AI tools need a lot of oversight. Just like you might allow a 6 year old push a lawnmower, but you’re still going to keep an eye on things.

Vibe Coding Day 8

Replit‽ What happened to the famous website that aimed to be the Google Docs for JS with these nifty things called Repl's?

They can't hit you with the ol' Bobby Tables if you delete the database yourself first. A+, no notes.

He was vibe-coding in production. Am I reading that right? Sounds like an intern-level mistake.

he was smart enough to just roll back to a backup

edit: downvoting me doesn't change what happened. read the article people or atl ctrl+f for "rollback"

he made the agent promise not to touch production data and was surprised when it did. it effectively ran a git push on the empty local testing database with upstream being production

Not smart enough to just do the work himself

All I see is people chatting with an LLM as if it was a person. “How bad is this on a scale
of 1 to 100”, you’re just doomed to get some random answer based solely on whatever context is being fed in the input and that you probably don’t know the extent of it.

Trying to make the LLM “see its mistakes” is a pointless exercise. Getting it to “promise” something is useless.

The issue with LLMs working with human languages is people eventually wanting to apply human things to LLMs such as asking why as if the LLM knows of its own decision process. It only takes an input and generates an output, it won’t be able to have any “meta thought” explanation about why it outputted X and not Y in the previous prompt.

I didnt realise that repl.it pivoted to vibe coding. It used to be kinda like jsfiddle or CodePen, where you had a sandbox to write and run web code (HTML, JS/TypeScript/CoffeeScript, and CSS/LESS/Sass).

At this burn rate, I’ll likely be spending $8,000 month,” he added. “And you know what? I’m not even mad about it. I’m locked in.”

For that price, why not just hire a developer full-time? For nearly $100k/year, you could find a very good intermediate or senior developer even in Europe or the USA (outside of expensive places like Silicon Valley and New York).

The job market isn't great for developers at the moment - there's been lots of layoffs over the past few years and not enough new jobs for all the people who were laid off - so you'd absolutely find someone.

Corporations: "Employees are too expensive!"

Also, corporations: "$100k/yr for a bot? Sure."

There's a lot of other expenses with an employee (like payroll taxes, benefits, retirement plans, health plan if they're in the USA, etc), but you could find a self-employed freelancer for example.

Or just get an employee anyways because you'll still likely have a positive ROI. A good developer will take your abstract list of vague requirements and produce something useful and maintainable.

Most of those expenses are mitigated by the fact that companies buy them in bulk on huge plans. As a freelance contractor myself, I pay a lot more for insurance than I did when I worked for a company. And a retirement plan? Benefits? Lol.

Most of those expenses are mitigated by the fact that companies buy them in bulk on huge plans.

There's no bulk rate on payroll taxes or retirement benefits (pensions or employer 401k match). There can be some discounts on health insurance, but is not very much and those are at orders of magnitude. So company with 500 employees will pay the same rates as 900. You get partial discounts if you have something like 10,000 employees.

If you're earning $100k gross as an employee, your employer is spending $125k to $140k for their total costs (your $100k gross pay is included in that number).

I'm gonna guess capitalism

I don't get pleasure from the misfortune of others. But all these vibecoding fails give me the biggest Schadenfreude ever.

Which is a shame, because it used to be a quite good playground

You didn't read closely enough.

“Replit QA’s it itself (super cool), at least partially with some help from you … and … then you push it to production — all in one seamless flow.”

Replit is an agent that does stuff for you including deploying to production. If someone don't want to use a tool like that, I don't blame you, but it was working as it is supposed to. It's a whole platform that doesn't cleanly separate development and production.

Replit is an agent that does stuff for you including deploying to production.

Ahahahahahhahahahahhahahaha, these guys deserve a lost database for that, Jesus.