alt Hacker News> but it ended up merely in a supporting role
This has been my experience, as well, but it’s a really big support. It just needs adult supervision. I can’t understand how vibe-coded apps, actually work.
As far as “taste,” goes, I test my stuff constantly, checking for even minor “friction points,” sometimes, refactoring back to design, in order to resolve issues that many folks would ship. I’m pretty anal, and want my work to be the best experience possible.
I can’t see any LLM coming close to being able to evaluate the user experience, like I can.
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Tools like Playwright and Maestro can already give you a small taste of what that would look like.
But overall I agree, LLMs are currently awful at being beta testers. They miss the most basic stuff that any human would immediately catch as being poor UX, and for all their visual prowess they are terrible at auditing UI.
> I can’t understand how vibe-coded apps, actually work.
With a better process. e.g. plan->revision cycles, better instructions/docs like an ADR system.
I don't think vibe-coding is relegated to "build me reddit but with blockchain" and then it's done.
I think it instead describes the workflow where the software impl stays opaque but you evaluate the end product as an end user to step the product forward. It basically centers you as the tastemaker.
I'd say I vibe-code all of my personal projects now since December where AI had a breakthrough where it required less babysitting and developed good "taste" like smart sum types without being prompted to do so.
I've accumulated my own best practices like a heavy plan->revise cycle where plans ultimately promote into ./plans/impl/YYYY-MM-DD-{slug}.md, and an ADR system in ./docs/design/*.md that encodes arch/design invariants that accumulate over time, and new decisions/principles are folding back into it as they are discovered (by the AI).
During the plan revision cycles, the LLMs may ask me a multiple choice question about which decision branch to take, and lately I've just been responding with "take the ideal option" with good results -- either way it will take a well-reasoned position that I can't really argue with.
Meanwhile, my role is mainly to evaluate the end product and steer it directionally. How much I decide to prescribe and inject myself into technical decisions is a function of how serious the project is, but it's easy to notice that LLMs are simply better and better at arriving at well-reasoned decisions, and my interjections are more and more limited to technical/directional taste rather than necessity.