…and I still don’t get it. I paid for a month of Pro to try it out, and it is consistently and confidently producing subtly broken junk. I had tried doing this before in the past, but gave up because it didn’t work well. I thought that maybe this time it would be far along enough to be useful.
The task was relatively simple, and it involved doing some 3d math. The solutions it generated were almost write every time, but critically broken in subtle ways, and any attempt to fix the problems would either introduce new bugs, or regress with old bugs.
I spent nearly the whole day yesterday going back and forth with it, and felt like I was in a mental fog. It wasn’t until I had a full night’s sleep and reviewed the chat log this morning until I realized how much I was going in circles. I tried prompting a bit more today, but stopped when it kept doing the same crap.
The worst part of this is that, through out all of this, Claude was confidently responding. When I said there was a bug, it would “fix” the bug, and provide a confident explanation of what was wrong… Except it was clearly bullshit because it didn’t work.
I still want to keep an open mind. Is anyone having success with these tools? Is there a special way to prompt it? Would I get better results during certain hours of the day?
For reference, I used Opus 4.6 Extended.
The solutions it generated were almost write every time
Did you vibe code this post? 😂
I use it and it works. It doesn’t give you the right result in one shot, but neither does manual coding. You iterate and prompt again and again. In the end, it saves a ton of time. Engineers are definitely going to lose their jobs because fewer people are needed. I know its tough to accept this and people will go through denial. Part of that is saying the AI code is junk. But, you’ll find it can produce junk and quickly fix it into the right solution faster than an engineer can. It sucks, but this is the new reality. The one thing that is cool once you embrace it is that you realize you can customize your favorite apps or even build anything you want from scratch.
It sucks, but this is the new reality.
Sorry mate, but you drank the AI koolaid from Sam Altman and the other tech oligarchs. The reality is that all of the major AI companies are deep in the red, OpenAI isn’t even making a profit with the 200$ subscription.
The only reason people are able to burn thousands of tokens to vibecode their apps is that they don’t have to pay the price for that, the companies are. This money will run out soon and then we will see the real cost for the bigger models.
If a subscription for Claude Code costs 500$ or even 1000$, will companies still pay for it or let actual humans do the work? We will see. I seriously doubt it, and I don’t want to depend on a subscription-based service to do my work while my skills are atrophying. Thank god my employer doesn’t force me to use AI.
Engineers are definitely going to lose their jobs
This kind of fear-mongering is what I despise most about the whole bubble.
You still need programmers because you need people proficient in programming to be able to tell how to fix the junk that it generates into working code.
I think the last part you said is the best way to use LLMs. I am not confident in it building complex architectures but if you want to make a dedicated single use script or a very customised basic application for personal use, it will do it well
customize your favorite apps
can you elaborate?
Github is full of open source apps. Some times the maintainer won’t add a feature you want. You can just clone the repo and ask Claude to do it and then run your own version of it.
It’s a tool that you need to learn. Try some of claude.md files people share online for your programming area as a starter. You still need to review what it does but just asking for it to create tests as it creates code does a lot to improve output.
I recently started using Pro to debug a problem I couldn’t solve. The one thing I need from it is an extra insight, a second opinion (because I’m the only developer), and it allowing me to let it read the whole folder helps, it identified a problem I didn’t consider because it’s a file outside of where I was looking.
I have a full pro model for Kiro at work. It does actually work, but we have custom MCP servers for all the internal tools, context on how to use these tools, style guidelines, etc. and then on top of that we have a lot of AI context files in the code base to help the AI understand the code base and make the correct changes.
I’ve been using it on a side project and it works if you know how to constrain it. It does get things wrong a lot. But the big thing about it is doing spec driven development where you give it a write up and it makes a requirements doc and a design doc with a lot of correctness properties in them to follow when generating and making the tasks.
I don’t believe people can vibe code unless they can actually code. It’s a whole different way of coding. I still manually edit what it does a lot.
A lot of people explain it like it’s a brand new junior developer. You need to give it as much context as possible, tell it to exactly what you want, tell it what you don’t want, tell it why, etc. and it still may not listen exactly.
Also working on some 3d maths.
I’ve used the free versions a bit, but not really to the extent that I’d call it vibe coding. The chat bots often know where to find libraries or per-existing functions that I don’t know. It’s also okay at algorithms for well defined problems, but it often says be careful not to do something I absolutely need to do or visea versa. It’s very hit and miss on debugging. It’ll point out obvious stuff (typos) reliably, and it can do some iteration stuff usually, but it usually doesn’t pick up on other things. Once in a rare while it will impress me by suggesting I look at a particular thing, and I think it manages this better in new chats, but most complex issues fail for it. I use it as a faster stackoverflow, but you need to be able to work through the code yourself, understand what you’re doing, and test that individual steps are doing what they need to do. The bots can’t really do any sort of planning or breaking down a problem into sub-problems, and they really suck at thinking about 3d stuff.
In my experience there are three ways to be successful with this tool:
- write something that already exists so it doesn’t need to think
- do all the thinking for it upfront (hello waterfall development)
- work in very small iterations that doesn’t require any leaps of logic. Don’t reprompt when it gets something wrong, instead reshape the code so it can only get it right
The issue with debugging is that it doesn’t actually think. LLMs pattern match to a chain of thought based on signals, not reasoning. For it to debug you need good signals in your code that explicitly tell what it is doing and the LLMs do not write code with that level of observability by default.
Edit: one of my workflows that I had success with is as follows:
- write a gherkin feature file describing desired functionality, maybe have the LLM create multiple scenarios after I defined one to copy from
- tell the LLM to write tests using those feature files, does an okay job but needs help making tests run in parallel.
- if the feature is simple, ask the LLM to make a plan and review it
- if the feature is complex then stub out the implementation in code and add TODOs, then direct the LLM to plan. Giving explicit goals in the code itself reduces token consumption and yield better plans
write something that already exists so it doesn’t need to think
If something already exists, it shouldn’t need to be rewritten.
Doing otherwise is a sign that something has gone wrong.
That was the case before LLMs and it is still the case today.
Absolutely. It’s amazing how many articles showcasing vibe coding is just people reinventing things like a password generator.
you need to fully be able to program to work with these things, in my experience.
you have to explain what you want very specifically, in precise programming terms.i tried a preview of chatgpt codex and it’s working better than my free version of claude, but codex creates a whole virtual programming environment, you have to connect it to a github repository, then it spins up an instance with tools you include and actually tests the code and fixes bugs before sending it back to you.
but you still need to be able to find the bugs and fix them yourself.oh and i think they work best with python, but i’ve also used ruby and dart and it’s decent.
it’s kinda like a power tool, it’ll definitely help you a lot to fix a car but if you can’t do it with wrenches it won’t help very much.I’ve never been able to program in anything more complex than BASIC and command line batch files, but I’m able to get useful output from Claude.
I’m an IT Infrastructure Manager by trade, and I got there through 20 years of supporting everything from desktop to datacenter including weird use cases like controlling systems in a research lab. On top of that, I’ve gotten under the hood of software in the form of running game servers in my spare time.
What you need to get good programs out of AI boils down to 3 things:
- The ability to teach an entity whose mistakes resemble those of a gifted child where it went wrong a step or ten back from where it’s currently looking.
- The ability to provide useful beta test / debug output regarding programs which aren’t behaving as expected. This does include looking at an error log and having some idea what that error means.
- Comfort using (either executing or compiling depending on the language) source code associated with the language you’re doing things in. This might be as simple as “How do I run a Powershell script or verify that I meet the version and module requirements for the script in question?”, or it might be as complicated as building an executable in Visual Studio. Either way whatever the pipeline is from source to execution, it must be a pipeline you’re comfortable working with. If you’re doing things anywhere outside the IT administration space, it’s reasonable to be looking at Python as the best first path rather than Powershell. Personally, I must go where supported first party modules exist for the types of work I’m developing around. In IT Administration, that’s Powershell.
I’ve made tools which automate and improve my entire department’s approach to user data, device data, application inventory, patch management, vulnerability management, and these are changes I started making with a free product three months ago, and two months back I switched to the paid version.
Programming is sort of like conversation in an alien language. For that reason, if you can give precise instructions sometimes you really can pull something new into existence using LLM coding. It’s the same reason that you could say words which have never been said in that specific order before, and have an LLM translate them to Portuguese.
I always used to talk about how everything in a computer was math, and that what interested me more than quantum computing would be a machine which starts performing the same sorts of operations on words or concepts that computers of that day ('90s and '00s when “quantum” was being slapped on everything to mean “fast” or “powerful”) were doing on math. I said that the best indicator when linguistic computing arrives would be that without ever learning to program, I’d start being able to program. I was looking at “Dragon Naturally Speaking” when I had this idea. It was one of the earliest effective speech to text programs. I stopped learning to program immediately and focused exclusively on learning operations from that point forward.
I’ve been testing the code generation abilities of LLMs for about three years. Within the last six months I feel like I’m starting to see evidence that the associations being made internally by LLMs are complex enough to begin considering them the fulfillment of my childhood dream of a “word computer”.
All the shitty stuff about environment and theft of art is all there too, which sucks, but more because our economic model sucks than because LLMs either do or do not suck. If we had a framework for meeting everybody’s basic needs, this software in its current state has the potential to turn everyone with a passion for grammatical and technical precision into a concept based developer practically overnight.
I have no qualifications to judge the quality of the generated results, yet the generated results are always of great quality.
Do you seriously not realize how out of touch this sounds?
I’ve never been able to program in anything more complex than BASIC and command line batch files, but I’m able to get useful output from Claude.
Chatbots being deemed useful in tasks by people unqualified to make those judgments is a running problem.
That’s been my experience. It’s always subtlely wrong, its solutions are hard to maintain, and if you spend too much time with it, it starts forgetting what you said earlier. Managers don’t understand the distinction, they already can’t code well, and only test it in small problems where it’s not context-limited, so they’re amazed.
I think it’s pretty heavily dependent on what you’re trying to do. I’ve gotten a lot of push from higher ups at my company to use copilot wherever possible. So, I’ve spent a lot of time lately having copilot + opus write code for me. Most of what I’m doing is super straightforward middleware APIs or basic internal front ends. Since it has access to very similar codebases for reference, and we have custom agents that point it in the right direction, it’s a pretty good experience.
However, if I ask it to do something totally new, it does okay, more like what you’ve experienced. It takes a lot of hand holding, but it usually gets the job done as long as you’re very descriptive in your prompt. Probably not faster than an experienced developer at the moment though
I’ve also started using it recently and I’m not sure if the way I’m doing it is particularly “right”.
I don’t have a lot of knowledge of practical coding practices because in school we literally had a new project every two weeks so I never learned things like you need unit tests or proper architectural design. It was mostly making sure whatever project there was that week ran and didn’t crash.
So now I’m working as a sysadmin doing the random junk a sysadmin gets pushed on them. What I’ve been doing is telling it my project plan, Claude will write up something that looks better, and I continue to have a back and forth about architecture and libraries, asking it if it thinks any particular idea is good or bad, until I get to a place I’m happy.
Then because I want to learn rust and implement it myself, I’m having Claude basically guide me through creating it like a teacher would, with it taking on a very Socratic tone (“now that we’ve done this, what do you think is the next step?” “We have a list of CSVs so what do you need to do to read their values?”). And I’ve been moving forward but by bit like this.
I don’t know if it’s a particularly good way, honestly, I’d love feedback from anyone who’s done something similar or whatever!
I think it’s mostly going to be useful for boilerplate generation, and effectiveness is going to vary wildly based on what language you’re using. JS or Python? It’ll probably do OK. Plenty of open source for it to “learn” from. Delphi? Forget it.
Brief experimentation showed it liked to bullshit if it was wrong, rather than fix things.
The trick about vibe coding is that you confidently release the messed up code as something amazing by generating a professional looking readme to accompany it.
The more Emojis in that Readme the better!
Don’t just use it as a drop in replacement for a programmer; use it to automate menial tasks while employing trust but verify with every output it produces.
A well written CLAUDE.md and prompt to restrict it from auto committing, auto pushing, and auto editing without explicit verification before doing anything will keep everything in your control while also aiding menial maintenance tasks like repetitive sections or user tests.
verify with every output it produces.
I agree that you can get quality output using these tools, but if you actually take the time to validate and fix everything they’ve output then you spend more time than if you’d just written it, rob yourself of experience, and melt glaciers for no reason in the process.
prompt to restrict it from auto committing, auto pushing, and auto editing without explicit verification
Anything in the prompt is a suggestion, not a restriction. You are correct you should restrict those actions, but it must be done outside of the chatbot layer. This is part of the problem with this stuff. People using it don’t understand what it is or how it works at all and are being ridiculously irresponsible.
repetitive sections
Repetitive sections that are logic can be factored down and should be for maintainability. Those that can’t be can be written with tons of methods. A list of words can be expanded into whatever repetitive boilerplate with sed, awk, a python script etc and you’ll know nothing was hallucinated because it was deterministic in the first place.
user tests.
Tests are just as important as the rest of the code and should be given the same amount of attention instead of being treated as fine as long as you check the box.
I agree it’s not perfect; I still only use it very sparingly, I was just just saying as an alternative to trusting everything it does out of the box.
Recently I used it (some free-tier DuckAI model, not Claude) to write a Python script for pasting PNGs into PDFs (complete with Tk interface) while applying a whole bunch of custom transformations. Simple enough, but a total chore with all the back-and-forth of searching for relevant unfamiliar libraries and syntax checking and troubleshooting. Inevitably it would have taken me the whole afternoon by hand. With AI I knocked it out in 25 minutes. That was my epiphany moment.
Since then I’ve noticed a general problem with AI coding. It almost always introduces too much complexity, which I then have to waste time untangling (and often just understanding) before I can proceed. Whereas if I had done it “my way” from the start I might have got there earlier. But I figure this problem is kinda on me.
And for me, therein lies why my use of it has become reduced to a really complex rubber duck, or to write something out that I could do by hand, but making my robot butler do it is just faster. Anyone actually leaning into today’s generative AI models for generating code that requires complexity or thought… they shall reap what they sow in the years to come.
