alt Hacker NewsYes. I started two projects with AI from scratch. Both abandoned, complete mess. Projects without AI are so easy to manage, maintain, add/remove features, etc. I use AI as a search engine on my projects instead of Google. I ask what's wrong with my code and change or improve it myself based on my experience.
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I've been a vibe-coding skeptic for years, but because of the math breakthroughs of the past few weeks I decided to experiment with the latest models on some test projects. They're a lot more capable than I thought they would be. I agree that it's easy to create an unrecoverable mess, especially when you're one-shotting a lot of features without detailed instructions. But I find that as long as I'm strict about the API boundaries and force the agent to work in small chunks, it's pretty effective. As one example, I got it to write an SVG renderer in a few hours (not the whole spec, but most of the path features and text rendering), which would have taken me at least a week just for the coding part, plus extra time to learn the algorithms.
Have you considered that maybe this is a reflection of your skills rather than that of the LLM?
I'm reading y'all comments and it seems we're still finding our footing, and will for some time. I have the luck that I have access to pretty much all frontier and other models alike. I've been extremely negatively biased towards any LLM use in the start. Then the influx from juniors came, then the revolt of doing PRs on such slop came, then some structured methods how to do LLM work came, then vibe projects came, etc, etc. I literally have all the described experiences you've guys mentioned. From good, to bad, to ugly. It's like there's no one particular way about doing this, and no two projects share the same approach - just like ye olde times.
When and what model?
I have the opposite experience. I don't have the patience sometimes to clean up my code and stick to coherent conventions and organization even though the will is there. With my AI projects I watch it and if the AI starts drifting I ask it to go through and look for convention/directory structure violations and it happily cleans everything up in about 10 or so minutes.
Are you in Python by chance? Python has a lot of crazy hidden/inexplicit/spooky action at a distance stuff (especially in the frameworks) that can make LLMs gunk up code by defensively programming or just burn context chasing data provenance