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Comment by neutronicus | Hacker News Reader

IDK.

My wife used the $20 claude.ai and Claude Code (the latter at my prompting) to vibe-code an educational game to help our five-year-old with phonics and basic math.

She noticed that she was constantly hitting token limits and that tweaking or adding new functionality was difficult. She realized that everything was in index.html, and she scrolled through it, and it was clear to her that there was a bunch of duplicated functionality.

So she embarked on a quest to refactor the application, move stuff from code to config, standardize where the code looks for assets, etc. She did all this successfully - she's not hitting token limits anymore and adding new features seems to go more smoothly - without ever knowing a lick of JS.

She's a UX consultant so she has lots of coding-adjacent skills, and talks to developers enough that she understands the code / content division well.

What would you call what she's doing (she still calls it vibe coding)?

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No, I think the moment she "embarked on a quest to refactor the application" she graduated from vibe-coding to coding.

I kind of agree that she isn't just "vibe-coding" anymore.

But I think the fact that she's managing without even knowing (or caring to know) the language the code base is written in means that it isn't really "coding" either.

She's doing the application architecture herself without really needing to know how to program.

I frequently tell people with complicated Excel spreadsheets that they are software developers without them realizing it, so I have a broad personal definition!

LLM-assisted coding? Pairing with LLMs?

I've copy-pasted snippets for tools and languages that I do not know. Refactored a few parameters, got things working. I think that counts as programming in a loose sense. Maybe not software development or engineering, but programming.

It's coding, it just isn't professional software engineering.

The first non-toy program I ever wrote was in BASIC, on ZX Spectrum 48, and although I don't have it anymore, I remember it was one of the shittiest, most atrocious examples of spaghetti code that I've ever seen in my life.

Everyone starts somewhere.

How exactly do people think those of us who are self-taught got started?

I was picking apart other peoples' javascript to see how it worked years before I was taught anything about coding in a formal setting.

Pretty much this. My first programming experience was going through books/forums and copy-pasting stuff. It wasn't until years later that I cared to know how to create an actual project with an IDE.

I'd go with this old one: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extreme_programming

Also I feel old now, I think we _just_ did XP at a company, but that was almost a quarter century ago :D

"Vibe architecting" or maybe less pretentiously, "vibe orchestrating". I think that nicely encompasses thw workflow and required skillset. A very knowledgeable eng can orchestrate all the way but clearly nocode people are able to do this as well.

I think orchestration may be a step that can't really be magicked away by advancements, beyond toy implementations. Because at the end of the day it is just adding specific details to the idea. Sure, you can YOLO an idea and the LLMs can get better at magically cleaning things up, but the deeper you go the larger the drift will be from the concept and the reality without continued guidance.

If LLMs could construct buildings you might describe what you want room by room and the underlying structure will need to be heavily revamped at each addition. Unless you start with "I am making a 20 floor building" you are going to waste a lot of time having the LLM re-architect.

I think the real new skill people are going to get scary good at is rapid architecting without any strong awareness of how things work underneath the hood. This is the new "web programming isn't real programming" moment where future developers might not ever look at (or bother learning about!) variables or functions.

I mean this out of genuine curiosity, not as criticism: did she consider telling claude code to look for any duplicate functionality and remove it? Or even edit CLAUDE.md to tell it to check for duplicates after major refactors and remove them? I use CC every day at the moment and I would expect these sorts of instructions to work extremely well, especially in what appears to be relatively small codebase.

Once it became plain that there was duplicate functionality and that it was a problem, yeah, the first thing she did was tell Claude at a high level to factor out duplicate functionality.

This didn't really work - it would often implement a factored-out piece of logic but just leave the pre-existing code alone. So she had to be pretty specific about problem areas in order to actually push the refactoring plan forward.

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