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>a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces.

Serious question: at what point is it easier to just write the code?


Depends. If you have written other Tower Defense games then it’s probably really close to that line. If you just took a CS class in high school then this vibe approach is probably 20x faster.

My aunt would always tell me that making fresh pasta or grounding your own meat was basically just as fast as buying it. And while it may have have been true for her it definitely wasn’t for me.


And if it's a work project, you're going to spend a few years working on the same tech. So by the time you're done, there's going to be templates, snippets,... that you can quickly reuse for any prototyping with the tech. You would be faster by the fact that you know that it's correct and you don't have to review it. Helps greatly with mental load. I remember initializing a project in React by lifting whole modules out of an old one. Those modules could have been libraries the way they were coded.


All of this, and highlighting this part:

>You would be faster by the fact that you know that it's correct and you don't have to review it. Helps greatly with mental load.

I keep thinking maybe it's me who's just not getting the vibe coding hype. Or maybe my writing vs reading code efficiency is skewed towards writing more than most people's. Because the idea of validating and fixing code vs just writing it doesn't feel efficient or quality-oriented.

Then, there's the idea that it will suddenly break code that previously worked.

Overall, I keep hearing people advocating for providing the AI more details, new approaches/processes/etc. to try to get the right output. It makes me wonder if things might be coming full circle. I mean, there has to be some point where it's better to just write the code and be done with it.



>There was a time when Musk and his fans were riding a wave of enthusiasm, but with Tesla and Starship problems they've dialed it back.

That's the thing though: those stans were (and still are on some other platforms) very vocal, irrespective of his copious ups and downs (e.g. prior Tesla problems, Twitter debacle, provocative/bad behavior, etc).

In fact, it seemed the worse things were the more vocal they became (like a PR army), and that included here on HN until very recently, IMO.


You can only promise people self-driving cars and Mars and so on, while actually giving them a somewhat worse Twitter and breaking the government, before they eventually get sick of you, I suppose.

Like, I'm sure there are still die-hard Musk superfans out there, but you've got to imagine that a lot of his followers eventually became disillusioned.

I've noticed this happening on HN with other stuff to some extent; way back in the day HN was one of the most Bitcoin-enthusiastic places out there, but that tide eventually turned. Same for NFTs. Arguably you can now see it starting to happen for AI.


I get everything you said except HN turning on AI. I see it many other places but not here. People are experimenting to find the good parts.


A year or so ago HN was basically all in on "this is the singularity"; things are currently drifting somewhat more towards reality.


Oh they're still very active on X, but some of that is bots, which don't work as well on Hacker News. They get flagged here.


>It's not a left-right thing. Even apolitical stuff gets downvoted. Comments about health, obesity, diet tend to get a lot of downvotes...

Well, everything has become political though, right? I mean, you mentioned health, but that's actually a hyper-political topic.


maybe political division has made people more inclined to downvote out of disagreement overall, as being symptomatic of angrier times.


>HN goes through its phases

I've definitely observed this over the years, but there has also been a fair bit of consistency in the form of certain through-lines and more balance.

In any case, what I'm describing is a pretty sudden shift—in particular the recent "re-normalization".


And each one of those items would somehow have a dead pixel.


I loved Fry's and shopped there often in the 90s and 00s but it did seem like half of the things I bought there had to be returned for one reason or another.


Once I was returning something at the Palo Alto Fry's and the couple ahead of me had a laptop where someone had removed the battery and replaced it with a sandwich. Only at Fry's.


I once returned a product that was not working to the Burbank Fry's location. I walked around the store for a bit, then passed by the section where that product was sold - and saw the product I had returned back on the shelf. Could tell by the way I had torn it open - they had just wrapped it back up and put a small discount on it.


>for one reason or another.

Exactly that. It was never that it straight-up didn't work. It was just that there was some issue.

I first encountered it with a TV that literally had a dead pixel. From there, the next 3-4 purchases featured something wrong. Monitor's built-in settings menu didn't display, cordless phone speaker issue, etc.

Dead pixels.

No way it was random. Funniest part was they'd get snippy with their return policy, like you were the problem.


Only question is the size of the upcoming contracts for some newly formed firm(s) or existing firm(s), adjacent to this administration.



>You can certainly do it, in a true emergency. But you certainly don't want to make a habit of it.

Harvard's endowment returned 9.6% last year, growing the total by $2.5 billion. In the previous year, the endowment returned 2.9%, though the total endowment decreased as the gain was offset by contributions to operating expenses. [0]

In other words, Harvard already operates somewhat from their endowment, and can realize net endowment gains in spite of that.

[0] https://www.harvardmagazine.com/2024/10/financial-report-fis...


>In other words, Harvard already operates somewhat from their endowment, and can realize net endowment gains in spite of that.

The argument isn't that Harvard should never draw from its endowment, like it's saving for retirement or something. The argument is that they shouldn't raid endowments by doing additional withdraws to fund the current shortfall.


>The argument isn't that Harvard should never draw from its endowment, like it's saving for retirement or something

The argument I was replying to was actually of exactly this form.

That argument also implied that any endowment spending to cover shortfalls would necessarily be of the principal, but that is also incorrect.

In fact, the White House just responded with a $2.2B funding freeze—an amount that would have been covered by last year's endowment return.


>Your job exists more or less at the whims of the currently governing administration.

Perhaps in theory, but not in practice as a historical norm. And, certainly not for "standard" non-appointed, bureaucratic roles.

It's important that we don't normalize what we're seeing here, in terms of quality or degree.


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