Comment by torginus
3 days ago
I'm kinda surprised how negative and skeptical anyone is here.
It kinda blows my mind that this is possible, to build a browser engine that approximates a somewhat working website renderer.
Even if we take the most pessimistic interpretation of events ( heavy human steering, relies on existing libraries, sloppy code quality at places, not all versions compile etc)
I'm not too surprised, the way I read a lot of (not all!*) the negative comments is ~"I'm imagining having to work with this code, I'd hate it". Even though I'm fairly impressed with the work LLMs do, this has also been my experience of them… albeit with a vibe-coding** sample size of 1, done over a few days with some spare credit.
The positive views are mostly from people who point out that what matters in the end is what the code does, not what it looks like, e.g. users don't see the code, nor do they care about the code, and that even for businesses who do care, LLMs may be the ones who have to pay down any technical debt that builds up.
* Anyone in a field where mistakes are expensive. In one project, I asked the LLM to code-review itself and it found security vulnerabilities in its own solutions. It's probably still got more I don't know about.
** In the original sense of just letting the LLM do whatever it wanted in response to the prompt, never reading or code reviewing the result myself until the end.
The problem I've had with vibe coding is akin the adage of the first 90% of the code taking 90% of the time, and the last 10% taking the other 90% of the time. The LLM can get you to 90% initially but it hits a wall unless you the user know what it's doing and outputting, but that is very difficult when you're vibe coding by its very definition, meaning that you're not looking at the code at all. And then you have to read thousands of lines of code which you don't understand that it's entirely easier to stop and hand code a new version yourself, which is precisely what I've done with some of my projects.
The problem is getting there 90% but poorly makes that last 10% much harder.