Just tried vibe coding. I'm not sure how people do this...

It was like fighting against an adversary who was trying to actively harm a project. About 80% of the things I asked it to do, it did something else instead, and often more harmful.

It wanted to force push it's feature branch onto master because it got an error trying to push to master, because it's on a feature branch.

Wtf

Prompting very detailed to the point it's only a source writer. Also, if you have a subject, use perplexity to describe based on internet content what you want to make. It will give big detailed documents which are great for vibing. Also, give examples to it. Repository, you do better yourself faster anyway.

I'm guessing this perfectly mirrors your experience: https://youtube.com/shorts/... .

Found it purely by chance. Just popped up in the feed.

@D-4got10-01 yes exactly. I love Alberta, she understands our pain.

They asked me to do this at my previous company and instead of delivering great work, I lost 4 days constantly battling the results.

I'm convinced now that pure vibe coding is sole for the fun of seeing the frontend appear.

I vibecoded some stuff and every I saw the code going sideways and kept going it became just a trainwreck

my hot take here is using GenAI for coding is a skill on itself

I know right!

It's a constant battle to steer it into the right direction without it going off and doing weird shit

I can see why people like it, but oh buddy is it not for me

When you outline the clear small step goals, it helps. Understanding the whole picture? Naaah!

You don't try to steer that shit, it doesn't have a compass! Sometimes if you have it it's not better because it doesn't understand it. You use it for very small chunks.

Chunks so small it doesn't even pay off to explain it because you will write it faster.

@lungdart Lets get this sparkling water vibe coding!

A tip: if you have a prompt, ask the AI what is unclear about it. It will generate questions for you to answer. Answer them all and ask to update the prompt. Iterate this until nothing is left and by using this prompt, you'll get expected results. It can ask you 50 things, but if you don't do this, it'll take 50 decisions for you and ofcourse you won't be happy. By spending a hour or two on the prompt, it will generate weeks of work so worth it.

@whimsical thanks for the tip, I'll try it out

@jonathands oh, for sure it's a skill, and I keep on learning about it. Not just the tooling, but also the behaviors of the llm and possibilities. It created and ruined much hobbies for me to work on. It's so much fun.

AI-coding is a bit of a journey - a mix of impressive results and utter crap.

I have been using CoPilot in VsCode for a while, mainly for minor function rewrites, and what I have found is (currently, my views may change next year) is that it will often need to ask it twice. First you ask it to give you roughly what you want. Then you take a glance, and ask if there's some specific thing that couldn't be improved. Then it will figure out that yep - the first iteration was not perfect.

In one way that is kinda like a human developer. Ask me to write some code on the spot I will give you a decent solution. Ask me to review my own code I might optimise it. Ask me to review it again with an edge-case in mind I might change it again. 😆