Comment by teiferer
1 day ago
You mean you told Claude a bunch of details and it built it for you?
Mind you, I'm not saying it's bad per se. But shouldn't we be open and honest about this?
I wonder if this is the new normal. Somebody says "I built Xyz" but then you realize it's vibe coded.
Let's say there is an architect and he also owns a construction company. This architect, then designs a building and gets it built from of his employees and contractors.
In such cases the person says, I have built this building. People who found companies, say they have built companies. It's commonly accepted in our society.
So even if Claude built for it for GP, as long as GP designed it, paid for tools (Claude) to build it, also tested it to make sure that it works, I personally think, he has right to say he has built it.
If you don't like it, you are not required to use it.
I agree that it's ultimately about the product.
But here's the problem. Five years ago, when someone on here said, "I wrote this non-trivial software", the implication was that a highly motivated and competent software engineer put a lot of effort into making sure that the project meets a reasonable standard of quality and will probably put some effort into maintaining the project.
Today, it does not necessarily imply that. We just don't know.
Even with LLMs delivering software that consistently works requires quite a bit of work and in most cases requires certain level of expertise. Humans also write quite a bit of garbage code.
People using LLMs to code these days is similar to how majority people stopped using assembly and moved to C and C++, then to garbage collected languages and dynamically typed languages. People were always looking for ways to make programmers more productive.
Programming is evolving. LLMs are just next generation programming tools. They make programmers more productive and in majority of the cases people and companies are going to use them more and more.
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> Today we just don’t know
You never knew. There are plenty of intelligent, well-intentioned software engineers that publish FOSS that is buggy and doesn’t meet some arbitrary quality standards.
the implication was that a highly motivated and competent software engineer put a lot of effort into making sure that the project meets a reasonable standard of quality and will probably put some effort into maintaining the project
That is entirely an assumption on the part of the reader. Nothing about someone saying "I built this complicated thing!" implies competence, or any desire to maintain it beyond building it.
The problem you're facing is survivorship bias. You can think of lots of examples of where that has happened, and very few where it hasn't, because when the author of the project is incompetent or unmotivated the project doesn't last long enough for you to hear about it twice.
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In general that is all implication and assumption, for any code, especially OSS code.
Hand-written code never implied much about quality no matter the author, especially as we all use libraries of reusable code of varying quality
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The original person didn't say "I wrote this non-trivial software", they said "I built Velo".
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We know. It is not difficult to tell them apart. Good taste is apparent and beauty is universal. The amount of care and attention someone put into a craft is universally appreciated. Also, I am 100% confident this comment was the output of a human process. We can tell. There is something more. It is obvious for those that have a soul.
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The architect knows what it is doing. And the workers are professionals with supervisors to check that the work is done properly.
Every single commit is Claude. No human expert involved. Would you trust your company database to an 25 dollars vibe session? Would you live in a 5 dollars building? Is there any difference from hand tailored suit, constructed to your measurements, and a 5 dollars t-shirt? Some people don't want to live in a five dollars world.
Most of the OSS projects on HN are not worthy for you to base your company on, especially sight unseen. Using an agent has nothing to do with it.
Agent authorship doesn't imply unreviewed or underspecified code
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That's a lot of ifs.
That has to be the worst analogy I have read in a while, and I’m HN that says something.
Asking someone to build a house - and then saying I built it - is "very misleading" to put it nicely.
When you order a website on upwork - you didn't build it. You bought it.
Plenty of architects claim ”this is my building” even if they didn’t pour all the concrete
No, it's more like the architect has a cousin who is like "I totally got this bro" and builds the building for them.
Right and also in this world there are no building codes or building inspections.
What an outrageously bad analogy. Everyone involved in that building put their professional reputations and licenses on the line. If that building collapses, the people involved will lose their livelihoods and be held criminally liable.
Meanwhile this vibe coded nonsense is provided “AS IS”, WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED. We don’t even know if he read it before committing and pushing.
Even billion dollar software products have similar clauses, it doesn't have anything to do with vibe coding. To build and sell software no educational qualification is needed.
Quality of the software comes from testing. Humans and LLMs both make mistakes while coding.
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Depends on the building type/size/scale and jurisdiction. Modern tract homes are really varied, hit or miss and often don't see any negative outcomes for the builders in question for shoddy craftsmanship.
Same with any OSS. Up to you to validate whether or not it is worth depending on, regardless of how built. Social proof is a primary avenue to that and has little to do with how built.
It is the new normal, whether you are against it or not.
If someone used AI, it is a good discussion to see whether they should explicitly disclose it, but people have been using assisted tools, from auto-complete, text expanders, IDE refactoring tools, for a while - and you wouldn't make a comment that they didn't build it. The lines are becoming more blurry over time, but it is ridiculous to claim that someone didn't build something if they used AI tools.
Do you take issue with companies stating that they (the company) built something, instead of stating that their employees built something? Should the architects and senior developers disclaim any credit, because the majority of tickets were completed by junior and mid-level developers?
Do you take issue with a CNC machinist stating that they made something, rather than stating that they did the CAD and CAM work but that it was the CNC machine that made the part?
Non-zero delegation doesn’t mean that the person(s) doing the delegating have put zero effort into making something, so I don’t think that delegation makes it dishonest to say that you made something. But perhaps you disagree. Or, maybe you think the use of AI means that the person using AI isn’t putting any constructive effort into what was made — but then I’d say that you’re likely way overestimating the ability of LLMs.
Could we please avoid the strawmen? Nowhere have I claimed that they didn't put work into this. Nowhere did I say that delegation is bad. I'd like to encourage a discussion, but then please counter the opinion that I gave, not a made-up one that I neither stated nor actually hold.
> You mean you told Claude a bunch of details and it built it for you?
> Nowhere have I claimed that they didn't put work into this.
There's some mental gymnastics.
> please counter the opinion that I gave
The reply your responding to did exactly that, and you just gave more snarky responses.
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There was a recent wave of such comment on the rust subreddit - exactly in this shape "Oh you mean you built this with AI". This is highly toxic, lead to no discussion, and is literally drove by some dark thought from the commentator. I really hope HN will not jump on this bandwagon and will focus instead on creating cool stuff.
Everybody in the industry is vibecoding right now - the things that stick are due to sufficient quality being pushed on it. Having a pessimistic / judgmental surface reaction to everything as being "ai slop" is not something that I'm going to look forward in my behavior.
>This is highly toxic, lead to no discussion
Why good faith is a requirement for commenting but not for submissions? I would argue the good faith assumption should be disproportionately more important for submissions given the 1 to many relationship. You're not lying, it indeed is toxic and rapidly spreading. I'm glad this is the case.
Most came here for the discussion and enlightenment to be bombarded by heavily biased, low effort marketing bullshit. Presenting something that has no value to anyone besides the builder is the opposite of good faith. This submissions bury and neglect useful discussion, difficult to claim they are harmless and just not useful.
Not everyone in the industry is vibe coding, that is simply not true. but that's not the point I want to make. You don't need to be defensive about your generative tools usage, it is ok to use whatever, nobody cares. Just be ready to maintain your position and defend your ideals. Nothing is more frustrating then giving honest attention to a problem, considering someone else perspective, to just then realize it was just words words words spewed by slop machine. Nobody would give a second thought if that was disclosed. You are responsible for your craft. The moment you delegate that responsibility into the thrash you belong. If the slop machine is so great, why in hell would I need you to ask it to help me? Nonsensical.
Your bias is that you think that because you can use a bike then my bike efforts are worthless. Considering that I often thrash out what I generate and I know I do not generate -> ship ; but have a quality process that validate my work by itself - the way I'm reaching my goals present no value to my public.
The reason this discussion is pathetic, is that it shifts the discussion from the main topic (here it was a database implementation) - to abide by a reactionary emotive emulation with no grace or eloquence - that is mostly driven by pop culture at this point with a justification mostly shaping your ego.
There is no point in putting yourself above someone else just to justify your behavior - in fact it only tells me what kind of person you were in the first place - and as I said, this is not the kind of attitude that i'm looking up to.
> Everybody in the industry is vibecoding right now
no ‘everybody’ is not. a lot of us are using zero LLMs and continuing to build (quality) software just fine
Justifiably, there is 0 correlation between something written manually and quality - in fact I argue it's quiet the opposite since you were unable to process as much play and architecture to try & break, you have spent less time experimenting, and more time pushing your ego.
Huh? It says so right in the README.
https://github.com/elitan/velo/blame/12712e26b18d0935bfb6c6e...
And are we really doing this? Do we need to admit how every line of code was produced? Why? Are you expecting to see "built with the influence of Stackoverflow answers" or "google searches" on every single piece of software ever? It's an exercise of pointlessness.
Indeed. There is a difference between "I have learnes by reading a lot of SO" and "I have copied the contents of this file verbatim from SO". Using Claude is very close to the latter without saying it.
I think you need to start with the following statement:
> We would like to acknowledge the open source people, who are the traditional custodians of this code. We pay our respects to the stack overflow elders, past, present, and future, who call this place, the code and libraries that $program sits upon, their work. We are proud to continue their tradition of coming together and growing as a community. We thank the search engine for their stewardship and support, and we look forward to strengthening our ties as we continue our relationship of mutual respect and understanding
Then if you would kindly say that a Brazilian invented the airplane that would be good too. If you don’t do this you should be cancelled for your heinous crime.
> a Brazilian invented the airplane
lol, good one!
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Not sure why this is downvoted. For a critical tool like DB cloning, I‘d very much appreciate if it was hand written. Simply because it means it’s also hand reviewed at least once (by definition).
We wouldn’t have called it reviewed in the old world, but in the AI coding world we’re now in it makes me realise that yes, it is a form of reviewing.
I use Claude a lot btw. But I wouldn’t trust it on mission critical stuff.
It's being downvoted because the commenter is asking for something that is already in the readme. Furthermore, it's ironic that the person raising such an issue is performing the same mistake as they are calling out - neglecting to read something they didn't write.
It‘s at the very bottom of the readme, below the MIT license mention. Yes, it’s there, but very much in the fineprint. I think the easier thing to spot is the CLAUDE.md in the code (and in particular how comprehensive it is).
Again, I love Claude, I use it a ton, but a topic like database cloning requires a certain rigour in my opinion. This repo does not seem to have it. If I had hired a consultant to build a tool like this and would receive this amount of vibe coding, I’d feel deceived. I wouldn’t trust it on my critical data.
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Eh, DB branching is mostly only necessary for testing - locally, in CI or quick rollbacks on a shared dev instance.
Or at least I cannot come up with a usecase for prod.
From that perspective, it feels like it'd be a perfect usecase to embrace the LLM guided development jank
Mostly..
App migrations that may fail and need a rollback have the problem that you may not be allowed to wipe any transactions so you may want to be putting data to a parallel world that didn't migrate.
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For local DB's, when I break them, I stop the Docker image and wipe the volume mounts, then restart + apply the "migrations" folder (minus whatever new broken migration caused the issue).
If you don’t read code you execute someone is going to steal everything on your file system one day
why does it matter?