drob518The cult of vibe coding is dogfooding run amok
It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work.
If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.
I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked. I've worked at BigCos and startups, and a lot of the terrible code that makes it to production was shocking when I first started.
This isn't a dig at anyone, I've certainly shipped my share of bad code as well. Deadlines, despite my wishes sometimes, continue to exist. Sometimes you have to ship a hack to make a customer or manager happy, and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens.
For that matter, the first draft of nearly anything I write is usually not great. I might just be stupid, but I doubt I'm unique; when I've written nice, beautiful, optimized code, it's usually a second or third draft, because ultimately I don't think I fully understand the problem and the assumptions I am allowed to make until I've finished the first draft. Usually for my personal projects, my first dozen or so commits will be pretty messy, and then I'll have cleanup branches that I merge to make the code less terrible.
This isn't inherently bad, but a lot of the time I am simply not given time to do a second or third draft of the code, because, again, deadlines, so my initial "just get it working" draft is what ships into production. I don't love it, and I kind of dread of some of the code with my name attached to it at BigCo ever gets leaked, but that's just how it is in the corporate world sometimes.
This is the product that's claiming "coding is a solved problem" though.
I get a junior developer or a team of developers with varying levels of experience and a lot of pressure to deliver producing crummy code, but not the very tool that's supposed to be the state-of-the-art coder.
> and then replacing those hacks with better code just never happens
Yeah, we even have an idiom for this - "Temporary is always permanent"
> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code of many, many, many products that they used every day they would be shocked.
Absolutely. The difference is that the amount of bad code that could be generated had an upper limit on it — how fast a human can type it out. With LLMs bad code can be shat out at warp speed.
Oh I don't disagree with that. I am getting pretty tired of people making multi-thousand-line pull requests with lots of clearly AI-generated code and expecting it to be merged in.
I think the better unit to commit and work with is the prompt itself, and I think that the prompt is the thing that should be PR'd at this point, because ultimately the spec is what's important.
> I think that the prompt is the thing that should be PR'd at this point, because ultimately the spec is what's important.
The fundamental problem there is the code generation step is non-deterministic. You might make a two sentence change to the prompt to fix a bug and the generation introduces two more. Generate again and everything is fine. Way too much uncertainty to have confidence in that approach.
If you make the prompts specific enough and provide tests that it has to run before it passes, then it should be fairly close to deterministic.
Also, people aren't actually reading through most of the code that is generated or merged, so if there's a fear of deploying buggy code generated by AI, then I assure you that's already happening. A lot.
> I suspect if people saw the handwritten code
Somehow, everyone has forgotten the terrible code quality that existed prior to 2020.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UjZQGRATlwA
Like, come on. Software has been shit for decades. AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.
Bill Gates gets the BSOD
>AI hasn't observably reduced the quality of software I use everyday in a way that is meaningfully separable from normal incidents in the past.
I have noticed a spike in web apps exhibiting random failures and glitchy behavior over the past few months.
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