[LatencyKills]

I have a friend who is VP at a major telecom company. He has no technical experience but has been using Claude to create data analysis apps. He was complaining that it took three hours to process certain datasets, so I took a look.

He had Claude essentially create a 300MB json file and was doing all of the data processing on that data directly.

It never occurred to him, or Claude, that there were other ways to operate on that data. It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.

These are the type of issues that worry me about vibe coding.

[sokoloff]

What would have happened five years ago? I suspect this VP would have gone entirely without analysis tools for these datasets or would have a department of people slowly grinding away at his long list of tickets, tickets that were poorly specified and hard to get clarity on because by the time they were worked on, he’d lost some of the context of his original request.

Now, he makes small apps that scratch his own itches, while everything is fresh in his mind and he can clarify or learn “hmm, that’s not actually what I want” and the cost is some tokens and the occasional job that runs in 3 hours instead of not existing at all.

[LatencyKills]

He didn't even know that there was a solution to the performance issues. He simply assumed that processing data took that long.

I think it is great that he now has this capability, but a total ignorance of software engineering is going to continually bite this type of user. Instead of questioning Claude's solution, my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.

He was also using very sketchy Python imports when much safer, more mature options are available. Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.

[Schlagbohrer]

Finding out that one's boss cannot estimate work time is a blessing if an engineer is wise enough to use that. "Yes boss, this task will take me all of June to do" (finish it in two days, enjoy a relaxing June)

[Schlagbohrer]

> Not knowing that you shouldn't use just any random Python package is a ticking time bomb... especially when his machine is connected directly to his corporate intranet.

Don't worry, I'm sure IT would never give this manager priveleged access to systems permissions.

[noisy_boy]

> my friend thought he just needed a faster computer.

Another contributing factor to rising consumer electronics prices due to vibed up coding is just what we needed.

[esikich]

People have done this long before vibe coding was a thing. I've seen this everywhere. Not every business employs devs or can afford to. So people hack things together with powershell or python. It has always been this way.

[WithinReason]

> It took me less than 10 minutes to get that processing time down to under a minute.

You could have done it with Claude in 1 minute :) It probably never occurred to the VP to ask Claude for performance optimizations