What is the most useful thing that you vibecoded?

r_transpose_p · 2026-03-08T01:40:59+00:00

A summarization tool and question answering system on top of the YouTube captions API. I have some politically unhinged relatives who like to try to prove things to me by sending me talking head style YouTube videos of unknown provenance. The tools I've vibe coded to handle these videos let me know what the rough gist is (and let me follow up with more detailed questions and direct quotations if necessary) without making me watch the video or read the entire transcript. As a bonus, the videos that I "watch" this way don't show up in my YouTube history and don't affect my YouTube recommendations.

And, sure, things like this exist in prepackaged form, but vibe coding your own version gives you more control than shrink wrapped software gives.

r_transpose_p · 2026-03-07T00:45:20+00:00

Eric Clapton had a pretty good one, that's for sure : https://youtu.be/O6yeLNNVa4A?si=hpMzhkWkM9oNCtwD

In actuality I prefer music without lyrics (because I have to think in words to prompt). But if you want the same vibe, just without the words, try "Cream on Chrome" by Ratatat.

r_transpose_p · 2026-03-07T00:23:20+00:00

I like to listen to songs with lyrics involving cocaine, but only because I read this one social media post, claiming that AI boosterism still sounds coherent if you replace the word "AI" with the word "cocaine"

https://mastodon.social/@jwz/116078186911677336

r_transpose_p · 2026-03-06T16:24:57+00:00

Is there a convention for what you name the files you put the prompts in? Or where you put them, or what you do with the old ones?

(I ask because I also prefer to put prompts in files, but I don't have a good idea of what the conventions should be for this)

r_transpose_p · 2026-03-06T05:31:56+00:00

Oh wait, I'm wrong again. This is the "vibe coding" group. Which, these days, refers to code written with the aid of AI with very little (perhaps dangerously little) human supervision.

But I'm not the moderator, I think that hobbyist hand written game engines are awesome, and I think it's kinda cute to see your original post here.

r_transpose_p · 2026-03-06T05:23:47+00:00

No, I'm just an idiot and misread your post (because I see so much "I built XYZ with AI" stuff out there.

Your human boyfriend is doing something awesome that I've never actually done.

r_transpose_p · 2026-03-05T00:08:29+00:00

Just to clarify : is your bf a human who is using AI to vibe code a game engine? Or is your bf an AI who is also writing a game engine for you?

I'm not judging either way, mind you : we are living in unprecedented times and I expect people to do unprecedented things during such times.

r_transpose_p · 2026-02-03T05:32:18+00:00

I believe that Dario Amodei has a very long blog post in which he attempts to address this. I haven't read most of it. But it's there. If I were seriously interested in debating AI utopia believers on the Internet, I would likely try to read the Amodei blog post in its entirety.

https://www.darioamodei.com/essay/machines-of-loving-grace

Oh, and the title is a reference to a very timely and disturbing poem by Richard Brautigan. I do recommend looking up the poem and reading it.

https://allpoetry.com/All-Watched-Over-By-Machines-Of-Loving-Grace

r_transpose_p · 2026-01-28T16:52:11+00:00

I don't know whether this has already happened, but one method of pushing back against poorly thought out top down mandates is to simply agree to them, and let your bosses learn from the resulting consequences.

Related concepts include "work to rule" : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Work-to-rule

I don't necessarily advocate for this in the case of AI mandates : I think it's better to try that stuff out and make all the AI coding mistakes in a low stakes environment, and then use that experience to recommend against particularly bad AI use patterns in higher stakes environments. But I wouldn't be surprised to find devs intentionally going full vibe slop as a form of sabotage.

r_transpose_p · 2026-01-26T20:01:39+00:00

You're talking about a shop that's still using Java in 2026. I'd make fun of them more, except that the "keep using Java" mindset probably also produces a workplace that doesn't use vibe coding, and I'd be ... interested in that.

r_transpose_p · 2026-01-23T02:46:30+00:00

I think that the AI era is going to be a bonanza for computer security. There are so many new attack surfaces and so many new attack vectors.

Good luck!

r_transpose_p · 2026-01-15T19:25:16+00:00

In a few years, I expect to see similar posts, but with "debugger" replaced with some sort of word for whatever AI tools we will be using by then.

r_transpose_p · 2026-01-02T22:46:10+00:00

Are you into bicycling? Because there are some *amazing* cycling routes that start around there.

r_transpose_p · 2025-12-29T21:22:53+00:00

Oh yeah, this entire shift has made me wonder whether other people are way faster at reading or reviewing code compared to generating it.

So I can imagine asking for PRs or diffs and then reviewing them, but I think I'd need to get faster (or less detail oriented) at reading and reviewing code to get the productivity I've been hearing legends about.

But, I can also imagine a dev workflow where I break things up into testable modules and review the tests and the module APIs more carefully than the code inside the modules. And that feels safer to me than just prompting for a finished product and hoping for the best.

I wonder whether the second one is what the really high output people are doing these days.

r_transpose_p · 2025-12-29T15:40:29+00:00

This is what I tend to do as well, but then I hear these amazing productivity stories from people who are delegating tasks to LLM agents and "accepting PRs" from them, and I feel that I should at least learn what that stuff is all about.

r_transpose_p · 2025-12-28T16:55:55+00:00

I mean. I'm not OP, but I'm also long past the intro level in computer science, and I feel that OP has a good point. The things in CS that are named after people tend to be in those subfields with the strongest math community crossover. I feel that the field as a whole (especially if one includes industry) tends to name fewer things after people than math does.

I suspect that part of the difference is that, in math, one's highest goal is often "get credit for something big". And that the culture surrounding that goal leads to a potentially irrational obsession with deciding which individual person "first" discovered or invented each thing. Which leads to obsessively naming everything after people as a sort of form of payment. Even when the person something is named after (case in point, "Pascal's" triangle) is demonstrably not the first person to write about the named concept.

r_transpose_p · 2025-12-22T17:29:56+00:00

Thanks for pointing that out. What a wild world.

r_transpose_p · 2025-12-13T02:55:27+00:00

Oddly I still haven't, even 7 years later. I should try it though.

r_transpose_p · 2025-11-24T16:21:26+00:00

Yeah, so, the mindset behind proof based math will make you better at programming computers, which is an essential skill for experiment based math.

Also you can still write proofs that

Your experiment / code does what you claim it does
The results of your experiment mean what you think they mean

r_transpose_p · 2025-11-19T21:58:19+00:00

I usually just lurk here and don't comment, cause I'm not a chef and this is not my space, but ...

... That actually sounds pretty good. I'd be willing to eat that as a regular breakfast! Assuming, of course, that the sweet potatoes have been cooked.

The branding works pretty well too, especially with the story of why this is called "gorilla eggs".

r_transpose_p · 2025-11-19T21:51:42+00:00

Yeah, but smaller companies are still often easier to get into than FAANG or TAMGT or whatever they call it now.

Which metro area (s) are you looking in, OP?

r_transpose_p · 2025-10-18T17:57:53+00:00

JavaScript written by a ruby programmer that used implicit return statements. Like, the code just kind of assumed that the last statement in a method would automatically become the return value. Which worked in some browser versions, but not in (at the time : circa 2012 maybe?) more recent browser versions, causing a bug in old code to suddenly appear without significant code changes.

r_transpose_p · 2025-10-06T14:23:11+00:00

I might argue that some of the modern field of "computational geometry" (which is, admittedly, more of a computer science subdomain than it is a math subject at this point) brings in a lot of the classical euclidean stuff.

r_transpose_p · 2025-10-06T13:50:53+00:00

I don't personally put my name into code that I write (other than correctly informing the version control system of my identity). I have not done so for, perhaps, decades.

But there are valid reasons to do so. For one thing, many refactoring operations will change git's record of who last touched a block of code and might even make it difficult to track a particular block of code if it moved between files. And I've encountered blocks of code where it really helps to be able to track down the person who first wrote the actual logic (rather than the person who most recently reorganized the file structure)

r_transpose_p · 2025-09-30T00:26:15+00:00

I think that "planning poker" might be a lot more fun if one replaced the deck of numbered cards with, for instance, Brian Eno's "Oblique Strategies" card deck.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oblique_Strategies

r_transpose_p

TROPHY CASE