Comment by Animats

Comment by Animats a day ago

33 replies

It's about to get much worse.

You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.

protocolture a day ago

>You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

In abstract, probably true, but so vague to be useless.

I can probably vibe code with qwen on debian. But are you then going to pivot from your microsoft example to like, my ISP? And if I point out I can move to an ISP with less than 5 staff, you will probably just move the goalposts further right?

Might be better to let you establish your goalposts first hey.

  • kragen a day ago

    What has your experience vibecoding with Qwen on Debian been like so far? What tooling and approaches have you found to work best?

    • protocolture a day ago

      I use it on Windows, I am just loosely aware that I could run it on debian if I wished. I use 7b and its roughly as useful as GPT 3.5. I dont have any tools linked to it yet.

      • kragen a day ago

        Does that mean "pretty useful" or "a total waste of time"? I never got much useful code out of GPT 3.5.

    • brazukadev a day ago

      I'm implementing an MCP client using Qwen3 4B and its tool call capabilities are impressive! I'm sure it will only improve and the 30B is probably already much better.

      • kragen a day ago

        What are you running it in, ollama? Did you have to install some additional software to enable it to call tools (also via MCP?)

827a a day ago

Eh, this I cannot abide with. There are dozens of hosted model providers, from the foundational providers (OpenAI, Anthropic, etc) to cloud re-hosting (Azure, GCP, AWS) to routing proxies (OpenRouter, Vercel, etc). There are huge open source models that are quite competitive (Qwen3-Coder). There are smaller open source models that can run on your laptop and easily help with function writing. There are walled garden, highly integrated tools (Claude Code, Codex) and there are plug-and-play bring your own API key or model tools (Charm Crush, etc). The ecosystem is vast, and every facet of it appears to be getting better.

sherburt3 a day ago

What if you just like do normal programming instead?

  • echelon a day ago

    What if vibe coding becomes 20x faster than normal coding? Are you going to stay old school and write artisanal code?

    • bigstrat2003 a day ago

      It may surprise you to learn that some people actually like programming, so yes I will. If AI tools are 20x faster then I guess I'll have to use them to get paid, but I'll be damned if I start letting a computer do the fun part for me on personal projects.

      That said I'm not too worried. Vibe coding is currently slower due to how bad it is at writing software. In several years companies pouring billions into improving LLMs still haven't been able to make them not suck. That suggests to me that it's a fundamental limitation of the tech at present, and won't get better until another research breakthrough happens.

      • echelon a day ago

        We've had AI assisted coding for less than half a decade.

        The rapidity of development is astonishing.

        • auggierose 20 hours ago

          These two statements can coexist. Yes, AI is amazing. And yes, it is not good enough yet to significantly speed up my work beyond research and writing tests.

    • jezek2 a day ago

      Quantity was never an issue, quality is.

    • skydhash a day ago

      There's no silver bullet in software development.

      • echelon a day ago

        Universal statements have a high burden of proof.

        People used to claim we'd never fly. Shortly after we started, we reached the moon.

        The entirety of the last 60 years of software may have been a low energy local optima.

        • skydhash a day ago

          The last 60 years of software gave us amazing projects, and if you go through their code, you'll see the same principles that is outlined in every good software engineering book: Good organization, hackish when needs be to resolve some accidental complexity, good comments,...

          Most of those things rely on having the right mindset/philosophy first, then having a good grasp about the domain and the technologies (programming languages, platforms, libraries,...). After that you need to start thinking about the tools you used to help you (editors, test runners, static analyzers, debuggers,...). Most LLM users put the latter above all others. Like using the agent precludes knowing about the domain, the technology, and the tooling. And what philosophy? Craftmanship? Sir, here it's all about YOLO.

bigstrat2003 a day ago

> You can't vibe code without using a service from a big company, and obeying their rules.

True, but that's also not exactly a good thing to be doing to begin with.

nixpulvis a day ago

This is one of my biggest problems with AI coding assistance. And how they will shape the development of less human friendly APIs and libraries over time.

toast0 a day ago

> If Microsoft terminates your account, your programming career is over.

Why wouldn't you just get another account?

  • EvanAnderson a day ago

    Age verification laws in the US are chipping away at Internet anonymity. You might not be able to get another account because your legal identity might be required (and can be banned).

    • kube-system a day ago

      This isn’t just a US thing. Many countries require KYC for a lot of online accounts

  • themacguffinman a day ago

    All major platforms have mechanisms to identify ban evasion. It's not so easy to create another account when, for example, they ask for a phone number.

    • drnick1 a day ago

      In the U.S. at least, it is trivial to buy a new SIM anonymously. But really, you should refuse to use any platform that requires a phone number in the first place. These companies make it implicitly very clear that they want to control you and extract every bit of information that they can from you.

    • TuxSH a day ago

      Slightly unrelated but GH's ToS clearly only permit one free account per person and I've heard they sometimes enforce this

unleaded a day ago

i'm guessing you've never seen r/LocalLLaMA?

It's a miracle that open-weight LLMs are even a thing at all, let alone as good as they are (very).

  • janice1999 a day ago

    You need thousands of dollars of hardware to run a decent coding model with bearable tokens/s.

    • warkdarrior a day ago

      Freedom isn't free. That is why GPL does allow charging money for software.