Comment by josefresco
2 days ago
While I agree overall, I'm going to do some mild pushback here: I'm working on a "vibe" coded project right now. I'm about 2 months in (not a weekend), and I've "thought about" the project more than any other "hand coded" project I've built in the past. Instead of spending time trying to figure out a host of "previously solved issues" AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.
This is precisely it. If anything, AI gives me more freedom to think about more novel ideas, both on the implementation and the final design level, because I'm not stuck looking up APIs and dealing with already solved problems.
It's kind of freeing to put a software project together and not have to sweat the boilerplate and rote algorithm work. Boring things that used to dissuade me. Now, I no longer have that voice in my head saying things like: "Ugh, I'm going to have to write yet another ring buffer, for the 14th time in my career."
The boring parts where you learn. "Oh, I did that, this is now not that and it does this! But it was so boring building a template parser" - You've learnt.
Boring is suppose to be boring for the sake of learning. If you're bored then you're not learning. Take a look back at your code in a weeks time and see if you still understand what's going on. Top level maybe, but the deep down cog of the engine of the application, doubt so. Not to preach but that's what I've discovered.
Unless you already have the knowledge, then fine. "here's my code make it better" but if it's the 14th time you've written the ring buffer, why are you not using one of the previous thirteen versions? Are you saying that the vibed code is more superior then your own coding?
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... Why aren't any of the first 13 ring buffers reusable, though?
Like any tool it can be put to productive use or it can be used to crank out absolute garbage.
Can you elaborate on the implied claim that you've never built a project that you spent more than two months thinking about? I could maybe see this being true of an undergraduate student, but not a professional programmer.
Not to put words in their mouth, but it seems like they mean they used to think about a problem and then spend X minutes typing the solution in via the keyboard that they no longer have to do.
Open your mind and try it.
Yesterday I had two hours to work on a side project I've been dreaming about for a week. I knew I had to build some libraries and that it would be a major pain. I started with AI first, which created a script to download, extract, and build what needed. Even with the script I indeed encountered problems. But I blitzed through each problem until the libraries were built and I could focus on my actual project, which was not building libraries! I actually reached a satisfying conclusion instead of half-way through compiling something I do not care about.
I think you're missing the general point of the post.
>AI frees my human brain to think about goals, features, concepts, user experience and "big picture" stuff.
The trigger for the post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders, whatever their coding chops are. For Show HN posts, the sentence I quoted precisely describes the things that would be mind-numbingly boring to Show HN readers.
pre-AI, what was impressive to Show HN readers was that you were able to actually implement all that you describe in that sentence by yourselves and also have some biochemist commenting, "I'm working at a so-and-so research lab and this is exactly what I was looking for!"
Now the biochemist is out there vibe-coding their own solution, and now, there is no way for the HN reader to differentiate your "robust" entry from a completely vibe-code noobie entry, no matter how long you worked on the "important stuff".
Why? because the barrier of entry has been completely obliterated. What we took for granted was that "knowing how to code" was a proxy filter for "thought and worked hard on the problem." And that filter allowed for high-quality posts.
That is why the observation that you know longer can guarentee or have any way of telling quickly that the posters spent some time on the problem is a great observation.
The very value that you gain from vibe-coding is also the very thing that threatens to turn Show HN into a glorified Product Hunt cesspool.
"No one goes there any more, it's too crowded." etc etc
Why do I care who made the thing showed to HN? If someone makes a tool that I like or a project that’s amazing, but they did so with a robot, who is harmed?
Like all we need to do is decouple “I made this” from “I can compose all parts in my mind”, which were never strongly coupled anyway. Is the thing that is being shown neat? Cool! Does it matter if it was a person or 20 people or a robot? I don’t think so, unless it’s special pleading for humans.
I think this is quite a strange argument. Any technical show-and-tell in the form of 'I wrote a cool implementation of such-and-such algorithm' is obviously much less impressive if someone/something else wrote it, but that's always been true, and I think the Show HN format is largely used for tools or products that someone has created, in which case what's more interesting is the problem it solves and how it solves it. It's exactly as you say with your hypothetical biochemist; they've been looking for a tool like this! I don't think they spent much time worrying about how it was written or what the REST API would look like.
There is a proliferation of frameworks and libraries supplying all kinds of mundane needs that developers have; is it wrong for people Showing HN to use those? Do libraries and frameworks not lower the barrier to entry? There have been many cases of 'I threw this together over a weekend using XYZ and ABC', haven't there? What's interesting is how they understand the domain and how they address the problems posed by it - isn't it? Sure, the technical discussion can be interesting too but unless some deep technical problem is being solved, I don't care too much if they used Django or Flask, and which database backend they chose, unless these things have a significant impact on the problem space.
> the barrier of entry has been completely obliterated
I was very interested in 3D graphics programming back in the DOS days before GPUs were a commodity, and at that time I felt the same about hardware accelerated rendering - if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. Turns out that lowering barriers to entry doesn't magically make everything easier, but does allow a lot more people to express their creativity who otherwise would lack the knowledge and time to do so. That's a good thing! Pre-made engines like Godot remove an absolute ton of the work that goes into making a game, and are a great benefit to the one-man-bands and time-strapped would-be game designers out there whose ideas would otherwise die in the dark.
You seem to be insisting on arguing against arguments that have not been made and ignoring the whole point of the original post.
I am having to repeat the beginning of my previous comment:
>>The trigger for the [original] post was about post-AI Show HN, not about about whether vibe-coding is of value to vibe-coders.
The topic is: The drop in quality of post-AI Show HN. It is specifically about this community. Please read the context the OP has referenced in their own post:
Is Show HN Dead? No, but it's Drowning
https://www.arthurcnops.blog/death-of-show-hn/
Instead of adressing the specifics of that post you seem to ignore the points that were made there and seem to prefer to talk about why vibe-coding solutions should be interesting to pre-AI programmers. Ok, let's go there.
>if no-one needs to think about rasterisation and clever optimisation algorithms, and it's easy to build a 3D engine, I thought, then everyone and their dog will make a game and we'll drown in crappy generic-looking rubbish. [Turns out that's not the case.]
Here in this context, you are confusing "easy" with "non-human". Specifically, when people here decry the banality and tediousness of perusing and reviewing vibe-coded solutions by "everyone and their dog" the emphasis is on and their dog. Let's be clear, a non-deterministic non-human entity that is coding something by approximating the intentions of a human is not the same thing as a human developing a 3D engine or SDK end-to-end with human intentionality no matter how "easy" coding a 3D engine has become. So it leaves it to the HN reader to figure out what level of ownership the human poster has over their 90% vibe-coded solution. It's no surprise that HN readers, when alerted to the possibility via a Show HN post, would rather just vibe-code a solution themselves if they are interested in the problem space instead of engaging with the Show HN post itself. When hard-pressed, I can think of very few instances where programmers would not prefer to vibe-code there own solution instead of test-running and reviewing someone else's AI slop. Some of the casual statistics that the original posters have bothered to look at seem to bear this out.
> knowing how to code" was a proxy filter for "thought and worked hard on the problem."
Also: Actually made the thing. I know how to code, but have 0 Show-HNs because my ideas and fun side-projects never get to that stage.
Now, "making the thing" is not a good proxy either
I tend to agree, this has been my experience with LLM-powered coding, especially more recently with the advent of new harnesses around context management and planning. I’ve been building software for over ten years so I feel comfortable looking under the hood, but it’s been less of that lately and more talking with users and trying to understand and effectively shape the experience, which I guess means I’m being pushed toward product work.
That's the key: use AI for labor substitution, not labor replacement. Nothing necessarily wrong with labor saving for trivial projects, but we should be using these tools to push the boundaries of tech/science!
Exactly. People project all kinds of ethics on writing code. The constant hum of anti-LLM on HN is monotonous and telling. Hurt egos everywhere.
I dunno, I think the boosters show their hurt feelings here more often than the detractors do.
Lmfao. The front page is littered with whining about the craft from people who can’t argue coherently why I should go back to getting yelled at by a linter.
It’s all “I can’t think anymore” or “software bad now” followed by a critique of the industry circa 2015.
Most of the people making cool stuff with LLMs are making it, not writing blog posts hoping to be a thought leader.
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You don't fit the profile OP is complaining about. You might not even be "vibe" coding in the strictest sense of that word.
For every person like you who puts in actual thought into the project, and uses these tools as coding assistants, there are ~100 people who offload all of their thinking to the tool.
It's frightening how little collective thought is put into the ramifications of this trend not only on our industry, but on the world at large.
That’s because the OP is thinking of a straw man.
Who cares if some idiot makes some ai shit and doesn’t learn anything? That same person has had access to a real computer which they’ve wasted just as effectively until now.
> Who cares if some idiot makes some ai shit and doesn’t learn anything?
Nobody cares, that’s the point. Yet they still share them on Show HN.
That's not vibe coding