by makowskid on 5/6/25, 1:08 PM with 56 comments
by lolinder on 5/6/25, 1:46 PM
What the author is proposing isn't really "vibe" anything, it's just dedicating a small amount of time to fixing tech debt in a way that happens to involve an LLM as an assistant. The LLM in this model is honestly mostly superfluous.
Don't get me wrong, this absolutely is how LLMs should be used in a professional setting, but I just question why we needed a name and a blog post for it. This is just responsible code maintenance as it's always been.
[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en
by laborcontract on 5/6/25, 1:55 PM
Proper refactoring with an llm requires full testing coverage and, by the time you do all that, is the refactoring really necessary? I prefer 100% stability. If you're refactoring the because it's poorly structured and unreadable, that’s okay.. LLMs can help understand it.
In my use of llms, i find it’s actually much easier to rebuild something from scratch rather than refactoring flawed code. It’s much less likely to inherit strange assumptions and code smells that way.
With all that said, the one prompt I do use when refactoring is to tell the llm to do a lossless refactor and then follow up with a "was this really lossless"? It's not foolproof. LLM's love to lie.
by mg on 5/6/25, 1:52 PM
I have been coding since I am 12 years old. I always loved writing code. But I also always loved reading code. I don't know, for me code is a kind of art. Never met anyone else who sees it like this. When a friend was hiring for his startup a while ago, I was happy to sit down for multiple hours and read all the code the applicants wrote and gave him advice on whom to hire.
So for me, the new times are paradise. I try to not touch code directly anymore. I write prompts that would enable a really good developer to implement features and then let various LLMs work on it. Afterward, I rate the results so I have an overall score for each LLM. I pick the best solution for my codebase and manually finetune it to perfection.
After each commit, I also ask the LLMs if they can find anything in the files that can be refactored to make the code shorter or more logical. The result is that the codebase becomes better and better. Because the LLMs often find stuff to improve. They usually come up with 10 ideas I dislike, but also one idea that I like. And so the codebase becomes better and better over time. Instead of worse and worse like in the past when you had to keep a balance of refactoring for the sake of beautiful code and building new features. Nowadays, refactoring becomes more and more free.
by lukev on 5/6/25, 1:42 PM
But we definitely need a word that makes a distinction between a LLM autonomously generating software, and having a human ultimately curating all the code (even if they're using a LLM to generate it.)
If not vibe coding, what should we call that?
by empath75 on 5/6/25, 1:46 PM
by skybrian on 5/6/25, 2:00 PM
by mbeavitt on 5/6/25, 1:53 PM
by lylejantzi3rd on 5/6/25, 3:36 PM
Or will they do what most companies do when they sink millions of dollars into a codebase that doesn't work: dump the codebase, dump the team, hire a new one, and build from scratch?
What does everybody think?
edit: oxford comma is life.
by ChrisMarshallNY on 5/6/25, 2:06 PM
i.e. "I have this function. Can you suggest ways to make it more efficient?" etc.
Sometimes, it gives good feedback, sometimes, not. I almost always need to modify whatever it gives me.
by mentos on 5/6/25, 1:53 PM
Probably an opportunity to category kill that niche.
"Got a vibe coded prototype you want to make more robust?"
by llm_nerd on 5/6/25, 1:45 PM
"There’s a lot of hype about vibe coding"
There is incredibly little hype around vibe coding. 99% of the comments about vibe coding are people propping it up as a strawman to knock down. Otherwise it's like it fills the void left by web 3.0's decline to irrelevance where a bunch of useless masturbatory noise is had by people trying to get in front of something that they think will be a thing. Maybe they can put it on the blockchain.
All of us normal people incorporate LLMs into our work process. No vibes at all. Just another tool in our belt.
EDIT: Just discovered that my comment is apparently dead by default, which is...interesting.
by panny on 5/6/25, 1:35 PM
Some questions,
Does repomix do anything Github copilot should be doing? It seems like this should be something copilot does automagically.
Does it work on any language? I notice the repomix github suggests a different tool if you're using python.
It seems straightforward to create an output.xml on the repomix site, but is there an opinionated try-it-free AI to use that output with?
I'm tired of trying things only to get ai slop. If this cures the slop, I would be interested.
edit: it seems the HN discussion is dominated by the definition of "vibe coding" and not at all interested in what the article presented as a solution... nice.
by evertedsphere on 5/6/25, 1:40 PM
by numbsafari on 5/6/25, 1:58 PM
Coming in as a gray hair to fix their disaster definitely pays the bills.
by zwnow on 5/6/25, 1:49 PM