Comment by physicsguy

8 hours ago

I've just done my first almost fully vibe coded hobby project from start to near completion, a village history website with a taxonomy, and it's taken so much poking and prodding and cajoling to get the software to do exactly what I want it to do. Having built plenty of production stuff, I know what I want it to look like and the data model was really clear, yet even trying every trick in the book to constrain them, I just found the LLMs went off and did totally random things, particularly as the project got further from the start.

Maybe there'll be an enormous leap again but I just don't quite see the jump to how this gets you to 'industrial' software. It made it a lot faster, don't get me wrong, but you still needed the captain driving the ship.

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physicsguy

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Havoc  8 hours ago

> you still needed the captain driving the ship.

The question is more what becomes of all the rowers when you’re switching from captain + 100 rowers to captain + steam engine

They’re not all going to get their own boat and captain hat

  • kj4211cash  8 hours ago

    But were there ever 100 "rowers"? In this case, the commenter would have developed the website him- or herself instead of using AI. And it would have taken a little longer but probably been higher quality. In my experience, most developers are already capable captains and most of their job is "captaining." One of their main complaints is managers who treat them like rowers. AI just shifts what it means to captain?

  • applied_heat  5 hours ago

    >They’re not all going to get their own boat and captain hat

    Why not? Anyone can load up Claude code and start trial and erroring until they get something that works and has similar reliability to accepted software … what is the stat about 1 bug per 10 lines of code on average?

    I am meeting a lot of non coders telling me about their projects they are getting AI to do for them, stuff to help land title something or other, stuff to work on avalanche forecast, whatever their area of expertise they are unchained and writing programs using AI that they couldn’t before.

    Everyone is the captain now

    • onion2k  43 minutes ago

      Anyone can load up Claude code and start trial and erroring until they get something that works and has similar reliability to accepted software..

      You still need to understand the code that AI is generating to fix the problems that you can't vibe a solution to. You still need to understand the process of developing software to know when something isn't working even if it looks like it is. You still need other people to trust the software that you created. None of those things comes naturally to vibe coders. They're essentially teaching themselves software engineering in a very back-to-front way.

  • physicsguy  5 hours ago

    Right but in this case, what might have taken me 2-3 days initially took me a day still with many many frustrating “no, I said I don’t want you to edit that file in that way” moments. So it’s faster but annoying.

    To me it feels like when doing it’s like when you’re pair programming (which is quite intense anyway) with a frustrating newby who can program but misses the big picture no matter how many times you try. It works better for certain types of software - web it’s great, I have had much worse results when doing data pipeline stuff at work.