Hacker News Reader

Comment by readitalready | Hacker News Reader

I let agents break things 30 changes down the line. If something breaks, I add a check to my project validator and start over, with the validator providing instructions on what was wrong and how to fix it. It's all automatic, and now I have a guard against the exact same error in the future.

Some of these checks have caught thousands of the same error, even with the latest Opus 4.7 writing the original code.

View on HN

You proved that testing is a good idea, not that vibe coding is a good idea.

To be honest, I am past the point of wanting to convince people that AI is useful, if you want to refuse new tools other people find helpful, your loss.

(Also I stick to the original definition of "vibe coding = not looking at generated code", "LLM assisted coding = verify generated code", I do both, depending on the task)

So basically your only test is "it compiles" since you have no idea what it's actually testing.

How do you think the tests were generated?

You don't actually think I look at the code, do you?

Down the line the agent is no longer able to fix one failure without causing another and the codebase is unsalvageable, but you may not have reached that point yet.

Agents can help a lot when you carefully review everything they output and find all the time bombs they like hiding in your code and your tests. If not, then they're fine for codebases that don't need to last more than a year or two.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com