Comment by magicalhippo
5 days ago
Those tools only get you so far, especially if you write something novel to you. Using a new framework or programming language say.
Sometimes using a new framework or programming language is the fun part.
But sometimes it's just the best way of solving a problem incidental to the fun part.
One of the two projects I vibed included a web frontend. I didn't touch a single line of HTML, CSS or JavaScript of the frontend. And I didn't touch the API on the backend. I'm not a web dev, so this isn't something I've got snippets for or whatever, and in this case wasn't the interesting part.
The interesting part for me in that case was making a tool that could help us, not the details how exactly how that was done.
For someone who did a lot of webdev 20 years ago and hasn't done much in the last decade, and does mostly backend development now, being able to vibe code up a quick web or text-mode UI is killer. It might look like crap and not be very maintainable, but who cares - it's a temporary dashboard we'll throw away next quarter when we're done with our migration.
> The interesting part for me in that case was making a tool that could help us, not the details how exactly how that was done.
And I wouldn’t argue about the economics of getting a MVP out. But with software, you often got one happy path and myriads way of getting into an incoherent state (and crashing early would be a boon in this case) and/or returning the wrong response. When you care about failure, you also care that your code is semantically right. The devil is very much in the details, especially if you have N>1 users.
Getting thing dones for me include a high confidence that the code will do the right thing. And that’s means reviewing each line and checking the semantics (only when it’s a few line of code) or building a test harness and making sure I handle contracts and invariants.
Snippets, Code Generators, and Copy-Paste gives me sample that I can trust, although I may need to edit. But LLM doesn’t. And I’m doubly doubtful when it’s something I’m not familiar with.