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by desdenova 329 days ago
That's the main problem with vibe coding.

The whole point is having the LLM figure out what you want from vague hand-wavy descriptions instead of precise specification.

You don't need an LLM to parse a precise specification, you have a compiler for that.

2 comments

It's entirely possible to have specifications somewhere between "vague hand-wavy descriptions" and source code. But it's really not my job to defend AI against all the people who want it to be completely useless, seem to need it to be so, really. I just use it, it works a lot of the time, doesn't work other times, and that's that. Results carry more weight than opinions.
> That's the main problem with vibe coding.

It's not a problem. It's in fact the core trait of vibe-codig. The primary work a developer does in vibe coding tasks is providing the necessary and sufficient context. Hence the inception of the term "context engineering". A vibe coder basically lays out requirements and constraints that drives LLMs to write code. That's the bulk of their task: they shift away from writing the low-level "how" to instead write down the high-level "what".

> The whole point is having the LLM figure out what you want from vague hand-wavy descriptions instead of precise specification.

No. The prompts are as elaborate as you want it to be. I, for example, use prompt files with the project's ubiquitous language and requirements, not to mention test suites used for acceptance tests. You can half-ass your code as much as you can half-ass your prompts.

Sounds like a compiler with extra steps.