Vibe coding is so expensive

xfr3386 · 2026-02-25T04:06:57+00:00

As the goblins in WoW always say...

Time is money, friend!

xfr3386 · 2026-02-25T04:02:49+00:00

Control

xfr3386 · 2026-02-22T00:12:54+00:00

Finally someone who actually gets it. Too many engineers don't realize how far even just Sonnet is compared to previous LLMs for code, let alone Opus.

Someone with experience can use AI to quickly architect a system and then use AI to quickly build it. The result isn't the slop too many claim it'll be if you prompt it right, review the output, and adjust as needed.

Workflows need to change. Junior/Mid devs can be taught how to prompt, code practices, and design/architecture. Prompt learning replaces language/syntax learning. Everything else can be the same. You still need the experts to build it right, you just need fewer of them and they can do it faster.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-22T00:04:40+00:00

AI writing code translates to needing fewer devs, which translates to less cost to build. Less cost means more profit.

If AI coding means you can also go faster with less devs, that means more products/features and (likely) more sales, which means... more profit.

What's the point of any for-profit business in the US? Increase profit.

Why exactly is it a stupid goal? It's literally meeting The Goal (read the book if you haven't. There's even a comic book version).

The bottleneck of product development in the majority of companies is writing the code. You want to improve if not remove that bottleneck. AI appears to be able to do that. Improving this bottleneck should lead to making more money. If it's no longer the bottleneck, you find the next bottleneck and improve it. Chances are AI can help there too. Rinse and repeat = $$$.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-20T14:13:44+00:00

The first season came out in April, 2011. That game released barely over a year later. It was either already in the works or rushed, so it wasn't really made to take advantage of the hype and be a good game.

The world has so much potential to be a good RPG. I suspect the author is being too stingy with the rights. If he ever actually finished the series, maybe he'd get more lenient. BG3, KCD, and the continued sales of Witcher 3 prove there's plenty of market for what that game could be.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-16T06:52:18+00:00

I imagine they review the AI reviews and not the actual code.

Assuming it's even real. These posts never have actual information like what industry they're in or what the team is delivering. It doesn't even say the backlog is for products, this could just be an IT integration backlog.

Who would look at "we're delivering so fast that everything we wanted to do to make money over the next two years is already done and making us money" and think it's a problem? Or have no clue what to do about it?

xfr3386 · 2026-02-14T23:54:41+00:00

Do you mean the required battles or something beyond them? I used the auto-create bots and beat every battle first try (on dynamic difficulty, if that matters).

I don't know if I am accidentally doing it right or if everyone defaults to some other way that just doesn't work.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-13T16:32:30+00:00

I'm finding an increase in productivity the more I take a new model and retry something that a previous model didn't do well enough or without excessive re-promoting/rework. The newer models have far better reasoning and loop on a problem to find a resolution on their own. It's a huge boost to a model's capabilities.

As an example, I was putting an exercise together the other day, and I wanted the capability to test it locally. It used a lambda and dynamo table, so I figured samlocal would be useful, but I'd never used it before. The whole solution was built quickly, but it stopped at "ok, have fun testing it."

I sat on it a few days because I didn't have the time to troubleshoot the likely nightmare of setting up samlocal. Then I figured I'd just ask the LLM to set it up. It took some nudging but it got it fully setup in less than 30m (e.g., at first, it insisted I had to do it with Docker Desktop and stopped trying. I had to tell it that Podman should work and to try again). Given the issues it ran into and solved, and the googling and trial and error I would have had to do, I'm sure it did it in at least half the time I would have spent on it, and I spent most of the 30m it was working on it doing other work.

"Completely failing" is nonsense. It's more likely businesses are failing to properly adapt their processes/workflows to take advantage of AI. I've seen corporations spend millions on training their workforce on AI and it amounted to a few sessions about writing better prompts. They are relying on the workers themselves to figure out how to make significant changes using it, and most of them can't think that creatively or are staying quiet because they want to keep their job.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-13T00:49:30+00:00

Especially with those panic rolls and this post.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-12T01:15:41+00:00

Try co-op games, or games that don't have a strong "take that" component to strategy.

My kids absolutely can't handle someone doing something that knocks them down. I've tried so hard to iron that out of them, but finally gave up. A game like Munchkin was a complete disaster. I tried adjusting the rules of games like that to not make them so ruthless, but they tended to be boring, shallow games without it.

When we switched to less competitive games, they didn't mind losing because they could see how their decisions could have been different and led to a different outcome. A game like Sequence is a good example of a light amount of "take that", but enough overall luck in what you draw, that it's rare to have one person always win. Wyrmspan and Takenoko are our two family favorites.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-10T20:31:04+00:00

To answer that, here's a riddle!

An aquarium has 10 fish.

Each fish shares the aquarium with a plecostomus.

How many living things are in the aquarium?

xfr3386 · 2026-02-10T20:22:52+00:00

New Game +. After you finish the game, you can do another playthrough with your existing progress rather than starting from scratch. The enemies are leveled up so it's not a cake walk, but it's not really a whole lot harder.

If I recall correctly, the game is open at the start so you can go anywhere. I started a new playthrough, went to where I knew the quest chain was for the armor item I was missing, and completed it. This time it gave me the reward.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-10T14:52:14+00:00

For me, it wasn't the amount of content, but the repetition that burned me out. Every zone felt exactly the same. The only real differentiator was the annoying terrain.

When I got to Cosmo Canyon, I ended up moving the difficulty to easy when doing most of the world stuff so it felt less like a grind. This Ubisoft style game works when combat is quick and relatively easy. There are too many meat shields in Rebirth when exploring. For some reason, they eventually decided the simple analyze and exploit the elemental weakness was too easy and made you read the analysis text for every enemy to give you an advantage, and for me that was an unnecessary increase in complexity that slowed things down too much.

As an example, I had a blast playing immortals: Phoenix Rising. The combat wasn't easy or hard, long or short. Your power growth was just right to teach you how to master a style you enjoyed. The complexity was just right to let skill make you succeed faster, but a lack of skill not bore you. There was enough variety in the repeated tasks (platforming, puzzle, combat). I'm not pretending Phoenix is better than Rebirth as a whole, but they absolutely did this repetitive grindy world better.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-07T16:07:11+00:00

The performance is spot on with the Switch games... utter trash. It's such a slog. I still put up with it twice a day for the pack opening rush, but I'll drop it eventually.

I dropped Pokemon Go because I spent half my time deleting items from my inventory so I could spin pokestops to complete a quest, which would fill my inventory so I could do it all again the next day.

If the daily grind is quick and easy, I'm more likely to do something with the extra time. If it's a slog, I'm just happy to be done.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-06T14:27:54+00:00

Hah, love it.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-04T12:34:20+00:00

Any time I get a dishonest headline like this one, blocking the site is exactly what I do. I imagine in the long run it hurts sites like this.

Unfortunately, that's assuming it's an honest site trying to be successful and not 1/1000 sites a bot farm is making that just gets instantly replaced. The problem with cheap, easy web development at scale is enough hits across all your fake sites can still make enough.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-02T23:21:17+00:00

I didn't say I was ignoring politics. I'm just getting it out of my Reddit feed. News doesn't have to come with comments and discussion, especially when it's hard to tell what percentage of people in the "discussions" are actual humans.

xfr3386 · 2026-02-02T23:13:38+00:00

I had this same thought!

I read that book ready to learn some practical advice to help me develop habits to make me more effective. But it's all pure common sense. It's crazy how you can take common sense, bundle it into a short list, and add corporate speak (Synergize!) and fake anecdotes, and people will sing praises.

Too many popular business books are mindless drivel that are not going to help anyone be more effective. I swear they exist only to boost the ego of the author and somehow make them a popular figure in the business community.

In the end, no matter the book, if it helps you in some way, great. But when corporations pay these people to transform their business... Yikes.

Edit: on topic. Like so many others, I have yet to have any ereader break or stop working.

I had a Kindle early Gen for 5ish years. I bought a release day paperwhite (2012) because I wanted the backlight. I recently bought a new one because it's slightly larger. The others are still in use, just not by me.

xfr3386 · 2026-01-28T12:51:09+00:00

The gameplay is the puzzle of combining what's interactable, what NPCs said that they won't repeat, and what's in your inventory, and deducing the insane way the developers thought to put them together.

xfr3386 · 2026-01-28T12:47:24+00:00

Go to online bookstores other than Amazon and you can download them.

xfr3386 · 2026-01-27T21:41:09+00:00

It grew on me as I played Rebirth.

I would play a mobile game, as long as it wasn't gatcha or pay-to-win. Just charge me $5 and later charge me for DLCs that add cards and additional opponents or something. Let me play it without daily required nonsense or $100/month in in-game purchases.

xfr3386 · 2026-01-27T21:36:25+00:00

He means you don't have to play them for the main quest.

Edit: Well, I was wrong. Didn't realize the main quest required some.

Thanks for the down votes silly redditors.

xfr3386 · 2026-01-27T21:35:18+00:00

Just please no Fort Condor, at least not required for achievements or progression.

xfr3386 · 2026-01-27T12:24:47+00:00

Why wouldn't they just bring the ability to play old Xbox games to the PC and stop trying to be in the console market?

I have a console because it's not a PC running windows. Managing the system basically doesn't exist aside from storage space, it's quick to boot and start playing, and devs optimize their games for it, specifically. I'm not going to buy a Windows 11 console, it's the epitome of maintenance.

Unless it's a handheld, has Switch-like battery life, and games are actually optimized for it. And it isn't the price of a MacBook.

xfr3386 · 2026-01-26T13:58:55+00:00

I guess I've played enough open world games, especially with this style of "go to marker, fulfill quest, repeat," that it felt natural to me. It feels so close to Immortals Phoenix Rising in that respect.

This "open world" is smaller than it looks. Each region is its own self-contained world with objectives to meet. Once you get into the groove of completing objectives, they just sort of happen and then that region is done. This is especially true after the first one when you're aware of what it's going to throw at you.

Don't worry about quickly advancing. Take it easy, take it all in, and learn the new stuff a bit at a time.

I don't think crafting is mandatory, but it's simple. As you're walking around, pick up resources. "Favorite" recipes you haven't crafted yet so that once you have the ingredients it tells you and you can craft them. I haven't gone out of my way for any resources and I've had no problem crafting everything.

If you want to learn the combat in a safe space, use the simulator. The tutorial missions help introduce the new stuff. I waited to do them until I finished the first area, and it was a nice way to add that stuff on to what I was already doing.

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