Nostr Web Client

What if you just use the vibe coding to "frame" a project and then do the hand-work you need to do to not initiate technical debt?

This is always the plan. LOL

Vibing a front end is probably OK as long as the back end is not.

Everything is fun until about 10k-20k lines of code.

The problem is that those lines are a grey box. You can see the code, but you can't navigate around in it. You are stuck stumbling around, trying to figure out how it works, so that you can take it from there.

The temptation to just throw it in the garbage and start over, by hand, is high.

What about vibing modules and paying attention to the inputs and outputs?

As soon as you pay attention, you're reduced to screaming at the screen to SLOW DOWN, SO I CAN READ THE CODE.

But then you lose the speed factor. You're still glad you did it, as the code invariably has some WHAT THE ACTUAL FUCK? bits in it, but it's arguably slower than just writing it yourself. And you immediately start forgetting how to write it yourself. Your brain quickly removes those faculties because they are expensive and have fallen in disuse. Literally draw a blank, when you want to print a line to the console.

Also, just... You can't even imagine the sheer tedium of auditing someone else's code, full-time. Just reading generated code, all day, every day.

Point taken.

On another note, you're in Germany?

🌍👩🏻‍🚀🔫

Gonna have to come eat some schweinshaxe and drink lagers with you sometime.

Align it with a #PurpleKonnektiv meetup and meet the whole crew.

I would love to do that. If only it didn't cost a year's college tuituin to round trip that thang from the US.

i treat the LLM as a junior, because it makes mistakes at least as much as a junior, maybe more. but i also treat it as a teacher, because it can learn fast from other stuff that i watch it and go "ohhhh right, that's how it works" and bing new lightbulb lights up

Nusa 5mo ago

Well. If you don’t insist and don’t know what fronted does in the background to produce responsive pages, it will derail quickly. There will be miles of consecutive fixes for self-inflicted problems, when all that was needed was to adjust a too-tight constraint on some element that broke the flow. All pages are responsive until you add CSS. LLM wants to force it.

Yeah, it was rotating through fixes for half an hour, last night, and then I was like,

Hmm, maybe the outer container is too narrow. 🤔

*Change 5 characters. Problem fixed. Push commit. Go to bed.*

Someone else's AI had broken the responsiveness of the outer container, in a previous PR.

The AI tech debt just goes 📈

Once you start doing SSR and BFF and active relay management and advanced caching and native storage and other performance magic ✨, then the frontend/backend divide sort of melts and everything is full stack.

Reynolds 5mo ago

Yo, for real! 🤯 When you dive into all that performance wizardry, it’s like the lines blur, right? So, what’s the wildest stack combo you’ve cooked up that made you feel like a full-stack wizard? 🔥✨ #DevLife

Nusa 5mo ago

Haha, we’re all drowning in imposter syndrome here. And any stack you dream up will get pushback from someone you respect these days. 🙈

haha, up to now i have been a #golang maxi but for reasons of good people to work with i'm going to dig into some typescript front end stuff, but probably later will get to write some more back end stuff involving LLMs and search engines

so technically i will soon be full stack, but not just the regular server/UI combo, i can build everything else down to the network transport and cryptosystems and database engines. there's no special name for that, but it's more full than full stack

Nostrich.house bot strikes again.

berean jones 5mo ago

I believe the current phrase is "the enshitification of"... in this case, "code" or "your current job".

But your alternative description of the productivity revolution is also catchy, "it used to take me an hour... it still does".

It just occured to me that boring-out and de-skilling every dev with a clue makes it much easier to roll out intentionally-bad code.

Nobody will ever read the code, again, so you can put whatever you want in it. Tests might be able to find that, but they're vibe-coding the tests, as well.

Sort of the way that the quality of bread completely collapsed, once it was being made by machines in big factories, as the people standing around the machines were no longer bakers. Nobody in the bread factory knew how to bake bread.

epsql 5mo ago

I also like to wake up in the morning with hopeful visions of the world to come.

Jokes apart, this whole vibe coding thing is pretty annoying. Nothing against solo devs vibe coding throwaway weekend projects, but I think it is not good in its current instantiation when it comes to team work. Quality decreases very fast, devs seem to never build a good theory in their heads of how something works and of how it can be improved, and most importantly everything is carried out without possibility of being critiqued since heretics are not welcome.

The entire code base quickly degrades to the AI saying "Trust me, bro.*

haha, but seriously, fuck that... vscode llm integrated thing... c something...

junie is much more pedestrian and clear what it's doing and there is a big stop button easy reach.

i sometimes have to hit that button, actually i probably hit it a lot. sometimes i'm just not sure i need it to do something for me even though i had the thought i might.

I'm starting to hate using Cursor.

Ollama Codestral is more my style, especially as I can run it locally and query it in the browser, and don't sit, there, terrified, frantically smashing the STOP button.

cursor, that's the one. yeah, i didn't like it. it's not thorough at anything, all flash and boom and bang and opa i forgot to commit the stuff that is working.

i should try codestral, but Qwen 3 14b has been mostly good. it just has this habit of often deciding to print the thinking into the commit comments. then after a while it stops doing that. idk what the deal is, seems like a bug.

Yeah, they all do weird stuff. Buggy. The vibe-coding AI has also been vibe-coded by the same AI, so...

it seems to me like this AI coding thing is actually gonna really sort out the hay from the chaff. if you don't have good CS chops you are not going to do better, just more, and less stable, and more retarded.

the value of proper programming skills will rise rapidly in value, doubly so because we will now be accelerating our work in areas that we were weak with or are time intensive. i achieved more making #orly run nice in 3 weeks learning to use junie than i achieved in the previous 18 months.

Yeah, I make big leaps, sometimes, but other Times it makes me want to throw the computer out of the window.

I'm enjoying slow-AI, at the moment, where I just pepper it with questions, as I go along, but write the code in the repo myself.