Comment by the_mitsuhiko
Comment by the_mitsuhiko 3 days ago
> You can't, at least for production code.
You can. People do. It's not perfect at it yet, but there are success stories of this.
Comment by the_mitsuhiko 3 days ago
> You can't, at least for production code.
You can. People do. It's not perfect at it yet, but there are success stories of this.
> Can you use unsupervised agents, where you don't interact at a 'code' level, only at a high level abstraction level?
My view, after having gone all-in with Claude Code (almost only Opus) for the last four weeks, is ”no”. You really can’t. The review process needs to be diligent and all-encompassing and is, quite frankly, exhausting.
One improvement I have made to my process for this is to spin up a new Claude Code instance (or clear context) and ask for a code review based on the diff of all changes. My prompt for this is carefully structured. Some issues it identifies can be fixed with the agent, but others need my involvement. It doesn’t eliminate the need to review everything, but it does help focus some of my efforts.
Do you know of any links to writeups (or just mentions) of this?
Check out the_mitsuhiko’s youtube, he has been showing some good techniques in the past few weeks.
I don't trust Armin for that, he's too good a developer for vibe coding. The question is whether someone who can't program at all can make something that works well with LLMs, not whether Armin can.
Is that the question? I definitely don't think that's remotely reasonable for someone who can't program. For small things yes, but large things? They're going to get into a spin cycle with the LLM on some edge case it's confused about where they consistently say "the button is blue!" and the bot confirms it is indeed not blue.
It really depends on the area though. Some areas are simple for LLMs, others are quite difficult even if objectively simple.
Granted atm i'm not a big believer in vibe coding in general, but imo it requires quite a bit of knowledge to be hands off and not have it fall into wells of confusion.
There are few writeups but if you go to agentic coding meetups you can find people that show the stuff the build. It’s really quite impressive.
Also, yes. I wrote about this a bit here: https://lucumr.pocoo.org/2025/7/20/the-next-generation/
There are a lot of people who are entering programming via this thing.
Sure, but when I tried to vibe code something in a language I didn't have experience with, and so didn't look at the code at all, I had to basically trash the codebase after a few hundred lines because nothing I'd say could make the LLM fix the problems, or if it fixed them, more problems would pop up elsewhere.
In my experience, if you can't review the code and point out the LLM's mistakes to it, the codebase gets brittle fast. Maybe other people are better vibe coders than me, but I never managed to solve that problem, not even with Opus 4.1.
Are you talking about the same thing as the OP?
I mean, the parent even pointed out that it works for vibe coding and stuff you don't care about; ...but the 'You can't' refers to this question by the OP:
> I really need to approve every single edit and keep an eye on it at ALL TIMES, otherwise it goes haywire very very fast! How are people using auto-edits and these kind of higher-level abstraction?
No one I've spoken to is just sitting back writing tickets while agents do all the work. If it was that easy to be that successful, everyone would be doing it. Everyone would be talking about it.
To be absolutely clear, I'm not saying that you can't use agents to modify existing code. You can. I do; lots of people do. ...but that's using it like you see in all the demos and videos; at a code level, in an editor, while editing and working on the code yourself.
I'm specifically addressing the OPs question:
Can you use unsupervised agents, where you don't interact at a 'code' level, only at a high level abstraction level?
...and, I don't think you can. I don't believe anyone is doing this. I don't believe I've seen any real stories of people doing this successfully.