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Comment by afiodorov

4 months ago

I think it is a losing battle. People are energy preserving creatures and we skip paying attention if we can. Because paying attention is effort. Vibe coding is exactly this, low effort development and thus is enticing. Now if we can get away with low effort why shouldn’t we? I am not advocating serious NATO missions to be vibe coded for trajectories, no. When billions are at stake no way. But what if billions are not at stake? What if nothing is? This weekend I added a way to maximise my QApplication app. I just asked Claude code to do it and tested it. It worked. That is all I need for my own app that I use. It’s not that I don’t have any other users but works on my machine is the motto of this specific free and open source app.

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afiodorov

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Barrin92  4 months ago

>People are energy preserving creatures and we skip paying attention if we can.

Paying attention saves you energy in the long run. In the words of Gus Levy, nothing wrong with being greedy, but there's two types of greed, long term and short term; the latter is stupid.

Of course for a throwaway project it's irrelevant by definition. But the problem is in professional work you cannot get away with low effort, you're just pushing your problems to the back and they'll come back with interest. Vibe coding is simply moving your problems to other people, or to yourself at a later point in time.

  • afiodorov  4 months ago

    Running AI itself is not low effort though, far from it at current efficiency levels it burns way more energy to produce outputs than humans. Setting latest advanced models to think about the problem on your behalf doesn't necessarily make it low effort overall.

    Vibe coding is first and foremost moving some of your problems to the AI and that can be suffice even in professional setting where there's a lot of mundane requests, e.g. setting up slack alerts, running simple data transforms or figuring out one-off data analysis. Maintainability is less of an issue on tasks where it can be done from scratch if need be.

    If your situation is result-driven and easily verifiable AI-driven solutions are absolutely appropriate.