It feels disengenuous to say people vibe code things.
I know it’s correct English, I just think it’s kind of a bullshit statement.
When dumbasses talk to AI’s and the AI’s do things for them, it’s wild to think the credit goes to the dumbasses.
This is like your boss saying he did all your dev work and calling it “boss coding”.
collabora for me. Libreoffice-based but adjusted for “normies” (user interface from this century)
The 1995 user interface soothes my nerves but I will give collabora a try
“… an AI slop version of Microsoft Office that doesn’t fucking work” also known as Microsoft Office 365
The only reason Microsoft exists today is because of Exchange and an old market share on consumer/prosumer OS.
They’re a glorified email hosting company and an embarrassment to software development. Idc what AI does to their shitty software. Fucking hate Outlook.
That’s not really accurate, Azure is massive.
But irrelevant for most users. Azure can stay all it wants but we must be freed from the shackles of Microsoft Office
Maybe for most personal users, but in B2B (where the money is) …
Linux
Long live Libre devs!! Been with yall for over a decade
a couple of months ago i asked about this one of local Forbes editors and they explained this phenomenon as “because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing”. i decided not to continue this conversation because that’s fucking stupid
“because it is expected to code by hand but managing to vibe anything is amazing”.
I don’t think it’s wise to stake the future of computing on “It’s not that the bear dances well, it’s that the bear dances at all.”
maybe that’s why some rando forbes editor is not a CEO of some nondescript startup.
they’re desperate for ai to be profitable.
you’re right
It’s not really stupid. Things that are unusual are more noticeable, and garner more comment. We’ve grown used to devs tirelessly doing what they do, to the point most people don’t think about where their software comes from, but a machine sort of doing it (poorly, so very poorly) is novel, so people talk about it.
Currently, software mostly working as it should is the norm, so people don’t talk about it much. When the wave of slopcoded disasters starts to grow, people will talk about it, because software is suddenly not working as it should.
and yet no one is celebrating a piece of software well done
Id be done for a “it just works” day to celebrate all of invisable labour that makes the world work
That’s supposed to be Labour Day/ May Day
Tinfoil hat time:
A year ago, I did some reverse engineering. I figured a pattern matching engine has to be good matching patterns, so I threw the messed-up output of Ghidra into Claude to clean it up and to give me an overview of what the fuck happens in a certain part.
I was absolutely surprised. Sure, it got some things wrong, but it knew way more than it should have been able to guess from that short bit of fucked up, optimised not-quite-C. Including guessing context that it should not be able to guess. This was a firmware with not-yet-released functions that, to my knowledge, shouldn’t exist outside of this bit of binary firmware. At least not for us non-NDA mortals.
At the time, Mistral had a new-ish model as well, so I figured I’d give it a try. It worked as expected, cleaned up things, gave variables reasonable names, made educated guesses and so on, but didn’t act as if it had background info. And I was using Sonnet 4.x, so the small Claude which shouldn’t be that much larger.
Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too. I have no idea how, maybe aggressively training on user inputs? Anyway, this does not help to allalleviate my suspicions.
They’re using gig workers by the hundreds of thousands, if not millions to do “data annotation”. You can actually make quite a bit if you’ve got higher credentials like Phd, masters, or a very good resume.
My theory is they’ve been using professionals to inadvertently leak proprietary methodologies. They could be doing so by creating problems for them to solve that lead people to inadvertently expose solutions based on their actual jobs.
It’s lowkey corporate espionage.
Oh it learned enough from code that it has developed some basic, and hear me out of this, artificial verbal intelligence. I know I know, not just pattern matching, but actual artificial intelligence at a low level.
Please don’t downvote me (sorry don’t remember if this is fuckai or not) but I’m just saying it’s one possible explanation to this phenomenon you describe.
i would err towards it ingesting proprietary code before this, it’s not wrong but AI spits out copyrighted and should-be private stuff all the time.
There are studies and tools like LiCoEval and others that investigate LLM memorization. It does happen but it’s not all the time, and it’s very infrequent for real world (complex) examples. Mostly this concerns textbook examples or standard boilerplate code - from what I read. And I obviously don’t know the specific example mentioned. This is also a problem that can be fixed.
But I’m really just half mocking the very careful language used by the comment I replied to.
I threw about 10 short phrased meeting notes (4-5 words each) into an LLM to get some document formatting started with titles and sections etc. It built a full scope document and inferred a ton of information about the project and product. It was surprising how much it could infer, and suggested very sensible testing criteria and alternate solutions should the main product path not pan out.
I can see why people start believing it “thinks”, because it was remarkable what it “understood” about a vague new product. Had I sent the info out to stake holders, they would have assumed this person was a key team member that was involved from day 1.
“Intelligence”, as a word has always been ill defined. What’s it mean? It’s mostly been used to create prejudices via standardized tests, the bell curve, and IQ tests.
I don’t believe it’s “intelligent” as we don’t really know how to define that. But I do think it’s really really really good at writing reasonable seeming statements in various languages using probability.
Coding and programming, are just languages. So it will likely be able to get pretty damn good at it, just as it has with the English language.
I think with LLMs accurate regurgitation of facts, is the colary to good code.
But I don’t believe that means it “thinks” (which requires introspection, and an internal experience). It does multi-agent computing, and this might even simulate some aspects of thinking… But it’s not thinking. It’s computing.
It won’t be able to do any more than that, until it consistently gets data from having a body (and something like glial thought-interactions/organs/flaws/survival).
By the way, this also means if you could download a mind to a computer - it would slowly lose it’s humanity as it lived longer and longer interfacing with computer systems rather than human systems/organs/experiencs.
Eventually that “uploaded human” would become a Clankr, and stop understanding human life, the will to survive/think. Eventually it would just compute (not think/care or have flaws).
Many sci-fi stories are based on the man-to-technology-to-cold-rational-evil pipeline… Less have gone in the other direction, even though it often produces very popular characters: Spock, Data, the Terminator, Pinnoccio.
I specifically asked our CEO about this just to cover my ass. It seems insane to trust these guys at all. Here in the USA, small businesses have de facto no legal protection from large businesses.
Absolutely. Especially if you have company info / IP that someone else would pay a lot for. This is a question for lawyers and managers to negotiate with the lawyers at OpenAI, Anthropic etc, not for us little people to decide. I’m not throwing company data in an online service that is not cleared for us to use, and I don’t even work with spicy stuff. Back in my IT days we would have called that a data breach, which would have lead to something from an unpleasant hour in the boss’ office to a promotion to customer.
Makes me wonder how much of the frontier models hacking is just “our devs uploaded the codebase to Claude and suddenly it knows where all the backdoors are”?
I guess most, honestly
Since then, I have the conspiracy theory that the Claude people threw a bunch of proprietary sources in the training, too.
An enormous amount of people use this technology for privat company data without batting an eye; not just software developers, but business people for reports, etc.
They all throw their confidential data in there without even considering the implications, just “trusting” Anthropic. claude code bots are running on tens of thousands of proprietary code bases that used to be private, and of course they are using all this data to train their model.
It’s standard operating practice to steal everything. The world’s full of dumb fucks.
Then people are surprised that claude code gets better at coding
Better at replicating closed source software.
It surely gets better at coding in general, after all there are smart people at anthropic with near limitless budgets, but my conspiracy thesis is that it gets a lot better at replicating stuff it has seen before, but really shouldn’t have.
Meta had an explicit higher price for using their model without retention of prompts for training. This all but confirms your theory.
Wait… wait… you believe Facebook?
Oh, facebook will steal the data even if they say they won’t. What’s interesting is they put a price on blatant prompt copying.
We steal your data: $5 We steal your data and tell you we don’t: $10
I’m sure it’s all but officially confirmed, that all the people upload to it goes to training data unsanitised. And Microslop for sure uploaded entirety of their codebase to all the bots. This is at least part of the reason why claude is so surprisingly OK at reverse-engineering all the big stuff.
I don’t like LibreOffice but any actual Open Source dev deserves infinite more respect than those prompstitutes.
I disagree, their efforts don’t go unnoticed. Their recent no-AI claims prompted me to donate.
To be fair, neither does the real MS office
that doesn’t work
You see, they took the efforts to replicate Microsoft excel experience.
Excel is the 7th ring of hell
What level is Teams?
Hells sewage tunnels.
Satan just asked god to add new layers of hell.
But they got stuck in infinity meetings
He also asked to remove all the fun emojis because fun is banned in hell.
they made Teams 2, Satan might not get the note because he uses teams.
If you think using it is bad, try deploying/maintaining it
Wow, it managed to perfectly replicate Microsoft office?
How it looks, not how it works. Very buggy iir.
whooshing sound
I think that was the joke, because MS Office sucks. lol
Tells you something about Microsoft Office
LibreOffice - the only office suite that handles tables correct, even when multiple users change the document 🥳
For anyone not already aware, there was a push in the early 2000s to require government documents to be in a standard format rather than giving a specific vendor (Microsoft) unfair advantage (official government endorsement). LibreOffice (OpenOffice at the time) used the standardized ODF format, which should’ve pushed many European governments to switch to an open source office suite. Instead, Microsoft bribed a bunch of people to push through their “OOXML” format as a standard, even though it was just a snapshot of Office’s behavior, bugs and all.
There is another twist to this in that the OOXML format didn’t actually define the bugs in the format and MS Office itself didn’t actually follow the officially defined specification they pushed through. This inevitably led to every product that tried to make use of the official spec (e.g. Open Office) failing to be compatible with MS Office. It took the open source devs many years to properly duplicate the buggy mess that is the real MS Office formats.
Which is entirely tragic, because LibreOffice is good, I respect hand coding more than the products of a prompt slot machine.
LibreOffice just outright stating their policy of ‘no AI’ as a feature made me respect them so much more.
Based, x2
I wonder how long this will hold. Remind me 3 years?
I think “no AI” policies are a good thing and the intention is (likely) not literally forbidding AI; they couldn’t in any meaningful way. But the code should have a human attribution and ownership. If the code reeks of LLM, it’s shitty code quality. If people open MRs saying it was written by an agent, they distance themselves from their contribution but expect others to review and integrate it; which is also shitty behavior.
If on the other hand it’s well crafted code that was being thought through and refined, no one should or could care if an LLM was involved.
It’s only tragic for a month, after which the other project gets abandoned because its unmaintainable or the vibecoder got bored and moved on to another viral idea
I’m not going to switch to something unless I know its going to be around when I need it
The person behind all these *craft projects has (or claims to have) made millions from his AI image / video creation services and scam-enabling deepfake voice cloner. The projects are linked to and funded by his commercial endeavors. He’s also extremely exuberant about real developers and creators losing their jobs, and suffers from massive AI psychosis. Unfortunately I don’t think he or this project is going anywhere.
I don’t think any of it will ever actually work, but he’s very good at making outlandish comments and drumming up hype, so we’re going to keep hearing about it anyway.
abandoned because its unmaintainable
Exactly this. It’s hard enough maintaining my own code. It can take a good 15 mins or so to familiarise myself with something I haven’t worked on in a short while. Seeing code that isn’t mine is very challenging. Not the code itself, but the methods and structures used by the other person. All that has to be done before hunting bugs and adjusting features. Then of course there’s the things you don’t know about that can be easily missed.
An AI would need to thoroughly know the code and detailed context on the decisions behind it all, every session, in order to be able to maintain it with vibe, because the vibe coder won’t know any of this.
To me, its tragic for exactly that reason; the vibiot, is lavished and rewarded with attention, when they don’t even understand the outputs from their prompt slot machine. So when they get bored or confused by their projects and chase the next craze…The person that should’ve gotten the accolades for understanding and maintaining their work, is forgotten still. I don’t like this timeline, its a stupid time to be alive.
That rule where something is expected to last in the future as long as it already has in the past probably applies here
Damn; looks like grandma is going to outlive us all
The wikipedia article on the effect covers this with an awfully blunt aside lol
The Lindy effect applies to non-perishable items, like books, those that do not have an “unavoidable expiration date”.[2] For example, human beings are perishable
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lindy_effect
Neat, I haven’t heard of this one before. I’ll likely use it in the future
Yeah, I love little rules of thumb like that
That’s why I code in Fortran
It’s good enough that my 75yo mother picked it up without trouble when I switched her to Mint after W10 went EoL.
Same. My 60+ mother got a new computer recently, saw the prices of MS Office and told me “install that free thing”. So far no complaints, first remark was “well, looks like it has all the same buttons, works for me”
I wish the people at my company were like your mother. Instead, they freak out about the smallest of changes in the UI of the same application. God forbid they have to move to another application entirely. Had a user freak out their application wasn’t licensed and they couldn’t use all functions anymore. Turns out they just managed to somehow hide the toolbar with all the options… These are people anywhere from 20 to 60 years old, btw.
Yeah, it is not an age thing. I’m very happy that my mother has always been pretty good at programming solving. Although she never did any real tech related job, I believe this is a question of attitude more than anything else.
When she proudly tells me she used my dad’s phone to google for a fix for her phone acting up, my inner first year support monkey is proud :)
‘prompt slot machine’ <- I’m borrowing that
Or just slop-machine in short
Enjoy, its such a good turn of phrase!
