For me, I’m simply trying to read the article and there are random full screen pop-ups nagging me to sign up for newsletters and stuff

I have been using an open source program “handy”, it is a cross platform rust tauri app that does speech recognition and handles inputting text into programs. It works by piggybacking off the OS’s text input or copy and paste features.

You could fork this, and shell out to an LLM before finally pasting the response.

I clicked out of the article since it starts out with a contradiction.

Experienced engineers can successfully vibe code? By definition it means not reading the output.

If you’re not reading your output, then why does skill level even matter?

The definition of 'vibe code' is somewhat nebulous at the moment. For many it means "only look at the end product (website) and use prompts to fix it" but for others it means "mostly don't hand-code anything, but check the diffs".

> If you’re not reading your output, then why does skill level even matter?

Few thoughts here.

Experience helps you "check" faster that what you asked for is actually what was delivered. You "know" what to check for. You know what a happy path is, and where it might fail. You're more likely to test outside the happy path. You've seen dozens of failure modes already, you know where to look for.

Experience also allows you to better define stuff. If you see that the output is mangled, you can make an educated guess that it's from css. And you can tell the model to check the css integration.

Experience gives you faster/better error parsing. You've seen thousands of them already. You probably know what the error means. You can c/p the error but you can also "guide" the model with something like "check that x is done before y". And so on.

Last, but not least, the "experience" in actually using the tools gives you a better understanding of their capabilities and failure modes. You learn where you can let it vibe away, or where you need to specify more stuff. You get a feeling for what it did from a quick glance. You learn when to prompt more and where to go with generic stuff like "fix this".

Don't you think "having a concrete idea of what sort of code change / end behavior you're looking for" affects the prompts and LLM output?

Do apply the same logic to conductors too?

Now roast the horrendous ugly colors on this horrendous ugly website that is frying my eyeballs. Did you prompt your LLM to create the biggest pile of garbage possible? Or is that just how you talk about other peoples work?

Having too many skills can be a mistake. Getting too meta can be a mistake. I wrote about it on my blog too.

Yeah, it’s literally talked about and documented by the vendor as an intended characteristic of the design.

Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources? That doesn’t scale. Google employees can’t just demand a $10,000 workstation. It’s reasonable to assume they have some guardrails, for both financial and stability reasons. Who knows… if it’s unlimited now, will it stay that way forever? Probably unlimited in the same sense as unlimited pto.

> Why is that funny? What company gives you unlimited resources?

Anthropic has raised tens of billions of dollars of funding.

Their number of employees is in the thousands. This isn't like Google.

Claude Code is what they're developing. The company is obviously going to encourage them to use it as much as possible.

Limiting how much the Claude Code lead can use Claude Code would be funny because their lead dev would have to stop mid-day and wait for his token quota window to reset before he can continue developing their flagship coding product. Not going to happen.

I'm strangely fascinated by the reaction in the comments, though. A lot of people here must have worked in oddly restrictive corporate environments to even think that a company like this would limit how much their own employees can use the company's own product to develop their own product.

I can't get a $10k workstation but if I used $10k/month on cloud compute it'd take a few months for anyone to talk to me about it and as long as I was actually using it for work purposes I wouldn't run into any consequences more severe than being told to knock it off if I couldn't convince people it was worth the cost.

If an employee has a business need for a $10k workstation, I'm fairly certain they'll get a $10k workstation.

Yes, accounting still happens. Guardrails exist. But quibbling over 2% of a SWEs salary if it's clear that the productivity increase will be significantly more than 2% would be... not a wise use of anybody's time.

Folks in MEGACORP cloud env can spend > 5 digits a month and not get noticed.

Can they spend 7 digits?

Yes, but it would get noticed.

Google gives most of their engineers access to machines that would cost that much. If you’re working on specific projects (e.g. Chrome) you can request even more expensive machines.

If it takes a lot of back and forth it between lots of people it is more like a $12000 workstation or more after the labor for requesting and approving.

I tried this and the flow is sketchy UX even if it’s probably not malicious. It opens Messages, has you send a code to a number they control, and that “verifies” you. Probably to multiplex many chats on one phone number. That’s not a takeover by itself (you’re not forwarding a bank/Apple 2FA), but it’s sketchy. It also doesn’t work. It said hello and stopped replying.

Absolutely, I have worked at several.

This author simultaneously admits, he cannot hold the system in his head, but then also claims he’s not vibecoding, and I assert that these are two conflicting positions and you cannot simultaneously hold both positions

I am also doing my pattern recognition. It seems that a common pattern is people claiming it sped me up by x! (and then there’s no AB test, n=1)