Comment by neilv
1 day ago
The other day, I was forcing myself to use Claude Code for a new CRUD React app[1], and by default it excreted a pile of Node JS and NPM dependencies.
So I told something like, "don't use anything node at all", and it immediately rewrote it as a Python backend, and it volunteered that it was minimizing dependencies in how it did that.
[1] only vibe coding as an exercise for a throwaway artifact; I'm not endorsing vibe coding
> forcing myself to use Claude Code
You don't have to live like this.
Even though I'm a hardcore programmer and software engineer, I still need to at least keep aware of the latest vibe coding stuff, so I know what's good and bad about it.
You can tell Claude to use something highly structured like Spring Boot / Java. It's a bit more verbose in code, but the documentation is very good which makes Claude use it well. And the strict nature of Java is nice in keeping Claude on track and finding bugs early.
I've heard others had similar results with .NET/C#
Spring Boot is every bit as random mystery meat as Vercel or Rails. If you want explicit then use non-Boot Spring or even no Spring at all.
Same for Go.
You wanted it to use React but not node? Am I missing something here?
You can use React without Node by using a CDN. You can even use JSX if you use Babel in a script tag. It's just inefficient and stupid as hell.
My vibe coded one-off app projects have are all, by default, "self-contained single file static client side webapp, no build step, no React or other webshit nonsense" in their prompt. For more complex cases, I drop the "single file". Works like a charm.
I'm struggling to understand how they bought Bun but their own Ai Models are more fixated in writing python for everything than even the models of their competitor who bought the actual Python ecosystem (OAI with uv)
> Python
I once made a golang multi-person pomodoro app by vibe coding with gemini 3.1 pro (when it had first launched first day) and I asked it to basically only have one outside dependency of gorrilla websockets and everything else from standard library and then I deployed it to hugging face spaces for free.
I definitely recommend golang as a language if you wish to vibe code. Some people recommend rust but Golang compiles fast, its cross compilation and portable and is really awesome with its standard library
(Anecdotally I also feel like there is some chances that the models are being diluted cuz like this thing then has become my benchmark test and others have performed somewhat worse or not the same as this to be honest and its only been a few days since I am now using hackernews less frequently and I am/was already seeing suspicions like these about claude and other models on the front page iirc. I don't know enough about claude opus 4.7 but I just read simon's comment on it, so it would be cool if someone can give me a gist of what is happening for the past few days.)
It emits Actix and Axum extremely well with solid support for fully AOT type checked Sqlx.
Switch to vibe coding Rust backends and freeze your supply chain.
Super strong types. Immaculate error handling. Clear and easy to read code. Rock solid performance. Minimal dependencies.
Vibe code Rust for web work. You don't even need to know Rust. You'll osmose it over a few months using it. It's not hard at all. The "Rust is hard" memes are bullshit, and the "difficult to refactor" was (1) never true and (2) not even applicable with tools like Claude Code.
Edit: people hate this (-3), but it's where the alpha is. Don't blindly dismiss this. Serializing business logic to Rust is a smart move. The language is very clean, easy to read, handles errors in a first class fashion, and fast. If the code compiles, then 50% of your error classes are already dealt with.
Python, Typescript, and Go are less satisfactory on one or more of these dimensions. If you generate code, generate Rust.
How are you getting low dependencies for Web backend with Rust? (All my manually-written Rust programs that use crates at all end up pulling in a large pile of transitive dependencies.)
Cargo is just as vulnerable as NPM. It's just a smaller, more difficult target.
Ok I mean this is a little crazy, "minimal dependencies" and Rust? Brother I need dependencies to write async traits without tearing my hair out.
But you're also correct in that Rust is actually possible to write in a more high level way, especially for web where you have very little shared state and the state that is shared can just be wrapped in Arc<> and put in the web frameworks context. It's actually dead easy to spin up web services in Rust, and they have a great set of ORM's if thats your vibe too. Rust is expressive enough to make schema-as-code work well.
On the dependencies, if you're concerned about the possibility of future supply chain attacks (because Rust doesn't have a history like Node) you can vendor your deps and bypass future problems. `cargo vendor` and you're done, Node has no such ergonomic path to vendoring, which imo is a better solution than anything else besides maybe Go (another great option for web services!). Saying "don't use deps" doesn't work for any other language other than something like Go (and you can run `go vendor` as well).
But yeah, in today's economy where compute and especially memory is becoming more constrained thanks to AI, I really like the peace of mind knowing my unoptimised high level Rust web services run with minimal memory and compute requirements, and further optimisation doesn't require a rewrite to a different language.
Idk mate, I used to be a big Rust hater but once I gave the language a serious try I find it more pleasant to write compared to both Typescript and Go. And it's very amiable to AI if that's your vibe(coding), since the static guarantees of the type system make it easier for AI to generate correct code, and the diagnostics messages allow it to reroute it's course during the session.
Except with using Rust like this you're using it like C#. You don't get to enjoy the type system to express your invariants.