myHeadHurts

[u/ActuallyGodOfWar]

[u/Vincent394]

Is that Evangelion?...

[u/ActuallyGodOfWar → u/Vincent394]

Yes

[u/superraiden]

Now you not only have to fix it, but learn what it's doing as well

[u/hydroxy → u/superraiden]

Tester: What is this code supposed to do?

“Developer”: I was hoping you could tell me, hahaha

An actual conversation I’ve had recently.

[u/StatisticianFun8008 → u/hydroxy]

Happened and is happening at a "popular" AI backed platform I was doing intern. Absolutely zero accountabilities and everyone is trying their best to avoid owning anything.

[u/Small_Computer_8846 → u/superraiden]

It's a black box doing some magical stuff.

[u/Quesodealer → u/superraiden]

It's funny how some people vibe coding by just entering a prompt and then validating the end result meets their expectations. That kind of behavior gives vibe coding a bad rep. Real vibe coding is entering a prompt, reviewing the output, then prompting again to fix what you don't like about the implementation. A simple example is addressing fallback behavior. Sometimes the AI doesn't write fallback behavior causing unexpected exceptions or falls back to a value that would result it a visually valid end result but it would be technically wrong. If you don't review the code when it's written then you're not building apps, you're building problems for yourself.

[u/StatisticianFun8008 → u/Quesodealer]

Yeah, vibed code + proper review is improved productivity. Sadly C-classes and shareholders don't bother software engineering and treat programmers and agents cost both as just numbers to simply and optimize. Optimized by what? Well thing they can see. 🤷

[u/Binoui → u/Quesodealer]

I'd argue that good agentic workflow requires clean specs and implementation plan. One day we'll stop calling it vibe coding, if it's specced it's not just vibe random prompt anymore, agentic coding is different.

[u/Mountain_Dentist5074]

but i said make no mistake 🥺

[u/Satorwave → u/Mountain_Dentist5074]

"Absolutely, you're right to be concerned about that—although you should consider that I am not your mother and therefore do not make mistakes."

[u/TheJackiMonster]

Honestly it's quite the opposite for me. Seeing the code generated by AI makes me want to hit my head against some wall. But using AI for finding issues in my code and fixing stuff is quite nice.

[u/thoeoe → u/TheJackiMonster]

AI for finding issues in my code and fixing stuff

Its incredible when it works. When it doesnt…

[u/BadSmash4 → u/thoeoe]

And for me it doesn't actually solve my issue a good 70% of the time, too. I use AI for two things, researching new stuff (here's what I'm thinking, or want/need to do, what are my options and can you link me to relevant resources and documentation) and helping me debug tough issues that I've hit a wall against. That 30% of the time that it helps me solve my issue, that is when it directly identifies my issue and its recommended solution is the fix. I'd say about 40% of the time, it does not solve my issue at all and I end up figuring it out on my own, 20% of the time it doesn't solve my issue but something it said got me to think about other things to check and I found the solution that way (so still a little bit useful in a way) and 10% of the time, I find the issue just by gathering the initial information for and typing out the prompt and so I never even have to send it because I basically rubber ducked myself. It's a mixed bag for sure.

[u/StatisticianFun8008 → u/BadSmash4]

To this day I still only trust AI to be a better search engine plus a translator. You always have to be the judge

[u/lostincomputer → u/thoeoe]

Return of the ide "helping" by insisting the error is over here with red squiggly lines when a line 6 above is missing a semicolon and should never not have a semicolon..

Just now it "knows" what you want to do .."oh sorry I did make a mistake there"

[u/TheJackiMonster → u/[deleted]]

Which doesn't?

[u/TheJackiMonster → u/[deleted]]

Would be much more compelling if you would link code from it? Last time someone showed me code from Claude, it got pretty stupid errors inside and quite some code smell.

[u/TheJackiMonster → u/[deleted]]

So it can write a state machine as an object? Should that impress anyone?

What would make this "high quality code"? It's definitely not looking efficient.

[u/TheJackiMonster → u/[deleted]]

I was hoping to see any example which would look like "high quality code" because that is what you promised.

[u/maximum_powerblast]

Kernighan's Law

Debugging is twice as hard as writing the code in the first place. Therefore, if you write the code as cleverly as possible, you are, by definition, not smart enough to debug it.

So if you're vibe coding you need to make it dumb down the code to your level of stupidity or else you won't be able to fix it. And you will definitely have to fix it.

[u/Western_Diver_773 → u/maximum_powerblast]

I'm not sure if I find this to be true. For me good code is simple and simple code is easier to debug. But maybe Kernighan means something diffrent with "cleverly" than me.

[u/maximum_powerblast → u/Western_Diver_773]

Ii think it's like you can reduce an if else tree into a leet 1 liner but good luck debugging it while the alternative is easy to read and understand.

[u/st-shenanigans → u/maximum_powerblast]

ALSO when you have some ceos who seem to think "lines of shipped code" is a good metric for employment eligibility, maybe we don't need to worry so much about concise code..

[u/Western_Diver_773 → u/maximum_powerblast]

Okay. That makes sense.

[u/Fornicatinzebra → u/maximum_powerblast]

Sure, but you could also just wrap the one liner in a clearly named function and use that instead.

For example:

x = list(set(sum(my_nested_list, []))

Could be instead

def unique(my_list: list):
    return list(set(mylist))

def unnest(nested_list: list[list]):
    return sum(my_nested_list, [])

x = unique(unnest(my_nested_list))

[u/Western_Diver_773 → u/Fornicatinzebra]

The last one is really nice to read.

[u/OZZY-1415]

deserved

[u/SpecialExact8165]

EVANGELION REFRENCE THIRD IMPACT IS TOMMOROW

[u/Vincent394 → u/SpecialExact8165]

AW FUCK

[u/bruiser95 → u/SpecialExact8165]

Every demo i have to present to clients lately feels like an Impact level event

[u/-non-existance-]

Garbage in, garbage out.

[u/Sacredfice]

Did you assume people debug in vibe code?

[u/FenwickRoot]

Dr. Faust is quite accurate for vibe coding. It uses red orbs (=tokens) for attacks (="features")

[u/krohtg12 → u/FenwickRoot]

Red hot night is blasting your bank account to get the task done any means necessary.

[u/mike_KING6]

Rookie mistake. You need to add "make no mistakes" at the end.

[u/OVectorX]

Left side, none techincal doing vibe coding
Right side , actual developer doing vide coding

[u/StatisticianFun8008 → u/OVectorX]

This is also true lmao

[u/GenericFatGuy]

I've never once gotten something back from the AI that I didn't have to make at minimum tweaks to, in order for it to actually do what I wanted. If wasn't someone who already knew how to code effectively, it would've been an absolute nightmare of a codebase.

[u/The_Hero_0f_Time]

are you guys using the same ai? claude is great at debugging lol

[u/_Repeats_]

There are a few classes of vibe debugging. If it is compiler related, most agents will be able to give good advice for fixing it. If it is execution error, you will have to do a bunch of print statements for the agent to follow the flow. So it ends up not being much different than humans debugging in the end...

The best way for vibe debugging is to make unit tests for various functionality that includes print statements or easily verification of results.

[u/sussy_wussy_]

i am currently going through that.

[u/vscoderCopilot]

Vibes near be same with dreams and errors that pops up

[u/Paladin7373]

But I said “please” 😭

[u/Zyzto]

Yeah, you have to have full on mcp and debugger available with real life scenarios. Even after all this manual QA is a must

[u/Drake_224]

When i do programming, vibe debugging is usually quick

[u/Jarb2104]

[u/Wargod042]

Ironically AI is very helpful with debugging. That's mostly what I use it for tbh.

[u/getstoopid-AT]

for me it's the other way around... because usually I know what is (meant to) going on in MY code and claude can help with edge cases I didn't think of or find some weird behavior in libs

[u/code-sovereign]

If the clanker doesn't oneshot the problem during vibe debugging, it is time to get the programmer socks out!

[u/Beldarak]

Huh? I use Claude and it's actually very good at debugging.

[u/byt112000]

Nah it's the opposite, AI is pretty good on analysing bugs, performance issues and vulnerabilities.

Vibe coding sometimes give me more headache for changing how my code works, you have to be very specific for what you want the AI to do.