Comment by helloplanets

Outsourcing development and vibe coding are incredibly similar processes.

If you just chuck ideas at the external coding team/tool you often get rubbish back.

If you're good at managing the requirements and defining things well you can achieve very good things with much less cost.

With the basic and enormous difference that the feedback loop is 100 or even 1000x faster. Which changes the type of game completely, although other issues will probably arise as we try this new path.

100%! There is significant analogy between the two!

YES!

AI assistance in programming is a service, not a tool. You are commissioning Anthropic, OpenAI, etc. to write the program for you.

We need a new word for on-premise offshoring.

On-shoring ;

Agreed. The higher-ups at my company are, like most places, breathlessly talking about how AI has changed the profession - how we no longer need to code, but merely describe the desired outcome. They say this as though it’s a good thing.

They’re destroying the only thing I like about my job - figuring problems out. I have a fundamental impedance mismatch with my company’s desires, because if someone hands me a weird problem, I will happily spend all day or longer on that problem. Think, hypothesize, test, iterate. When I’m done, I write it up in great detail so others can learn. Generally, this is well-received by the engineer who handed the problem to me, but I suspect it’s mostly because I solved their problem, not because they enjoyed reading the accompanying document.

I’m a programmer (well half my job) because I was a short (still short) fat (I got better) kid with a computer in the 80s.

Now, the only reason I code and have been since the week I graduated from college was to support my insatiable addictions to food and shelter.

While I like seeing my ideas come to fruition, over the last decade my ideas were a lot larger than I could reasonably do over 40 hours without having other people working on projects I lead. Until the last year and a half where I could do it myself using LLMs.

Seeing my carefully designed spec that includes all of the cloud architecture get done in a couple of days - with my hands on the wheel - that would have taken at least a week with me doing some work while juggling dealing with a couple of other people - is life changing

I became an auto mechanic because I love machining heads, and dropping oil pans to inspect, and fitting crankshafts in just right, and checking fuel filters, and adjusting alternators.

If I wanted to work on electric power systems I would have become an electrician.

(The transition is happening.)

Right now vibe coding is more like training cats. You are constantly pushing against the model's tendency to produce its default outputs regardless of your directions. When those default outputs are what you want - which they are in many simple cases of effectively English-to-code translation with memorized lookup - it's great. When they are not, you might as well write the code yourself and at least be able to understand the code you've generated.

I've never seen horse that scratches you.

Yeah, it's why I don't like trying to write up a comprehensive design before coding in the first place. You don't know what you've gotten wrong until the rubber meets the road. I try to get a prototype/v1 of whatever I'm working on going as soon as possible, so I can root out those problems as early as possible. And of course, that's on top of the "you don't really know what you're building until you start building it" problem.

And programming languages are designed for clarifying the implementation details of abstract processes; while human language is this undocumented, half grandfathered in, half adversarially designed instrument for making apes get along (as in, move in the same general direction) without excessive stench.

The humane and the machinic need to meet halfway - any computing endeavor involves not only specifying something clearly enough for a computer to execute it, but also communicating to humans how to benefit from the process thus specified. And that's the proper domain not only of software engineering, but the set of related disciplines (such as the various non-coding roles you'd have in a project team - if you have any luck, that is).

But considering the incentive misalignments which easily come to dominate in this space even when multiple supposedly conscious humans are ostensibly keeping their eyes on the ball, no matter how good the language machines get at doing the job of any of those roles, I will still intuitively mistrust them exactly as I mistrust any human or organization with responsibly wielding the kind of pre-LLM power required for coordinating humans well enough to produce industrial-scale LLMs in the first place.

What's said upthread about the wordbox continually trying to revert you to the mean as you're trying to prod it with the cowtool of English into outputting something novel, rings very true to me. It's not an LLM-specific selection pressure, but one that LLMs are very likely to have 10x-1000xed as the culmination of a multigenerational gambit of sorts; one whose outset I'd place with the ever-improving immersive simulations that got the GPU supply chain going.

Have you actually tried high temperature values for coding? Because I don’t think it’s going to do what you claim it will.

LLMs don’t “reason” the same way humans do. They follow text predictions based on statistical relevance. So raising the temperature will more likely increase the likelihood of unexecutable pseudocode than it would create a valid but more esoteric implementation of a problem.

How do you configure LLM température in coding agents, e.g. opencode?