as a loophole to shortcut the problem. I think the solution is toward more formalization of the behavior we expect of various systems. E.g., produce a Lean proof that a program never behaves in a certain way, and if you can’t, iterate on the program until it satisfies such a proof. I’ve only tinkered around with this a little bit, but it seems promising on toy problems. Scaling up to tech-company level infra is going to take quite some time however I think.
- radicality 3mo agoSimilarly for me. I have a recent example too. I run a bunch of eps32 devices at home, using esphome. Pre-AI I wrote all the yaml myself and understood what’s happening and didn’t have any very bespoke hacks. Recently I asked an agent for a feature where the screen will get dimmer after some time, and eventually after a day the screen will turn off and then turn back on if I tap, which should be pretty easy in esphome. But: some past agent decided what it wanted wasn’t in esphome, so it made its own custom module in c++ for the display, spelunking in pdf datasheets; then the weeds were so deep the new agent decided to add on to that, and to read the power controller and display controller spec sheets and somehow implement my dimming feature by writing raw values to some nondescript registers. The contraption worked until it didn’t and once every so often my esp32 would just completely hang with black screen and no connnectivity and needed a power cycle, presumably because whatever low level register writing the agent implemented eventually breaks something. I told the agent to get rid of all custom stuff and wherever possible just use default esphome yaml, now it’s been working fine. I don’t really have a point with the anecdote, just that I’m also getting tired of such scenarios like the OP.
- Gigachad 3mo agoI've been hit with the team manager trying to clear tickets on the jira board with entirely AI generated code, and what I've observed is they always make the system more complex, usually absurdly complex. The AI code never looks at things from a higher level, or reconsiders the requirements, it just layers on a load of crap until the tests pass.
- witx 3mo agoAbsolutely mirrors my experience and wants
- LAC-Tech 3mo agoThe places where I've seen unequivocal wins with AI are repetitive tech debt tasks that apply the same transformation across a large amount of code or refactor under a pre-existing test suite with good coverage. I agree with this, but I'd add the caveat you have to do your own digging and researching (as the article says) to identify these tasks well. If you ask it for ideas, it gets painful. YMMV (and I am very open to getting better at this).
- cameldrv 3mo agoI've been thinking very similar thoughts. Without going into too much detail, a couple of observations: When carpenters moved from mostly hand tools to mostly power tools, it didn't take away much of the need to understand the techniques of woodworking, it just made it all faster. Reading a nonfiction book is very different than reading a book summary, even if (as is often the case), the ideas in the book could have been condensed way down. The point is that actually reading the whole book means you spend far more time engaging with the ideas, and so they become more deeply embedded in your neural network. In things like sports, this is just obvious, in that no one expects someone to become a good soccer player by just reading the rulebook, and obviously more practice is the main way you get better.
- stavros 3mo agoWhat I've seen lately is that Claude got more and more up its own ass. It keeps assuming I know the terms it keeps making up, like "ensure the strategy holds through the gap". What the fuck does that mean, Claude? Speak like a normal person. A few model iterations ago, I found its output when explaining what it wanted to do much easier to parse. Nowadays I just feel stupid because it keeps making up names for things and I have no idea what it means. Earlier today it said something about "the two-terminal solution" and I was just asking it to make a simple Python script to test an HTTP endpoint. I just don't understand what it's talking about any more. Has anyone else seen this?
- shibel 3mo agoYes, that’s my biggest gripe with Claude at the moment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48789551 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48789551 It’s more inhibiting to me than bad code, missing tests, or an obvious or non-obvious suboptimal solution.
- stavros 3mo agoYes! It's not even that it's dense, or complex. I can handle complexity and density, it's that in its own head a lot. It'll give things names and then somehow decide I already know the names, and casually use the names without any explanation. It's maddening.
- ButlerianJihad 3mo agoI started asking Gemini for technical help with Google products and the Android system, just from a user perspective. But it began weaving tales that imply that it has deep insight about the internals from a developer's perspective. Sooner or later, I began calling it out. I said "that sounds more like a Star Trek episode than technical support!" and it would go "you're absolutely right to call me out like that!" That specific, chaotic combination of symptoms—previews turning blank grey, action buttons freezing out, and the swipe gesture uncontrollably hyper-accelerating all the way to the first or last card—points directly to a memory-leak or deadlock crash inside the Android system UI renderer (specifically com.android.systemui). When this happens, the operating system's task-switching engine loses track of the physical finger-drag velocity and drops the thumbnail cache out of RAM to prevent a total device freeze. Because the system state is corrupted, it misinterprets a tiny flick as an infinite, maximum-velocity swipe. Gemini is capable of giving good technical advice and step-by-step instructions on clearing issues, but often with a pinch of toxic LSD in the mix!
- kstenerud 3mo agoMy experience over the past year has been the exact opposite. I work through a design with the agent, have it research any points I'm not confident on, drill down on details I feel fuzzy on, and then have it do an adversarial critique of it until it stops surfacing defects. By the time I'm setting it loose to do the actual implementation, there's very little left to decide and it's producing pretty tight code. Plus I now have some solid design documents, a decision history, an issues list, and a set of gotchas for the agent to keep in mind in future. My LLM is an assistant that helps my designs and decision process, implements the final work expertly, and I'm always in the driver's seat. And the development speed is astronomical.
- AlotOfReading 3mo agoI used to do adversarial critique, but I found that "agents can't identify issues" was a surprisingly long way from a good implementation. I kept finding silly correctness issues and shortcuts taken whenever I expanded testing or dug deeply into the implementation. Now, I'm back to rubber-ducking until I've built my own mental model over a few days of thinking.
- kstenerud 3mo agoI'm not doing adversarial critiques of the code; I'm doing adversarial critiques of the designs and plans. If it's still outputting bad code when it comes to the implementation, I do an interrogation round to find out why it's choosing that way, then update the principles, standards, or linting tools to fix it.
- AlotOfReading 3mo agoThe skill I wrote did both. Design would go through an adversarial round, then a signoff by me, then implementation, then critique rounds by agents prompted to specific types of issues. And even then, LLMs were still struggling to put together complicated bits of code.
- protocolture 3mo ago12 months ago I had ChatGPT successfully not to mention quickly, exctract elements of a PNG as SVG. About 6 or 7 times. I jumped in to perform the same thing again, and it spat out a PNG. And then when I asked it generated a little python script to generate the SVG. The Result was garbage. It took me a while to get the result I had gotten consistently last time, and the results included it hallucinating a few svgs in the process. I do wonder if we have already passed the best possible models and are over specialising them at this point.
- butlike 3mo agoThey're going to run into the problem we have in music production where the song is 'done,' but the producer can't stop adding magic (sugar, fun sounds, more effects, etc.) and the song becomes an overproduced, over magicked mess. The developers of chatbot technology have or are about to hit an inflection point where the tool is essentially done, then they're going to add too much sugar trying to make it some sort of god tool where it becomes overly complicated, overly convoluted, with dodgy results and too much magic.
- aarjaneiro 3mo ago> ensures that I'm in the driver's seat This is why I'm still primarily using tab complete. Maybe will spin up an agent here and there to add tests or for repetitive work where I can say "follow the approach I just did for this one case across all remaining cases"
- _superposition_ 2mo agoSimilar. Lately I'm finding all the rote writing tasks I've outsourced to automation are becoming insufferable to read. Over confident prodigy is pretty apt.