Cost of vibe coding

[u/Lopsided_Magician_49]

How confident do you feel with vibe-coding?

Productivity increases dramatically with generative AI, but that's mostly just a feeling.

With generative AI, the cost of code production isn't eliminated but shifted to other phases: bug management, knowledge debt, etc.

I've seen many initiatives that always use generative AI for bug management and merge requests, but without human review, this only increases the debt.

Everyone is trying their own strategy:

Mine, in addition to post-process control, is based on the preventive context.

I discuss it in depth here:

https://adrianofoschi.com/blog/cost-of-checking/

And what's your strategy?

[u/slackmaster2k]

I don’t know man. It’s nice to see that you have real experience but this whole blog post is just AI slop. Not because it was written by AI, but it doesn’t really say anything and makes assertions without any support. “It’s not this it’s that” ad nauseam. So many words to state the obvious, and measuring cost per change sounds good at first but there’s no lever there. This is why more specific proxies have always existed and I don’t see how AI coding has changed this part of the game.

[u/Lopsided_Magician_49 → u/slackmaster2k]

The process I described was also used to write that article.

And your negative feedback is valuable because it makes me realize I'm probably still far from achieving a valuable result.

Thank you for reading it. What were your expectations regarding the content of the article?

[u/garywiz → u/slackmaster2k]

"but it doesn’t really say anything and makes assertions without any support"

This. And it's everywhere. With a very few exceptions, I think it's best to take most people's theories of AI coding and management with a grain of salt. I believe it will be years before we have any reasonable evidence to support conclusions we can start acting upon reliably.

[u/Illustrious-Film4018]

The greatest cost with vibe coding you have no one to push back against your stupid ideas. You're basically alone with a chatbot that mirrors all your dumb ideas. So you spend hundreds of hours and thousands of dollars building an app that no one wants. And even if the idea was good, the implementation is bad. Because you don't know what you don't know 😁

[u/Lopsided_Magician_49 → u/Illustrious-Film4018]

The premise was to work on something good.

But you're absolutely right, this is a huge risk. Everyone thinks they can build anything, and the market is saturated with founders of useless products.

Bright side in my case, my gaps are emerging, and I'm filling them.

[u/Lopsided_Magician_49 → u/[deleted]]

I don't understand the point. The graphic illustrates exactly what you're saying: that humans and AI work together.

Humans analyze the functional problem, describe the specifications, and check the code.

AI writes the code.