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A vibe programmer that built a palm-sized fusion reactor in a cave over the course of 3 months with a single companion? Perfectly respectable to me. And he probably made his own AI too :)
I’ve always imagined peak programming as building up from low level languages, putting on some layers of abstraction and automatization written by yourself, and end up writing some trivial commands to produce very interesting outputs… Who knows? Maybe throwing around some holograms and voice-commands asking for nonsense. It doesn’t get much more vibey than that.
Programming in vim and emacs does look like that lol.
A vibe programmer that built a palm-sized fusion reactor in a cave over the course of 3 months with a single companion
With a box o scraps!
He leaves out that the “box of scraps” was essentially a complete selection of all the parts used by his company to make their weapons. He was basically given a couple each of every Lego set ever (already assembled !) and then tore them apart to make one big thing. It’s impressive, but it’s not like he reinvented modern technology from scratch. I’d call that “vibe engineering” at worst.
So what i get out of this is if you make your own homemade llm then we can call it “vibe” coding. Otherwise, if your just farting around on sone corporate data mining llm then it’s fart coding?
Everything in the Marvel Universe is just wizards. Nobody is coding. Nobody is engineering. Nobody is doing anything more technical than “Hit him with a bigger rock”.
Tony is just a wizard doing wizard shit in stylized techno-pastiche.
Yeah, Tony was capable of doing whatever the writers wrote him to be capable of, just like every other fictional character. And the writers wrote him doing it in a manner similar to the “programming” in Swordfish or the tech work in NCIS (or whatever show it was that had multiple people typing on one keyboard at the same time). As in difficult to tell if they had any understanding of it at all, sensationalised it for entertainment purposes, deliberately made it unlike any real programming to troll people who do understand programming, or some combination of all those.
MCU science might as well just be another school of magic. Especially when Tony’s suit could shapeshift and convert between matter and energy because of some quantum mumbo jumbo. He just cast a quantum spell on it.
Also every movie had multiple impacts in that iron suit that should have been worse for him than most car crashes.
I mean, I don’t really object to the premise of the character - Batman-like super genius who stacks the deck in his favor by building a bunch of cool gadgets to get him out of tight spots. But I agree, its far more fun to see a character like Tony run up against the limits of his gadgetry than to hand him the Super Science “I Win Button” and wait until the last five minutes of the show to press it.
Don’t get me wrong, it’s decent entertainment. It’s just disconnected from any kind of scientific or technical reality and a part of me is rolling my eyes for a lot of it. And maybe a bit frustrated because I like thinking about things and analyzing and problem solving. I prefer hard magic systems over soft magic ones because there’s no point in thinking about soft magic systems because they just do whatever the plot calls for when it calls for it while hard magic systems have to build up to it and need to be clever to surprise viewers.
Tony uses a soft technology system that defies thought.
From what I remember he seem to mostly use it to change parameters and intiate things with voice commands. At least in the movies.
The more we talk about things the greater chance it becomes the norm. What’s this tony? Never heard of him. Vibe coding? Never heard of it and I don’t think I would be interested. Moving on.
Have I misunderstood the term vibe coder? I thought it meant people who weren’t good at coding. I thought Stark’s whole thing was that he’s a genius. Is he notoriously bad at software but good with hardware or something?
Javis, his AI assistant, did all the work.
Except that he made Jarvis. Meaning he understands perfectly his tool’s abilities and limitations… Which vibe coders don’t.
I feel like you’re really forgetting the lore. Do you not remember the iconic “TONY STARK WAS ABLE TO BULD THIS IN A CAVE. WITH A BIX OF SCRAPS.” He built a compact arc reactor in a cave. The other man’s reply as to why he couldn’t do it in a lab with more scientists and equipment was “I’m not Tony Stark.”
Yes, but he also programmed Jarvis… So…
vibe coding is when you let an llm write almost all your code, taking its output at face value. tony stark in the films just vaguely describes to his computer what he wants and trusts that it does the right thing.
I think the underlying understanding is that Tony wrote the AI he’s asking to write the code. So, in effect, the AI he built is a form of scripting. Rather than spending his time churning out code, the AI will churn out code that’s up to his standard because he wrote the AI.
This was my understanding, too. Dude created his own hardware and software and then hand rolled an AI so he had more time to spend saving the world instead of hunched over a laptop. Anything he tells his own AI to do would probably be trivial to him to write himself but would take us months.
From my understanding a vibe coder is someone who builds software using mainly AI generated code. It doesn’t necessarily mean they’re a bad coder, but often the code generated by AI is just hard to process at this scale and people will have no clue what exactly is going on in their project.
A vibe coder is someone who codes by vibe, rather than by knowledge or practice. It’s literally a term to describe bad coders. Yes, it is about the use of AI, but only in the context of using that AI for programming without having any idea of what the AI is actually doing.
if they build software using mainly ai generated code, then they are a bad coder
I’ve tried this on personal projects, but not work projects.
My verdict:
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To be a good vibe coder, one must first be a good coder.
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Vibe coding is faster to draft up and POC, longer to debug and polish. Not as much time savings as one might think.
exactly, you can only really verify the code if you were capable of writing it in the first place.
And it’s an old well known fact that reading code is much harder than writing it.
An irrelevant but interesting take is that this applies as an analogue to a lot of stuff in electronics related space.
- It is harder to receive data than to transmit it, because you need to do things like:
- match your receiver’s frequency with that of the transmission (which might be minutely different from the agreed upon frequency), to understand it
- know how long the data will be, before feeding into digital variables, or you might combine multiple messages or leave out some stuff without realising
- this gets even harder when it is wireless, because now, you have noise, which is often, valid communication among other devices
Getting back to code, you now need to get in the same “wavelength” as the one who wrote the code, at the time they wrote the code.
i like the analogy
- It is harder to receive data than to transmit it, because you need to do things like:
I weirdly love reading code and figuring out what it’s doing. Debugging is cathartic.
It might take a while and I might be cussing up a storm saying, wtf is this shit? Why the fuck would you do it this way? Why the fuck did you make this convoluted for no reason?
Right now it’s unfucking some vibe coded bs where instead of just fixing an API to get the info we needed accurately, it’s trying to infer it from other data. Like, there is a super direct and simple route, but instead there are hundreds of lines to work around hitting the wrong endpoint and getting data missing the details we need.
Plus letting the vibe add so much that is literally never used, was never needed, and on top of that returns incorrect information.
enjoying it is a different issue. You probably enjoy it because it’s more difficult, which is perfectly valid reasoning
Exactly how I feel about it as well.
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Even if you’re the one that built, programmed, and trained the AI when nothing else like it existed?
So? Some of the people pushing out ai slop would be perfectly capable of writing their own llm out of widely available free tools. Contrary to popular belief, they are not complex pieces of software, just extremely data hungry. Does not mean they magically understand the code output by the llm when it spits out something.
Stark would have developed their own way of training their AI. It wouldn’t be an LLM in the first place.
and he stil wouldn’t understand its output. Because as we clearly see, he doesn’t even try to look at it.
What if it were just a really big Expert system?
That’s usually the thing that you call AI players or COM players in computer games.
out of widely available free tools
I think you missed the part where “nothing like it even existed”
so? someone invented current llms too. Nothing like them existed before either. If they vibe coded with them they’d still be producing slop.
Coding an llm is very very easy. What’s not easy is having all the data, hardware and cash to train it.
Yeah but the people who made it like that probably understand whether to trust it to write code or not. The AI Tony wrote, he knows what it does best and he trusts it to write his code. Just because it’s AI doesn’t mean it’s LLM. Like I trust the errors compilers give me even if I didn’t write them because it’s good. And I trust my scripts to do things that I wrote them for, specifically since I tested them. Same with the AI you yourself made, you’d test it, and you’d know the design principles.
The point is that no vibe coder could design an LLM without an LLM already existing. The math and tech behind machine learning is incredible, whatever you may think. Just because we can spin up new ones at will doesn’t mean we ever could have skipped ahead and built Jarvis in 2008, even if all of society was trying to do so - because they were trying.
In the fictional universe where a human could singlehandedly invent one from scratch in 2008 with 3D image generation and voice functionality that still exceeds modern tech… yeah, that person and their fictional AI wouldn’t necessarily be producing slop.
Even if they build the AI doing it from scratch, all by themselves?
yes. Because that would still mean they didn’t code the app.
“killing is bad!” “but what if the murderer 3d printed his own gun?”
More like: “killing is bad” “but what if the ‘murderer’ designed, build and produced their own target?”
You can’t kill a robot, so it isn’t killing.
the “target” is to get useful software out. The ai is the tool. In this example, the ai is the gun. It is the tool used to achieve the goal.
Anyone can make an improvised hammer. Stick a rock or a piece of metal on a stick. But that doesn’t make them carpenters, even though they made their own tools.
This meme made me feel better about myself. Been copy pasting from Stack overflow for more than a decade, vibe coding was a real step up for me.
Not quite there yet, still waiting on the holographic AI hardware design. Coming soon I hear.
I’m still a fan of the theory that the only thing he was good at was creating was ai
Falls apart due to cave situation. No jarvis for first suit or mini arc reactor
In the MCU? He hand built multiple suits, and designed all of the others himself. It even states that he designed his first engine when he was like 4 I think in the first movie. He was worse at creating AI than his actual mechanical and electrical engineering skills, as portrayed in the films. Comics are of course a separate matter.
But he wasn’t. At least in the movie version, he and Banner had failed a few times, maybe more we didn’t see on screen. Something happened when Tony wasn’t there that sparked Ultron to become aware and catch Jarvis off guard. I’d give him credit for getting it 99% of the way there, same with Vision, but he didn’t make that final jump, it happened on its own.
And Jarvis wasn’t AGI. Seems like it to us, but since Ultron was apparently the big moment of A(G)I in the MCU even with Jarvis being around all that time, he was just a very flexible and even self-aware scripting that would never do something on his own accord, only following Tony’s orders. I think even Ultron catches on to that in the brilliant few seconds of waking and realization with his “why do you call him Sir?”
You mean the one that turned into Ultron?
In the MCU yea that tracks.
And he was “good at it” because he could afford the hardware/menial labor to train the initial AI models.
Well, he had to be, programming his own AI basically by himself.
