I disagree with your sentiment.

The difference isn't what's finishing a project is, is the dissonance between what M4v3R and rhubarbtree understand when talking about "nontrivial production" software.

When you're working in enterprise, you usually have multiple stakeholders each defining sometimes even conflicting requirements to behavior of your software. And you're required to adhere to these requirements stringently.

That's an environment that's inherently a bad fit for vibe coding.

It can still be used there, too, but you will not get a 2-3x speed up, because the LLM will always introduce minor behavioral changes - which aren't important in M4v3R scenario, but a complete deal breaket for rhubarbtree.

From my own experience, I don't get a speed up at all via CoPilot agentic mode (Claude code is banned at my workplace). But I have had a significant boost in productivity in projects that don't need to adhere to any specific spec - namely projects I do an my own time (with Claude code right now).

I still use Copilot agentic mode though. While I haven't timed myself, I don't think I'm faster with it whatsoever. It's just less mentally involved in a lot of scenarios, so it's less exhausting - leaving more energy for side projects .

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mattmanser 2 days ago | parent [-]

I don't believe it's to do with the requirements. I think you'll still hit the same problems if those greenfield projects grow. It's still fundamentally about the code. I think you're missing the difference between a 10/100k+ lines of code professional software vs a quick 3k lines greenfield project.

In a few thousand lines of code you can get away with a massive amount of code bloat, quick hacks and inconsistent APIs. In a program that's anything more than a few thousand lines, you can't. It just becomes too confusing. You have to be deliberate. Code has to follow patterns so the cognitive load is lowered. Stuff has to be split up in a predictable manner.

And there's another problem, sensible and predictable maintenance. Changes and fixes have to be targeted and specific. They have to be written to avoid side-effect.

For organisation, it's been a huge effort on everyone's part these last 30 years to achieve that. Make code understandable, by organising it better. From one direction, languages have improved, with authors reducing boilerplate + cross-pollination of ideas between languages like anonymous methods. On the other, it's developers inventing + describing patterns or KISS or the single responsibility principle. Or even seemingly trivial things like choosing predictable folder structures and enforcing indentation rules[1]. I'm starting to feel that's often the main skill a senior dev brings to the table, organising code well.

Better code organization has made it possible for developers to make larger program. Code organisation is a need that becomes a big problem if you're not doing it well in large projects, but not really a problem if you're not doing it well in small projects.

And right now, AI isn't very good at code organisation. We might believe that you have to have a mental model of the whole program in your head, something an LLM is just not capable of right now. And I don't know if that's going to turn out to be a solvable problem as it seems like a huge context problem.

For maintenance, I'm not sure. AI seems pretty terrible at it. It often rewrites everything and throws the baby out with the bathwater. Again, it's a context problem.

Both could turn out to be easy to solve for this generation of AI, in the end.

[1] Younger programmers will not believe that even 15/20 years ago it was still a common problem that developers did not bother to indent their code consistently. In my first two jobs I'd regularly hit inconsistently indented code.

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MGriisser 2 days ago | parent [-]

I personally find Claude Code has no real issues working and producing code in the 40k LoC Ruby on Rails repo I work in nor in the 45k LoC Elixir/Phoenix repo I work in. For the last few months I'd say 99% of all changes I do to both are purely via Claude Code, I almost never use my editor anymore at all. It's common things don't work on the first try or aren't exactly what I want but usually just giving an error to Claude or further instructions will fix it in an iteration or two.

I think the code organization isn't amazing, but it's fine and frankly not that much of a concern to me usually as I'm usually just reading diffs and not digging around in the code much myself.

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ffsm8 2 days ago | parent [-]

Totally of topic, but the other day I was considering trying out elixir for a mainly vibe coded project, mainly because i thought the way you can structure code in it should be pretty much optimal for LLM driven development.

I haven't tried it yet, but I thought elixirs easily implementable static analysis of code could make enforcement whenever the LLM goes off rails highly useful, and an umbrella architecture would make modularity well established.

Modules could all define their own contexts via nested CLAUDE.md and subagents could be used to give it explicit implementation details.

Did you try something like that before MGriisser? (successfully or not?)

	▲	MGriisser a day ago \| parent [-]
		Unfortunately I don't do anything nearly that sophisticated, I honestly barely even know Elixir, I had just used it a little bit at a previous job and thought it would be a nice choice to try for the web server part of an application I was building. I mostly use Claude in that repo for controllers, DB access, and front end via heex templates, often with LiveView. I find it can get a bit mixed up with heex stuff occasionally given the weirdness of nested code into the HTML and all that but I think on pure Elixir it usually does a good job.