The cult of vibe coding is insane

It’s truly strange that people keep citing the quality of Claude code’s leaked source as if it’s proof vibe coding doesn’t work.

If anything, it’s the exact opposite. It shows that you can build a crazy popular & successful product while violating all the traditional rules about “good” code.

> That wouldn’t even be a big violation of the vibe coding concept. You’re reading the innards a little but you’re only giving high-level, conceptual, abstract ideas about how problems should be solved. The machine is doing the vast majority, if not literally all, of the actual writing.

Claude Code is being produced at AI Level 7 (Human specced, bots coded), whereas the author is arguing that AI Level 6 (Bots coded, human understands somewhat) yields substantially better results. I happen to agree, but I'd like to call out that people have wildly different opinions on this; some people say that the max AI Level should be 5 (Bots coded, human understands completely), and of course some people think that you lose touch with the ground if you go above AI Level 2 (Human coded with minor assists).

[0] https://visidata.org/ai

It looks vibe coding, or at AI coding in general, has been challenging a few empirical laws:

- Brooks' No Silver Bullet: no single technology or management technique will yield a 10-fold productivity improvement in software development within a decade. If we write a spec that details everything we want, we would write soemthing as specific as code. Currently people seem to believe that a lot of the fundamentals are well covered by existing code, so a vague lines of "build me XXX with YYY" can lead to amazing results because AI successfully transfers the world-class expertise of some engineers to generate for such prompt, so most of the complex turns to be accidental, and we only need much fewer engineers to handle essential complexities.

- Kernighan's Law, which says debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Now people are increasingly believing that AI can debug way faster than human (most likely because other smart people have done similar debugging already). And in the worst case, just ask AI to rewrite the code.

- Dijkstra on the foolishness of programming in natural language. Something along the line of which a system described in natural language becomes exponentially harder to manage as its size increases, whereas a system described in formal symbols grows linearly in complexity relative to its rules. Similar to above, people start to believe otherwise.

- Lehman’s Law, which states that as a system's complexity increases as it evolves, unless work is done to maintain or reduce it. Similar to above, people start to believe otherwise.

- And remotely Coase's Law, which argues that firms exist because the transaction costs of using the open market are often higher than the costs of directing that same work internally through a hierarchy. People start to believe that the cost of managing and aligning agents is so low that one-person companies that handle large number of transactions will appear.

Also, ultimately Jevons Paradox, as people worry that the advances in AI will strip out so much demand that the market will slash more jobs than it will generate. I think this is the ultimate worry of many software engineers.

Intereting times.

This is the guy that created bittorrent, btw. I know that was a long time ago, but he's not just some random blogger.

This is nearly as dumb as the post that "Claude code is useless because your home built "Slack App" won't be globally distributed, with multi-primary databases and redis cache layer... and won't scale beyond 50k users".

As if 97% of web apps aren't just basic CRUD with some integration to another system if you are lucky.

99% of companies won't even have 50k users.

My favorite uses of Claude code is to do code quality improvements that would be seen as a total waste of time if I was doing them by hand, but are perfectly fine when they are done mostly for free. Looking for repetitive patterns in unit tests/functional tests. Making sure that all json serialization is done in similar patterns unless there's a particularly good reason. Looking for functions that are way too complicated, or large chunks of duplication.

The PRs that it comes with are rarely even remotely controversial, shrink the codebase, and are likely saving tokens in the end when working on a real feature, because there's less to read, and it's more boring. Some patterns are so common you can just write them down, and throw them at different repos/sections of a monorepo. It's the equivalent of linting, but at a larger scale. Make the language hesitant enough, and it won't just be a steamroller either, and mostly fix egregrious things.

But again, this is the opposite of the "vibe coding" idea, where a feature appears from thin air. Vibe Linting, I guess.

"Laughing" at how bad the code in Claude Code is really seems to be missing the forest for the trees. Anthropic didn't set out to build a bunch of clean code when writing Claude Code. They set out to make a bunch of money, and given CC makes in the low billions of ARR, is growing rapidly, and is the clear market leader, it seems they succeeded. Given this, you would think you'd would want to approach the strategy that Anthropic used with curiosity. How can we learn from what they did?

There's nothing wrong with saying that Claude Code is written shoddily. It definitely is. But I think it should come with the recognition that Anthropic achieved all of its goals despite this. That's pretty interesting, right? I'd love to be talking about that instead.

This reminds me of Clayton Christensen's theory of disruption.

Disruption happens when firms are disincentivized to switch to the new thing or address the new customer because the current state of it is bad, the margins are low. Intel missed out on mobile because their existing business was so excellent and making phone chips seemed beneath them.

The funny thing is that these firms are being completely rational. Why leave behind high margins and your excellent full-featured product for this half-working new paradigm?

But then eventually, the new thing becomes good enough and overtakes the old one. Going back to the Intel example, they felt this acutely when Apple switched their desktops to ARM.

For now, Claude Code works. It's already good enough. But unless we've plateaued on AI progress, it'll surpass hand crafted equivalents on most metrics.

In my opinion there are two main groups on the spectrum of "vibe coding". The non technical users that love it but don't understand software engineering enough to know what it takes to make a production grade product. The opposite are the AI haters that used chatgpt 3.5 and decided LLM code is garbage.

Both of these camps are the loudest voices on the internet, but there is a quiet but extremely productive camp somewhere in the middle that has enough optimism, open mindedness along with years of experience as an engineer to push Claude Code to its limit.

I read somewhere that the difference between vibe coding and "agentic engineering" is if you are able to know what the code does. Developing a complex website with claude code is not very different than managing a team of off shore developers in terms of risks.

Unless you are writing software for medical devices, banking software, fighter jets, etc... you are doing a disservice to your career by actively avoiding using LLMs as a tool in developing software.

I have used around $2500 in claude code credits (measured with `bunx ccusage` ) the last 6 months, and 95% of what was written is never going to run on someone else's computer, yet I have been able to get ridiculous value out of it.

> Then I explain what I think should be done and we’ll keep discussing it until I stop having more thoughts to give and the machine stops saying stupid things which need correcting.

Users like the author must be the most valuable Claude asset, because AI itself isn't a product — people's feedback that shapes output is.

I think it's becoming clear we're not anywhere near AGI, we figured out how to vectorize our knowledge bases and replay it back. We have a vectorized knowledge base, not an AI.

> In this particular case, a human could have told the machine: “There’s a lot of things that are both agents and tools. Let’s go through and make a list of all of them, look at some examples, and I’ll tell you which should be agents and which should be tools. We’ll have a discussion and figure out the general guidelines. Then we’ll audit the entire set, figure out which category each one belongs in, port the ones that are in the wrong type, and for the ones that are both, read through both versions and consolidate them into one document with the best of both.”

But that isn't the hard part. The hard part is that some people are using the tool versions and some are using the agent versions, so consolidating them one way or another will break someone's workflow, and that incurs a real actual time cost, which means this is now a ticket that needs to be prioritized and scheduled instead of being done for free.

They think their dog food tastes great now, not because they improved it any, but because they've forgotten the taste of human food. Karmically hilarious.

"Ladran, Sancho, señal que cabalgamos"

The ship has sailed. Vibe coding works. It will only work better in the future.

I have been programming for decades now, I have managed teams of developers. Vibe coding is great, specially in the hands of experts that know what they are doing.

Deal with it because it is not going to stop. In the near future it will be local and 100x faster.

I've been a skeptic about LLMs in general since I first heard of them. And I'm a sysadmin type, more comfortable with python scripts than writing "real" software. No formal education in coding at all other than taking Harvard's free online python course a few years ago.

So I set out to build an app with CC just to see what it's like. I currently use Copilot (copilot.money) to track my expenditures, but I've become enamored with sankey diagrams. Copilot doesn't have this charting feature, so I've been manually exporting all my transactions and massaging them in the sankey format. It's a pain in the butt, error prone, and my python skills are just not good enough to create a conversion script. So I had CC do it. After a few minutes of back and forth, it was working fine. I didn't care about spaghetti code at all.

So next I thought, how about having it generate the sankey diagrams (instead of me using sankeymatic's website). 30 minutes later, it had a local website running that was doing what I had been manually doing for months.

Now I was hooked. I started asking it to build a native GUI version (for macOS) and it dutifully cranked out a version using pyobjC etc. After ironing out a few bugs it was usable in less than 30 min. Feature adds consumed all my tokens for the day and the next day I was brimming with changes. Burned through that days tokens as well and after 3 days (I'm on the el cheapo plan), I have an app that basically does what I want in a reasonable attractive, and accurate manner.

I have no desire to look at the code. The size is relatively small, and resource usage is small as well. But it solved this one niche problem that I never had the time or skill to solve.

Is this a good thing? Will I be downvoted to oblivion? I don't know. I'm very very concerned about the long term impact of LLMs on society, technology and science. But it's very interesting to see the other side of what people are claiming.

> The AI is very bad at spontaneously noticing, “I’ve got a lot of spaghetti code here, I should clean it up.” But if you tell it this has spaghetti code and give it some guidance (or sometimes even without guidance) it can do a good job of cleaning up the mess.

Set up an AI bot to analyze the code for spaghetti code parts and clean up these parts to turn it into a marvel. :-)

OT: I really enjoy Bram's takes, he's brilliant and prickly in the best ways.

I feel like vibe coding a product is functionally the same as prototyping.

In the past, which is a different country, we would throw away the prototypes.

Nowadays vibe coding just keeps adding to them.

I had to stop reading halfway through this article, my straw allergy had me sneezing uncontrollably at all the strawmen in there!

No, I completely disagree with this entire article.

Bad code or good code is no longer relevant anymore. What matters is whether or not AI fulfills the contract as to how the application is supposed to work. If the code sucks, you just rerun the prompt again and the next iteration will be better. But better doesn't matter because humans aren't reading the code anymore. I haven't written a line of code since January and I've made very large scale improvements to the products I work on. I've even stopped looking at the code at all except a cursory look out of curiosity.

Worrying about how the sausage is made is a waste of time because that's how far AI has changed the game. Code doesn't matter anymore. Whether or not code is spaghetti is irrelevant. Cutting and pasting the same code over and over again is irrelevant. If it fulfills the contract, that's all that matters. If there's a bug, you update the contract and rerun it.

almost as insane as your dumb crypto project

Can they ask the Claude to clean up the duplication etc its English code?

the simple truth is all code is garbage

Do you guys remember the cult of git or the containerization cult? Damn, I hate the advancement ;D

> I’ll start a conversation by saying “Let’s audit this codebase for unreachable code,” or “This function makes my eyes bleed,” and we’ll have a conversation about it until something actionable comes up. Then I explain what I think should be done and we’ll keep discussing it until I stop having more thoughts

This is painful to read. It feels like rant from person who does not use version control, testing and CI.

It is cruel to force machine into guessing game with a todler whose spec is "I do not like it". If you have a coding standarts and preferences, they should be already destiled and exlained somewhere, and applied automatically (like auto linter in not so old days). Good start is to find OS projects you like, let claude review it, and generate code rule. Than run it on your code base over night, until it passes tests and new coding standarts automated code review.

The "vibe coding" is you run several agants in parallel, sometimes multiple agents on the same problem with different approach, and just do coding reviews. It is mistake to have a synchronous conversation with a machine!

This type of works needs severe automation and parallelisation.

Capital. Owners. Hate. Labor.

You are a cog, an unfortunately necessary (currently) cost that needs to be reduced because you're decreasing profits.

This same thing has been a tension in Hollywood for many, many years. Studio execs hate creatives. They want to reduce everything they do to a formula that can be repeated en masse. It's why we get so many sequals and, most recently, so many reboots of existing properties. The real boon of streaming was that it allowed the studios to dismantle the residual system that kept people working in the industry.

You, as a software engineer, are not special. Your leadership hates you because they need you and every dollar you cost is a dollar taken from profits. It doesn't matter that you produce more value than you cost. They will still actively suppress your wages whenever they can. They will collude with other companies to do it. In the 2000s there was the hiring cartel with Apple, Google, etc. Since the pandemic, it's the ever-present layoffs that only exist to suppress wages and get more unpaid labor. People who are in fear of losing their job aren't asking for raises.

Vibe coding is just another effort to suppress engineering salaries. That's why it was created. That's why management likes it.

Management would use you as fertilizer if there was an uptick in the stock if they could get away with it.

> So pure vibe coding is a myth. But they’re still trying to do it, and this leads to some very ridiculous outcomes

creating a product in a span of mere months that millions of developers use everday is opposite of ridiculous. we wouldn't even have known about the supposed ridiculousness of code if it hadnt leaked.

what about the cult vibe projecting every business logic agentic?

> You don’t have to have poor quality software just because you’re using AI for coding.

People were given faster typers with incredible search capabilities and decided quality doesn’t matter anymore.

I don’t even mean the code. The product quality is noticeably sub par with so many vibe-coded projects.

Keep raging into the night, old guard.

I think the vibe-coding-deniers have move of a cult vibe, personally.

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AI is just another layer of abstraction. I'm sure the assembly language folks were grumbling about functions as being too abstracted at one point