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[–] 25 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Have I misunderstood the term vibe coder? I thought it meant people who weren't good at coding. I thought Stark's whole thing was that he's a genius. Is he notoriously bad at software but good with hardware or something?

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  • [–] 77 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    vibe coding is when you let an llm write almost all your code, taking its output at face value. tony stark in the films just vaguely describes to his computer what he wants and trusts that it does the right thing.

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  • [–] 53 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I think the underlying understanding is that Tony wrote the AI he’s asking to write the code. So, in effect, the AI he built is a form of scripting. Rather than spending his time churning out code, the AI will churn out code that’s up to his standard because he wrote the AI.

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  • [–] 22 points 1 year ago

    This was my understanding, too. Dude created his own hardware and software and then hand rolled an AI so he had more time to spend saving the world instead of hunched over a laptop. Anything he tells his own AI to do would probably be trivial to him to write himself but would take us months.

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  • [–] 32 points 1 year ago* (2 children)

    From my understanding a vibe coder is someone who builds software using mainly AI generated code. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad coder, but often the code generated by AI is just hard to process at this scale and people will have no clue what exactly is going on in their project.

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  • [–] 19 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    if they build software using mainly ai generated code, then they are a bad coder

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  • [+] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 10 months ago) (2 children)
  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    exactly, you can only really verify the code if you were capable of writing it in the first place.

    And it's an old well known fact that reading code is much harder than writing it.

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  • [–] 9 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    An irrelevant but interesting take is that this applies as an analogue to a lot of stuff in electronics related space.

    • It is harder to receive data than to transmit it, because you need to do things like:
      • match your receiver's frequency with that of the transmission (which might be minutely different from the agreed upon frequency), to understand it
      • know how long the data will be, before feeding into digital variables, or you might combine multiple messages or leave out some stuff without realising
    • this gets even harder when it is wireless, because now, you have noise, which is often, valid communication among other devices

    Getting back to code, you now need to get in the same "wavelength" as the one who wrote the code, at the time they wrote the code.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    I weirdly love reading code and figuring out what it's doing. Debugging is cathartic.

    It might take a while and I might be cussing up a storm saying, wtf is this shit? Why the fuck would you do it this way? Why the fuck did you make this convoluted for no reason?

    Right now it's unfucking some vibe coded bs where instead of just fixing an API to get the info we needed accurately, it's trying to infer it from other data. Like, there is a super direct and simple route, but instead there are hundreds of lines to work around hitting the wrong endpoint and getting data missing the details we need.

    Plus letting the vibe add so much that is literally never used, was never needed, and on top of that returns incorrect information.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Even if you're the one that built, programmed, and trained the AI when nothing else like it existed?

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  • [–] -1 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    So? Some of the people pushing out ai slop would be perfectly capable of writing their own llm out of widely available free tools. Contrary to popular belief, they are not complex pieces of software, just extremely data hungry. Does not mean they magically understand the code output by the llm when it spits out something.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Stark would have developed their own way of training their AI. It wouldn't be an LLM in the first place.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    and he stil wouldn't understand its output. Because as we clearly see, he doesn't even try to look at it.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago* (1 child)

    What if it were just a really big Expert system?

    That's usually the thing that you call AI players or COM players in computer games.

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  • [+] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 child)
  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

    so? someone invented current llms too. Nothing like them existed before either. If they vibe coded with them they'd still be producing slop.

    Coding an llm is very very easy. What's not easy is having all the data, hardware and cash to train it.

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  • [–] 2 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Yeah but the people who made it like that probably understand whether to trust it to write code or not. The AI Tony wrote, he knows what it does best and he trusts it to write his code. Just because it's AI doesn't mean it's LLM. Like I trust the errors compilers give me even if I didn't write them because it's good. And I trust my scripts to do things that I wrote them for, specifically since I tested them. Same with the AI you yourself made, you'd test it, and you'd know the design principles.

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  • [–] 0 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    an ai is not a script. You can know what a script does. neural networks don't work that way. You train them, and hope you picked the right dataset for it to hopefully learn what you want it to learn. You can't test it. You can know that it works sometimes but you also know that it will also not work sometimes and there'sjacksjit you can do about it. A couple of gigabytes of floating point numbers is not decipherable to anyone.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    And who says AI means neural network? That's what we use, doesn't mean that's the only AI possible to write. There are a lot of different models, neural network is popular right now because it can learn from data without anyone having to teach it actual logic. An AI written by fictional character can be a deterministic kind with very similar logic to humans that you can inspect and write and give weights to things.

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Even if they build the AI doing it from scratch, all by themselves?

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  • [–] -5 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    yes. Because that would still mean they didn't code the app.

    "killing is bad!" "but what if the murderer 3d printed his own gun?"

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  • [–] 3 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    More like: "killing is bad" "but what if the 'murderer' designed, build and produced their own target?"

    You can't kill a robot, so it isn't killing.

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  • [–] 1 point 1 year ago

    the "target" is to get useful software out. The ai is the tool. In this example, the ai is the gun. It is the tool used to achieve the goal.

    Anyone can make an improvised hammer. Stick a rock or a piece of metal on a stick. But that doesn't make them carpenters, even though they made their own tools.

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  • [–] 12 points 1 year ago (3 children)

    Javis, his AI assistant, did all the work.

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