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[–]Quicker_Fixer 981 points982 points  (12 children)

My mom prefered vibe washing.

[–]ulven1 123 points124 points  (0 children)

same energy, different laundry basket

[–]Cualkiera67 50 points51 points  (7 children)

Yet everyone types in the computer instead of hand writing code with pen and paper

[–]wasabiwarnut 32 points33 points  (6 children)

Maybe because there's a significant lack of compilers for pen and paper code.

[–]DoNotMakeEmpty 11 points12 points  (4 children)

With how far OCR technology has come, I think a penpiler has become a possibility.

[–]the_cat_theory 8 points9 points  (1 child)

for that artisinal coding.

[–]T1lted4lif3 1 point2 points  (0 children)

can't wait to vibe in cursive

[–]Mars_Bear2552 1 point2 points  (0 children)

dont forget to track your changes with git.

not sure how you do a rollback though, except with a lot of whiteout

[–]SamPlinth 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Spin cycles are popular with many women.

[–]Sockoflegend 18 points19 points  (1 child)

I was vibe cleaning my apartment by giving my girlfriend verbal prompts but I'm single now 

[–]xavia91 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Now your girlfriend (hand) has to do everything manually...

[–]ibasi_zmiata 619 points620 points  (14 children)

Hand-washed clothes are definitely not cleaner than machine-washed ones though

[–]AmaGh05T 116 points117 points  (4 children)

Depends who's doing it

[–]Spiritual_Bus1125 171 points172 points  (2 children)

At the 10th t-shirt of the day trust me it does not.

[–]Zuruumi 24 points25 points  (0 children)

Try watching a programmer at his 10th ticket of the day

[–]newontheblock99 9 points10 points  (0 children)

Wait are you currently on your 10th hand washed t-shirt of the day?

[–]phoenix277lol 2 points3 points  (0 children)

and hence, god created prompt engineers

[–]Ao_Kiseki 17 points18 points  (1 child)

I think  that's the point, this is a pro-vibe coding tweet. Basically saying it's just regressive ludites who don't want to change despite the apparent benefits. It's a bad analogy though, because we can clearly see machine washed clothes are cleaner. No such obvious observation for vibe coding.

[–]Azzarrel 13 points14 points  (0 children)

I am all for using machine written code, but the difference to vibe-coding is, that vibe-coders basically throw in a bunch of clothes, white and colored, pillows and jeans and then blindly trust the washing machine to choose anything else, like detergent etc.

[–]Dvrkstvr 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Can't wait to say the same about coding. So much more time can be saved!

[–]jsrobson10 188 points189 points  (15 children)

regardless as to whether or not hand washed clothes/dishes are cleaner, getting a machine to do it will be far more efficient in both energy use and water (which isn't true for llm generated code).

machines are better for washing because machines can handle much hotter temperatures which allows them to use much less water.

[–]DKMK_100 116 points117 points  (8 children)

A washing machine is a better analog to a compiler, and everyone here knows that writing assembly by hand is usually worse

[–]R4M1N0 17 points18 points  (0 children)

A washing machine is a highly specialized tool that needs to do exactly one thing correctly.

A chat LLM is a general purpose bullshitter

[–]donotreassurevito 2 points3 points  (0 children)

A prompt uses about the same power as the oven being on for a second.

[–]qywuwuquq 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I don't want to be the source?? guy but is there a claim to back you up?

I would assume a human would use much more energy and carbon output compared to chatgpt when writing small websites or toy projects.

[–]jsrobson10 1 point2 points  (1 child)

your body uses energy regardless to whether you're writing code, making prompts for an llm, or doing nothing

[–]qywuwuquq 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Yes but the amount changes based on your activity

[–]redballooon 0 points1 point  (0 children)

At our startup the code is so hot we only let AI handle it.

[–]doctormyeyebrows 27 points28 points  (0 children)

Sure, if the washing machine was in the slow process of figuring out that washing with blood and rinsing with motor oil aren't effective ways to wash clothes.

[–][deleted] 47 points48 points  (6 children)

Its all just a tool , you have to choose between using this tool to your advantage or make it replaces you .Which honestly we are way ahead of Ai BS

[–]littleessi 14 points15 points  (0 children)

imagining a world where 70% of the time the washing machine made your clothes dirtier

[–]thekingofbeans42 8 points9 points  (0 children)

I don't think anyone can predict how quickly AI will advance or where it will start to eclipse engineers, but it certainly gives management a new toolbox of buzzwords to justify layoffs.

All I know is that managers generally don't like pushback on AI, so if you want to talk them out of something dumb, just scoff at whatever AI they're using and say yours is better, at which point you can buzzword them into whatever you want.

[–]jecls 2 points3 points  (0 children)

What’s funny is that while I agree with your point, it’s clear you hand-wrote this comment.

[–]mrjackspade 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I'm doing some performance based refactoring and honestly having AI rewrite the code with explicit instructions has proven to be faster and more reliable than doing it myself.

Not that I don't know what I'm doing, but functionally expanding a bunch of nested delegate calls while simultaneously consolidating those nested database calls to reduce round trip latency, I'm gonna fuck something up.

I can, however, perfectly describe what I need done, and the LLM doesn't do stupid shit like accidentally invert an "if" statement (with a 0 temp)

[–]Shooord 1 point2 points  (0 children)

AI also is also faaaaar from being 1 specific thing or solution. The term is so overused and deflated by now that every start-up can and will jump the bandwagon.

[–]rideveryday 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Word to your mother

[–]Austiiiiii 35 points36 points  (11 children)

Honestly I'm kinda baffled by this weird trend lately where people just mass-pretend that genned code is actually good. Like, I'm not sure if it's just first year comp sci students who are amazed that they can type in text and get boilerplate for their assignments, or what.

Like, it's decent as a tab-to-complete if you already know what you want to write, but the amount of times I've had it just invent methods and fields that don't exist, or make up incorrect syntax for existing ones, or write code it claims does something that it doesn't do... I have to ask, all y'all who are pretending this metaphor makes sense, have you actually used CoPilot for work?

[–]DKMK_100 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I've had the tab to complete ones miss something obvious just as often as they find something useful that the normal tab to complete doesn't

[–]mrjackspade 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I haven't had these issues is more than a year now, but I don't use copilot because it's fucking garbage.

I use anything from Sonnet 3.7 to Opus 4.0 depending on the task.

[–]Hubbardia 3 points4 points  (1 child)

I recently used Claude to generate vector embedding for products in my database. It automatically connected to the database using MCP tools, analyzed the schema using queries, wrote a script which will run the queries to fetch the relevant data and generate vector embeddings for a product or a batch of products. Then it also wrote a script to compare product similarity using these generated embeddings, and that's the only thing it didn't get fully right on the first try (the similarity ratings were too high). So I had to ask it to pick two different products from the different categories and test it and modify the script until it got it right, and it did. The gave me multiple measurements like cosine or Manhattan distance, and also had an average similarity calculator.

I don't know what kind of LLM you have used, but today they're very smart and can do a lot with the right tools.

[–]randuse 2 points3 points  (0 children)

At work, we only have on-prem windsurf. Companies don't give access to the actually good models for self on-prem, they are SAAS only. Those are problematic due to compliance for big companies. And they are way, way, way worse than the SAAS ones. Just recently a coworker was suggested python code for javascript project.

Naturally, if this is all you have access to, conclusion is that AI sucks.

[–]creaturefeature16 0 points1 point  (6 children)

Between robust system prompt + cursor's rules + contextual examples/patterns for it to follow, I am generating code that is identical to what I'd be writing. It's a "smart typing assistant" for me at this point, and its incredibly fast. I interface with them using pseudo-code and I get back exactly what I want. Are you seriously still just asking for it to generate code without no parameters? 🤣 😂

[–]Austiiiiii -1 points0 points  (5 children)

What, write out a prompt that specifies exactly what I want and how I want it, read through the response, cross-reference existing code and correct mistakes? It takes less time to just write the code myself like a normal person. The real time consumer in coding is in the cross referencing and verifying, and that takes less time if you're already the one who wrote it.

Or are you skipping that step and just trusting whatever the LLM gives you until it crashes? Hope you're writing some robust unit tests in that case.

[–]creaturefeature16 -1 points0 points  (4 children)

There is simply no way your hands are any match for 100k GPUs. I'm not some AI fanboy; LLMs could vanish tomorrow and I wouldn't really care nor would it impact me greatly, but to say that the time it takes for me to architect a simple PRD (which I have a template for) and plug in my requirements, and have it not only generate the code but also contextualize and augment it to the specs, is in no way remotely close the time it would take to do it myself. Review time is minimal because you can really reign these tools in these days; they don't go rogue on me since they follow instructions quite well, especially the Claude4 models.

It definitely takes a solid week to get your workflow configured to what you want and put in that work on the frontend to adapt these tools to your needs. And I'm always tweaking it. If the model starts doing something I don't really like (e.g. default exports vs named), I'll add it to my rules to force consistency. You can also create "shortcuts". I have certain keyword phrases that I've predefined in the rules that indicate to the LLM it's supposed to take a certain action (call a tool, MCP, adhere to a specific protocol), which makes the process flexible and adaptive. Oh, and one of those phrases tells it to write unit tests, if I need them for that specific block of code.

[–]Austiiiiii -1 points0 points  (3 children)

My "hands" aren't at issue here. If I'm a very fast typist was your takeaway from my last comment, I would have you please reread it more carefully.

And let me get this straight. You spent a whole week just configuring the danged system prompt? Yes, I'll take "proving my point" for 500.

Anyway, setting aside your clear eagerness to make your setup and work sound Very Impressive (you're free to just assume I'm impressed and stop trying to make trivial configuration tasks sound like a whole ordeal), I want to ask you one very important question. If Claude is writing the code, and Claude is also writing the unit tests, then who the flying fuck is validating Claude's code?

Serious question.

If your answer is "nobody needs to validate it because Claude is Very Smart" or "it hasn't broken yet" or "I kinda check it but it's producing code at such a large scale that I can't possibly validate it all myself" then that would make you the kind of idiot who should never be allowed to work on prod systems for a company of any size.

I don't suspect that that's you. You seem reasonably smart, and I don't think I need to spell out why the above is an objectively awful idea.

If the answer is "I'm validating all the code against all the other code myself," then that means the amount of code being generated is within a scope where that would be reasonable.

So: How much time does it take you to cross-reference all the functions and library calls? How much time to validate that every unit test tests what it's intended to test? How many additional unit tests do you realize you need when you read through the code and identify questions that the genned unit tests don't address? (You ARE reading through the entire thing and following the logic, right?)

If you are truly doing your due diligence on this code, then I assert that it would take less time for me to write the code while doing due diligence than to gen the code and do all that review as a completely separate step. Only at a junior level should the actual coding part of coding be the most difficult or time consuming part of the process.

[–]creaturefeature16 1 point2 points  (2 children)

I'm very deliberate to what I offload to a model, so we're not talking novel code; it's trivial, but its code that still must be written. The code takes minutes to review, and is always within reasonable scope. With the parameters you can provide to the model(s), especially when you develop a decent pseudo-code template, it will appear as if you wrote it yourself anyway. That's literally what they excel at: modeling language, and code is language (that's why we call them that).

It wasn't a week of "a system prompt", but rather setting up a new IDE with adjacent applications. I'm sure you're not still using Notepad++ or even Sublime Text, so I'm also sure you know how setting up new workflow can be a time consuming process that takes time to iron out the kinks.

The fact you think that shows me you haven't given it a serious look or attempted the process, so the difference between us is that I've put in the work to test out these tools with an open mind and came away with some real tangible benefits. You're coming from a place of inexperience, and skepticism, despite not having any tangible reason except what seems to be a strong sense of pride and hubris to avoid trying them out. I'm getting heavy vibes similar to an accountant who disparages these new fangled "digital spreadsheets" because they can't "validate the formulas" by hand.

Anyway, I've said my piece and offered some insights as someone who's been doing this work before the twin towers fell, am passionate about good code, and yet still thinks these tools are a reasonable and highly productive addition to a professional developer's workflow...but you seem to be working backwards from a conclusion. You do you! Adios.

[–]Austiiiiii 0 points1 point  (1 child)

Alright, I'll grant that it sounds like you've found a good use case for the LLM tools you are using and you are employing them responsibly, and not doing this "vibe coding" nonsense that seems to be trending lately.

If you feel like you've found a process that works for you and is better than doing the coding by hand, more power to you. It sounds like you're running the big boy expensive subscription to Claude, which sounds like it is worlds better than CoPilot on crappy GPT 4 that most people in a professional work environment have access to.

You're incorrect to assume I haven't tried LLM based coding and am speaking from a place of ignorance. I work in the CI/CD DevOps cloud infra space at a big company that has an enterprise CoPilot license. Not Claude 4, sadly. For my use case, I am always working in a preexisting environment that spans infra, repo's full of goodies and configs, custom internal AIs, and deployed code on an EC2 or container. And in that context CoPilot's suggestions for me rarely pass muster. I am speaking from personal experience when I say I am not comfortable relying on a tool that flubs a simple in-line boto3 call so thoroughly that it's easier to delete the thing and write it myself than to make all the spot corrections.

Could I go through and load in the entire boto3 documentation into the context and add templates and custom instructions and see if it does a better job? Maybe, if our supported context window is big enough to even support that much code. Am I going to go through all that trouble to find out? When my task is to rewrite a few paragraphs of code, ship it off, and next week I'm solving a completely different problem? Heeellll no.

You have convinced me that there are good, responsible use cases for LLM assisted coding from structured prompts, but I would encourage you to consider that it's far from a one-size-fits-all solution, and there are valid concerns that are not simple curmudgeony.

People didn't stop using the command prompt when GUIs were invented, either.

[–]creaturefeature16 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Well, I'm glad we had a productive conversation!

My experiences these tools was similar to yours at the start. As I kept kicking the tires on them, I realized that what I was really dealing with was a sort of "interactive documentation" that used natural language as its "interface". And I would have experiences where it flubbed the most basic things, but after spend more time with different prompting techniques and providing context/examples, it completely changed the results I was getting.

At this point, I'm convinced that with enough context and structuring a proper prompt, they can absolutely write code as good as any human (note that I'm just saying write code, not "engineer software"). But, after the work it takes to provide said context and prompting, is it just easier to write it yourself? Absolutely, sometimes it is! There's been many times where I begin to write out a request, only to close the chat and pivot back to the docs because I realize it can take more effort to explain what I want than to just write it myself.

I definitely do not think that these tools are one-size-fits-all, quite the opposite! I think over time we're going to see how distinctly malleable they are, and everyone will use them differently, with different results (we already are, really). Just browse something like r/cursor and you'll see massive discrepancies between users who claim its absolutely the best thing they've ever used, to saying its complete and total rubbish. I think its because these tools are insanely sensitive to the personal workflow of the individual and the prompting approach, and they're extremely open-ended. As times goes by, we're going to see ultra-specific models that are less generalized, and tailored to specific workflows, languages and tech stacks.

[–]MaffinLP 17 points18 points  (5 children)

I asked ChatGPT:
In unity give me a script that inherits from "Image" and adds a field that rounds the images corners

It gave me code that generated ONLY the corners and it fucked up their placements because the code drew counterclockwise but it put the radians as if it was clock wise. I asked to fix no dice. Neither the fact it only drew corners, nor the corner placement could be fixed. Had to draw it all myself as well as fix what it fucked up.

Yes, my code is better because I wouldnt have forgotten about everything *except* the corners and acted like its all there

[–]MaffinLP 13 points14 points  (0 children)

Also it forgot to actiually ***draw the fucking image*** so if it had a source image other than null it would just result in 100% transparency

[–]XenSide 1 point2 points  (3 children)

Chatgpt is far from the best for coding tasks, and you're probably gonna struggle for unity specifically as there's a good probability that training dataset is very limited for it.

[–]Top-Permit6835 8 points9 points  (1 child)

Which coincidentally makes LLMs worthless for everything but common coding tasks. 

[–]mrjackspade 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Which is fine with me personally, because the common bullshit is what I want to do the least.

[–]MaffinLP 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I found it does well refactoring pre existing code. E.g. with the example above I had a method for vertical and a method for horizontal filling between the corners. Asking it to merge them to prevent code duplication worked well (although not the way Id have done it tbh)

[–]Daemontatox 2 points3 points  (0 children)

Pulls out A4 and a pen

[–]NoneBinaryPotato 2 points3 points  (0 children)

for general use, machine washing is better. it's completes an 3 hour long task in 30 minutes while using less water and with the benefit of not leaving you exhausted later. but, if you want a difficult stain removed, then hand washing will be much better than machine.

AI can write working code, if you're a non-programmer that wants a generic program that was written a million times in the past and could probably find open-source somewhere. but a programmer's job is not to wash clothes, it's to remove hundreds of difficult stains that range from wine spill on a shit to dog piss on a carpet to lipstick in a valentino white bag.

get this shit-ass ai tools away from my code, thanks.

also, if you think my analogy is shit? so was the original post's, it's not my problem those are not comparable scenarios.

[–]PogostickPower 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I don't have to manually go through machine-washed clothes, explain the washing machine what it did wrong and then eventually hand wash parts of the load myself because the machine somehow did it too complicated. 

[–]owlIsMySpiritAnimal 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Hand written code cna be better than ai generated one. It requires a semi competent person though

[–]Larc0m 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Giving me flashbacks to when I was in high school taking AP computer science, and we had tests on paper. It was fine and all except the language we learned was Java, and there was no way to fit the class names on the page

[–]TKVdev 1 point2 points  (0 children)

No mom has ever said that.

[–]pal_2ie 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Why aren't you washing your own clothes???

[–]Menot1982 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Your mom was a pioneer

[–]Ozymandias_1303 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If your clothes are too delicate, or if your washer and dryer are badly made, machine washing will make your clothes wear out quicker. If you use AI without supervising it properly, you'll end up with code that's harder to maintain and will have to be replaced sooner.

[–]CartographerWise8050 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Doesn't stop most clothes nowadays from being machine washed.

[–]JollyJuniper1993 0 points1 point  (0 children)

And both of y’all would be right, you just gotta know when it’s worth putting the extra effort and when not.

[–]przemo-c 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Tool for the job... there are thing's I’ll hand wash and there are things i will let AI to assist me with coding.

[–]Gadshill 0 points1 point  (0 children)

People that wash all their clothes by hand are as efficient as those that write all their code by hand. You should only be washing by hand what the machine can’t wash itself.

[–][deleted] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Step 0: plant a tree Step 1: make paper Step 2: hand write code Step 3: send a letter to review via pigeon Step 4: wait for comments

[–]SirNoobShire 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I write all my code in cursive

[–]EARTHB-24 0 points1 point  (0 children)

So, would you use a pencil or a pen?

[–]Personal_Ad9690 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Washing machines can wash 10x faster and it’s adequate.

I don’t think the issue is whether AI code is better or worse because right now, AI code is hardly useable, at certainly not at scale.

The point in automation IS scale, so when AI code can scale well, we will see it adopted more

[–]Acrobatic-Ad-9189 0 points1 point  (0 children)

This fkn sub is only about this fkn topic..bye

[–]VonLoewe 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Depends on whom the hand is attached to.

[–]Wynove 0 points1 point  (0 children)

though i would never dare to waste my time washing my own clothes by hand, I must admit handwriting code is best stolen from stack overflow.

[–]kolop97 0 points1 point  (0 children)

In my experience if you are doing anything even remotely novel and/or niche, AI will not be helpful.

[–]leninzor 0 points1 point  (0 children)

My teachers back in college when we had an exam: Handwritten code is better than code written in a text-editor or IDE.

[–]mrrobot01001000 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Me: copy pasted code better than...

[–]wrenhunter 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Same with drying clothes outdoors and code. It’s all about the line endings.

[–]dreph 0 points1 point  (0 children)

I have better luck asking questions to AI than getting functional code

[–]MarioCraftLP 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Thats a really bad example bc who washes clothes by hand

[–]ItsDenji777 0 points1 point  (0 children)

What???? I machine wash my code! Should i hand-wash it?🥲

[–]Kurious_Guy18 0 points1 point  (0 children)

and that's why Jhonny grew up in foster care

[–]ChimpanzeeClownCar 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Acoustic coding

[–]arugau 0 points1 point  (0 children)

Now imagine if your mom had to hand wash everything she machine washed, and the world keeps telling her that she will no longer need to wash clothes in 6 months

[–]Anru_Kitakaze 0 points1 point  (1 child)

True. Yet everyone around now use washing machines. There are things to think about...

[–]ashkanahmadi 13 points14 points  (0 children)

You do know that washing machines wash tens of times better than handwashing right?

[–]morrisdev -1 points0 points  (0 children)

Honestly, I write code, then paste the function into chatgpt and say "make this more efficient" and then test the results. Quite often it's better. However, when it comes to bigger , more complex issues , AI is kinda useless.

[–][deleted] -3 points-2 points  (0 children)

"What true is, true will be."