Vibe coding service Replit deleted production database
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They don’t really transfer solutions to new problems
Lets say there is a binary format some old game uses (Doom), and in it some of its lumps it can store indexed images, each pixel is an index of color in palette which is stored in another lump, there's also a programming language called Rust, and a little known/used library that can look into binary data of that format, there's also a GUI library in Rust that not many people used either. Would you consider it an "ability to transfer solutions to new problems" that it was able to implement extracting image data from that binary format using the library, extracting palette data from that binary format, converting that indexed image using extracted palette into regular rgba image data, and then render that as window background using that GUI library, the only reference for which is a file with names and type signatures of functions. There's no similar Rust code in the wild at all for any of those scenarios. Most of this it was able to do from a few little prompts, maybe even from the first one. There sure were few little issues along the way that required repromting and figuring things together with it. Stuff like this with AI can take like half an hour while doing the whole thing fully manually could easily take multiple days just for the sake of figuring out APIs of libraries involved and intricacies of recoding indexed image to rgba. For me this is overpowered enough even right now, and it's likely going to improve even more in future.
That's applying existing solutions to a different programming language or domain, but ultimately every single technique used already exists. It only applied what it knew, it did not come up with something new. The problem as stated is also not really "new" either, image extraction, conversion and rendering isn't exactly a "new problem".
I'm not disputing that LLMs can speed up some work, I know it occasionally does so for me as well. But what you have to understand is that the LLM only remembered similar problems and their solutions, it did not at any point invent something truly new. I understand the distinction is difficult to make.
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Headling should say, "Incompetent project managers fuck up by not controlling production database access. Oh well."
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That's applying existing solutions to a different programming language or domain, but ultimately every single technique used already exists. It only applied what it knew, it did not come up with something new. The problem as stated is also not really "new" either, image extraction, conversion and rendering isn't exactly a "new problem".
I'm not disputing that LLMs can speed up some work, I know it occasionally does so for me as well. But what you have to understand is that the LLM only remembered similar problems and their solutions, it did not at any point invent something truly new. I understand the distinction is difficult to make.
I understand what you're having in mind, I've had similar intuitions about AI in early 2000s.
What exactly is "truly new" is an interesting topic ofc, but it's a separate topic.
Nowadays I'm trying to look at things more empyrically, without projecting my internal intuitions on everything.
In practice it does generalize knowledge, use many forms of abstract reasoning and transfer knowledge across different domains.
And it can do coding way beyond the level of complexity of what average software developer does at everyday work. -
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Replit is a vibe coding service now? Swear it just used to be a place to write code in projects
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Oops I dweted evewyfing 🥺
I knew it would make you mad but I did it anyway.
I don't think you have the guts to do anything about it either, vibe coder.
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If an LLM can delete your production database, it should
And the backups.
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Not according to the twitter thread. I went thru its thread, it’s a roller coaster of amateurism.
Yes according to both the article and the \mathbb X thread. https://x.com/jasonlk/status/1946240562736365809 I pointed this out below and got downvoted to -8 for it smh.
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“Vibe coding makes software creation accessible to everyone, entirely through natural language,” Replit explains, and on social media promotes its tools as doing things like enabling an operations manager “with 0 coding skills” who used the service to create software that saved his company $145,000
Yeah if you believe that you're part of the problem.
I'm prepared to accept that Vibe coding might work in certain circumstances but I'm not prepared to accept that someone with zero code experience can make use of it. Claude is pretty good for coding but even it makes fairly dumb mistakes, if you point them out it fixes them but you have to be a competent enough programmer to recognise them otherwise it's just going to go full steam ahead.
Vibe coding is like self-driving cars, it works up to a point, but eventually it's going to do something stupid and drive to a tree unless you take hold of the wheel and steer it back onto the road. But these vibe codeing idiots are like Tesla owners who decide that they can go to sleep with self-driving on.
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The [AI] safety stuff is more visceral to me after a weekend of vibe hacking,” Lemkin said. I explicitly told it eleven times in ALL CAPS not to do this. I am a little worried about safety now.
This sounds like something straight out of The Onion.
It's because these people don't have a clue how AI actually works. They think it's like a human intelligence and that writing something in all caps is in some way going to give it more emphasis. They're trying to reason with something that has zero self-awareness.
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I am now convinced this is how we will have the AI catastrophe.
"Do not ever use nuclear missiles without explicit order from a human."
"Ok got it, I will only use non-nuclear missiles."
five minutes later fires all nuclear missiles
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“Vibe coding makes software creation accessible to everyone, entirely through natural language,” Replit explains, and on social media promotes its tools as doing things like enabling an operations manager “with 0 coding skills” who used the service to create software that saved his company $145,000
Yeah if you believe that you're part of the problem.
I'm prepared to accept that Vibe coding might work in certain circumstances but I'm not prepared to accept that someone with zero code experience can make use of it. Claude is pretty good for coding but even it makes fairly dumb mistakes, if you point them out it fixes them but you have to be a competent enough programmer to recognise them otherwise it's just going to go full steam ahead.
Vibe coding is like self-driving cars, it works up to a point, but eventually it's going to do something stupid and drive to a tree unless you take hold of the wheel and steer it back onto the road. But these vibe codeing idiots are like Tesla owners who decide that they can go to sleep with self-driving on.
And you are talking about obvious bugs. It likely will make erroneous judgements (because somewhere in its training data someone coded it that way) which will down the line lead to subtle problems that will wreck your system and cost you much more. Sure humans can also make the same mistakes but in the current state of affairs, an experienced software engineer/programmer has a much higher chance of catching such an error. With LLMs it is more hit and miss especially if it is a more niche topic.
Currently, it is an assistant tool (sometimes quite helpful, sometimes frustrating at best) not an autonomous coder. Any company that claims so is either a crook or also does not know much about coding.