dartos

Really strange how some people took a term that supposed to be a "lol watch this" and started using it for work...

don't forget about the insane amount of marketing around AI code companies and how they put "vibe coding" in front of everyone's face all the time.

You tell someone something enough times and they'll belive it

The world is not ready for systems that indulge people in their bullshit.

we never were. that's why the world is how it is rn.

I think that’d make for interesting experiments and fringe sites, I don’t really see like your average e-commerce site ever doing anything like that.

You’d want the A and B to be intentional, not automatically generated. Every VP thinks their idea for a feature will revolutionize the company.

Probably because both anthropic and openai were on the whole AGI train where they were trying to heavily personify their products.

Google never seemed to personify theirs, IIRC. They always presented their AI tools in a utilitarian way.

If you use too many words, you’re not good at writing words.

There’s no “and.”

I’m just stating a fact. No discussion of wrong or right or whatever.

Just pointing out how there is no more rule of law in the US. Idk when exactly it disappeared, but it’s definitely not present anymore

I asked if you would be willing to share your work and workflow.

You could say nothing. You could just say “I can’t, it’s for my job, but my workflow looks like this…” or something.

You could say you’re not comfortable sharing.

You could share a snippet and how you reached that result… idk anything.

But instead you went for some weird statement about flying and people writing articles.

Didn’t respond to any points in Dijkstra’s essay, just some platitudes.

really?

because of the current situation in the US...

Sorry, but have you paid attention to the legal system in the states?

Large corporations and their execs live by different laws than the rest of us.

That’s how it is.

Anything is else is, unfortunately, a fiction in this country.

A bit cynical, no?

I long for the day when someone can give advice based on their own personal experience without someone else being like “well that won’t work for literally everyone”

Yeah obviously. It’s a personal anecdote.

So you’re not willing to share anything?

Just anecdotes and platitudes?

Not even some reasoning?

Also note that I chose my words carefully when I said “Nothing I’ve seen indicates that is possible right now.”

I used “right now” to not rule out future possibilities.

I just can’t believe you. Nothing I’ve seen indicates that is possible right now.

Would you be willing to share your code and your workflow?

>You literally can't put enough context into a prompt to have it write the exact code you'd need in every case. Yes you can. I do this every day.

It hasn’t been possible for maths and isn’t for programming.

I’ll defer to Dijkstra on this “foolishness”

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~EWD/transcriptions/EWD06xx/EWD667...

I’ll need to read up on genetic algorithms, I think.

That sounds really cool, but coming from training other statistical models, im having a hard time imagining what the training loop looks like.

deploy thousands of lines of code to production without you needing to change a single thing.

I’m not saying this is impossible. I’m saying it leads to poor quality products. Deploying thousands of lines of code isn’t necessarily a good thing. Often it’s not.

You can write a very precise spec in the prompt. Use formal language, or use a little DSL you invent on the spot, or say "it should do X and Y and account for Z and also try to cover other things if you realize there are more", etc. There's a lot you can do.

At this point, why use an LLM at all? Why introduce a black box? We can perfectly and tractably convert formal languages into machine code.

Things are never simpler when black boxes are involved…

These tools, again, are undoubtedly useful and sometimes (albeit inconsistently) magic.

But they’re not a silver bullet for making software.

I tried vibe coding literally yesterday, as I do every week or so. I used avvante.vim and code companion. I tried with gemma3 and Claude. It’s slow, boring,and I (someone with ADHD) lose all focus when the llm starts running.

The output is prototype quality always. It looks okay and mostly works correctly (granted I usually just make a todo list or a job board) but is obviously over complicated and bloated.

If you don’t care about quality or long term maintenance (like with a prototype or POC) then it’s fine.

you're talking about specifically using genetic programming to create new programs as opposed to gradient decend in LLMs to minimize a loss function, right?

How would you construct a genetic algorithm to produce natural language like LLMs do?

Forgive me if i'm misunderstanding, but in programming we have "tokens" which are minimal meaningful bits of code.

For natural languages it's harder. "Words" are not super meaningful on their own, i don't think. (at least not as much as a token) so how would you break down natural language for a genetic algorithm?

Either you're not relying as much on the AI as you think you are, or you're not really sure what "production quality" means.

It seems like you should know, so I'm going to bet that you're not entirely letting the AI drive.

Having the AI draft some code which you refine is a fine workflow. I didn't think it was before, but i've come around on that. I think it's also nice to have an LLM do a onceover to point out areas where I may have missed catching an error (like with JSON.parse in javascript or something.)

It's just not my cup of tea, personally. I've found that I'm faster writing code myself and treating an LLM as an assistant or rubber duck, but to each their own.

I'm referring to wholly AI generated code with no human input besides a prompt or "vibe coding." You literally can't put enough context into a prompt to have it write the exact code you'd need in every case. Your prompt would end up just being code at that point.

That's the whole point of writing code. Precise and exact instructions for a machine. You're not going to get that by adding a statistical natural language layer in the mix.

I’d say this is more a tool for prototypes.

You could secure angel funding off a simple prototype.

You could also make something funny and share it with friends, if it doesn’t need to be monetized.

I wouldn’t use tools like this for long lived products though.

It’s only the bottleneck for orgs that don’t know how to keep focus and bloated orgs with too many teams/managers/engineers.

And scrappy startups made by businesses school dropouts (and grads)

vibe coding was not made up

Here’s the tweet that literally made up vibe coding: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en

One might say blindly following hype is silly and cope too.

I’ve seen no indication that relying entirely on AI can produce quality software.

It can produce prototype quality code, just as it has since gpt-3.5. Advantages of technology is never considered. Security concerns are often missed. And, from what I’ve seen, the codebases are bloated.

For your avg crud app, much of that doesn’t matter. It starts mattering when you start having real business constraints, like server budgets or data compliance. If you don’t see that, then you don’t have enough real world experience yet. That’s all.

Remember how crypto was going to change everything? Or the metaverse?

We live in a period of extreme technological hype backed by insane company valuations.

Don’t get too fooled by market.

These tools are useful. They are here to stay. And they do not replace the entire field of programming nor the work that programmers do.

I think it’s like any other tool. Some people get better mileage out of it than others.

There are even very skilled and accomplished engineers that don’t even use language servers.

Not programming, but even some legendary Disney animators still draw out their key frames by hand… on paper… in pen.

Build with what you build best with.

Personally, they help with little refactors and occasionally a quick, difficult to google, question, usually about syntax.

The image that they’re forward thinking by embracing a trend that VCs love.

The image isn’t for potential employees, it’s for VCs and hype.

What about it gives off the AI smell to you?

I meant in the code……… obviously…

Yeah I don’t see anything that even suggests it throttles the PC.

Looks like it’s just a display.

LLMs as a natural language interface is fine.

What I’m saying is that if there was a standard protocol for making travel plans over the internet, we wouldn’t need an AI agent to book a trip.

We could just create great user experiences that expose those APIs like we do for pretty much everything on the web.

How so? The bitter lesson is about the effectiveness of specifically statistical models.

I doubt an expert machine’s accuracy would change if you threw more energy at it, for example.

Loony toons back in action did the same thing too.i don’t remember it being as good at Rodger rabbit, but it was one of my favorite childhood movies.

Sure, as a biz it makes sense, but as a society, it’s obviously a big failure.

Well OC was referring to mass layoffs.

That article seems to be about contracted copywriters.

If your whole job is writing “150-word descriptions” (the article’s words) for $60 an hour and the like, yeah LLMs got you beat.

But that’s a far cry from mass layoff territory.

Also, in that same article, he was rehired by a (granted, a single) client who didn’t like chatgpt. What is the rate of clients that dropped chatgpt?