I've vibe coded an application to see what it's like | Hacker News Reader

I've vibe coded an application to see what it's like

rz01.org

15 pointsexitnode25 comments

   - As a professional developer, I would find it very frustrating to have to debug someone else's code and also be held responsible for that code.
   
   - As a hobbyist developer, it would bother me that I'm no longer a developer.

These two statements articulate my feelings about LLM-generated code better than I have heretofore been able to do myself.

Happy to hear that you feel the same!

"As a professional developer, I would find it very frustrating to have to debug someone else's code and also be held responsible for that code." Are you really a professional programmer? A very basic responsibility for many professionals are maintaining someone else's code.

No, I am not. I just imagined how I would feel as a professional developer.

What do you mean by "someone else's code"? Because, if I am taking responsibility for it, it is not "someone else's," it is—at least in part—my code. I am not in a position to say "this is someone else's," professionally speaking.

I cannot speak for the author of the article, but for my own part, I find it frustrating to take responsibility for code which no one else believes they should own. This can come about when professionals abdicate their responsibility because "AI wrote it," i.e., it's "someone else's code."

Examples:

  - When you are working in a team, you always take responsibility of the code your team mates has written, (review, maintain, bugfix, extend, refactor..)
  - Sometimes organizations reorg and you land in owning already written code by some other team (whole takeover)
  - Some other times you take a position to maintain and fix, refactor, bugfix an unknown codebase. You will work on this and leave. So it is never your code. (can be whole takeover, can be temporary ownership)

That makes sense. For me, being "responsible," becoming the new "owner," and "debugging" code which I did not write, can each be frustrating.

With regard to LLM generated code, the frustration often comes from there not being a previous "someone" who had been responsible for the code; or rather, the original author was in my opinion, irresponsible, and I must assume responsibility.

To your earlier point, I think your examples can be frustrating regardless of whether or not you're a professional—it being a regular part of the job notwithstanding.

That's my point. It should not be frustrating. It's part of the job. A responsibility a professional should be ready for.

On the part of vibe coded code, it can be a "bad code base" and readily so it's very understandable that reading it can be frustrating. However it could also be very well written. LLM written code can be considered a codebase that was written by a large portion of the developer community all together. It's not coming from some software. Software curated that from human written code one word at a time.

The interpretation of the quote which resonated with me is that, in my experience as a professional code writer, I find it frustrating to take responsibility for code which was written by someone who themselves did not engineer the code responsibly. In my experience, LLMs have made irresponsible software development significantly easier, faster, and cheaper relative to their impact on responsible software development. This is frustrating, especially given my belief that LLMs are one of the most significant tools we have today.

I don't think we agree on the definition of "professional" as it does or does not relate to what one feels (let alone what one should or should not feel), exclusive of what one does. I.e., I believe one can feel frustrated whilst also being professionally responsible... they can also feel frustrated and act irresponsibly, or any combination of feelings and actions. Part of professionalism to me is, in fact, performing one's responsibilities regardless of what one feels.

Well I have to agree on both counts.

Perhaps what "feel frustrating" needs to be agreed upon. I took it as I would not like to do this as I feel it to be kind of distasteful, not as I would take this but the code would be confusing.

"...I can’t really call “vibe coding”. I didn’t code. I didn’t even look at the code"

I thought that was the definition of vibe coding?

Yes, but maybe the author disagrees with the term? I mean, can you even call it "coding" when you don't handle any code?

Sure, you can disagree with it being "coding" or not, but "vibe coding" as used in the general vernacular means exactly what the author did. It's kind of silly to say "I disagree that green is the word that should be applied to the color of plants", it is what the word is. We don't all get to set our own personal definitions

That's exactly what the guy who invented the term "vibe coding" did :)

Anyone can decide what words mean to them, and if enough people agree with you, you can use them to communicate!

The word "green" isn't composed of multiple words with their own meaning. A better example would be objecting to guinea pigs being called guinea pigs because they're not actually swine.

This. I don't think it is coding although I have only scratched the surface of all this. Right now, it's more like instructing someone/something to code for me.

> I can code in Python myself. Not particularly well, but I can get done what I want or need to get done. What happened today, I can’t really call “vibe coding”. I didn’t code. I didn’t even look at the code. My role was that of a client or project manager who contracted someone/thing else to code for money. Furthermore, I was also the QA guy testing the application and giving feedback to Claude.

We did a hackathon at work recently, and this was definitely one thing I learned during the process of our team using Claude to do the whole thing. (Using Claude was an explicit stated goal of the hackathon, fwiw; every team did this.)

It felt very strange.

You should look at the code. It sucks. It will make you feel sick. It does the thing but you are right - you won’t want to maintain it. It makes you feel hollow inside like when you are coming down from acid

Coming down from acid makes you feel hollow?

I did that too[1], twice[2] :-).

[1] https://seaquel.app

[2] https://github.com/webstonehq/tuxedo

a bit off-topic, and you've probably already tried this, but if you want a really nerdy way to log qso, try FLE in a text editor:

https://github.com/on4kjm/FLEcli

Thank you for the suggestion but yes, I already know it. I've even written a FLE syntax highlighting plugin for vim: https://rz01.org/vim-fle-syntax/ :)

Ive downloaded a coding harness and using local llm to improve self hosting and security.

Seems fairly easy but whereas hand coding i run into bugs that are some dark corner of the code,now i do the same but cant do more than yell at the LLM to do better.

Im still saving time but the different types of bugs are fascinating.

>now i do the same but cant do more than yell at the LLM to do better.

Don't forget to add "Make no mistakes" to the prompt

Nice take.

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