Māris OzolsAug 7, 2025

Today I introduced my PhD student to vibe-coding (a term he has never heard of). He has never used an LLM or coded in Julia before, so I suggested half-jokingly that he can just vibe-code the numerics and I proceeded to demonstrate this. Unexpectedly, after some small fixes the code actually worked!

Somehow I have mixed feelings about this (a bit like giving somebody a cigarette for the first time). On one hand it's great that you can quickly get started with coding simple things in a language you don't know. On the other, it should not become a replacement for your own brain and skills.

Show threadj_bertolottiAug 7, 2025
@MarisOzols The less you know about coding, the more LLMs can help you getting somewhere fast.
The problems start when you actually want/need to do complex and highly non-standard stuff.
Show threadSolon

@j_bertolotti @MarisOzols I've implemented a less-common card game with LLMs and it was the land of a thousand pitfalls.

After all the debugging (of other people's code, which is harder) I'm not sure that I saved a lot of time. Or any time.

It even included some incorrect rules that come from a variant of the game despite my giving it a full specification document that didn't have anything like that.

Aug 7, 2025 at 3:08pmWeb
Show threadMāris OzolsAug 7, 2025

@solon @j_bertolotti In my case it was something standard and very simple that requires just 50 lines of code. But the kind of thing you mention is exactly what gives me mixed feelings.

It's important to know the limitations of your tools if you want to use the right tool for your task.