alt Hacker News"the last couple weeks"
When I ran this experiment it was pretty exhilarating for a while. Eventually it turned into QA testing the work of a bad engineer and became exhausting. Since I had sunken so much time into it I felt pretty bad afterwards that not only did the thing it made not end up being shippable, but I hadn't benefitted as a human being while working on it. I had no new skills to show. It was just a big waste of time.
So I think the "second way" is good for demos now. It's good for getting an idea of what something can look like. However, in the future I'll be extremely careful about not letting that go on for more than a day or two.
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This happened to me too in an experimental project where I was testing how far the model could go on its own. Despite making progress, I can't bare to look at the thing now. I don't even know what questions to ask the AI to get back into it, I'm so disconnected from it. Its exhausting to think about getting back into it; id rather just start from scratch.
The fascinating thing was how easy it was to lose control. I would set up the project with strict rules, md files and tell myself to stay fully engaged, but out of nowhere I slid into compulsive accept mode, or worse told the model to blatantly ignore my own rules I set out. I knew better, but yet it happened over and over. Ironically, it was as if my context window was so full of "successes" I forgot my own rules; I reward-hacked myself.
Maybe it just takes practice and better tooling and guardrails. And maybe this is the growing pains of a new programmers mindset. But left me a little shy to try full delegation any time soon, certainly not without a complete reset on how to approach it.
> I think the "second way" is good for demos now.
It's also good for quickly creating legitimate looking scam and SEO spam sites. When they stop working, throw them away, and create a dozen more. Maintenance is not a concern. Scammers love this new tech.
I've had the opposite results. I used to "vibe code" in languages that I knew, so that I could review the code and, I assumed, contribute myself. I got good enough results that I started using AI to build tools in languages I had no prior knowledge of. I don't even look at the code any more. I'm getting incredible results. I've been a developer for 30+ years and never thought this would be possible. I keep making more and more ambitious projects and AI just keeps banging them out exactly how I envision them in my mind.
To be fair I don't think someone with less experience could get these results. I'm leveraging every thing I know about writing software, computer science, product development, team management, marketing, written communication, requirements gathering, architecture... I feel like vibe coding is pushing myself and AI to the limits, but the results are incredible.
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I believe the author explicitly suggests strategies to deal with this problem, which is the entire second half of the post. There’s a big difference between when you act as a human tester in the middle vs when you build out enough guardrails that it can do meaningful autonomous work with verification.