I wouldn’t call myself a vibe coder (or a coder at all I’m pretty rusty and wasn’t killer to start) but I’ve used some Gemini and copilot to help with some VBA scripting. You just gotta walk it in and keep on iterating and telling it what was messed up and give it the error.
It usually will get close or even right eventually but also I ended up just bring up some official documentation to sort some things out because the LLM believed its own bullshit so hard I couldn’t get it to stop hallucinating syntax even when I told it over and over it was wrong.
Which is hard to tell at first glance when it looks right but it is just slightly off or maybe it’s trying to use a non existent “built in” function. I definitely learned some valuable lessons about AI in those small exercises though.
I would say that like anything else it’s a tool, and honestly LLM for writing some boilerplate code or getting something down that’s close (or even pseudo code) is useful. Would never ever trust it on its own and it may not even speed up your workflow but it can be helpful if you’re unsure what to do or how to approach something.
What you can never do is trust the output from the start. You can never just hand your brain off to the machine because it doesn’t actually know anything. I do wonder if the “efficiency” gain is even actually happening or if that’s mostly just a collective delusion fueled by the corpo overlords. At any rate anyone doing actual vibe coding isn’t going to get shit done because the code simply won’t work or will break in fun unexpected and unknown ways.
Blackmist@feddit.uk 3 days ago
I suspect the ones who are, were already programmers.
I’ve had some success taking our main windows app and converting it to a server with a Flutter front end.
Mostly stuff that I already knew how to do but couldn’t be arsed because it’s a lot of work to keep it all in sync. Break it down into actual tasks and Santa Claude stands half a chance. I’ve never written a line of Dart.
I’m also absolutely certain there’s a limit to how far this approach will get me. The old the first half of the work takes 90% of the time. The second half also takes 90% of the time.