The upper bound on program complexity used to be the power of the human mind. "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions. It's the AI-powered version of the scaling problem Brooks described back in "The Mythical Man-Month". The combinatoric problems get worse with scale. Concretely, multiple similar implementations of roughly the same thing appear in different parts of the project. This is a known problem of vibe coding now.

We need some way to make AI-driven coding strive for parsimony.

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conartist6 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Why would it? It has optimized what it was built to optimize: this is the token-selling industry. Take note that the people hawking the dream of a gold rush are not actually mining but selling shovels

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ashdksnndck 2 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Same issue happens in models trained by organizations who aren’t selling tokens. I believe it’s because being parsimonious is simply harder. Achieving the task at hand independently and declaring the job done is easier than building an abstraction and reconciling between every use case.

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tekacs 28 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

Labs are trying to make long-horizon work. Even if you're a coding agent, adding more and more surface area is distracting to that goal. There is reason that RL over long traces should, at least in principle, optimize for building in ways that help the result fit in the model's context window.

A meaningful risk of course is that the tools available to the model (ripgrep + fancier semantic approaches) allow it to do a good job of reasoning over things much larger than its context window, and so it doesn't pay the penalty sufficiently to fix it.

	▲	conartist6 14 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Does that not sound a little silly to you when you say it? Should I invest in becoming a memory athlete as a way of becoming a better software engineer? ...or should I learn how to build and use tools?

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TacticalCoder 7 minutes ago | parent | prev [-]

> "Vibe coding" can break through that barrier. But not because the problem being solved needs that complexity. Because the process does not drive itself towards compact abstractions.

It's the infinite AI monkeys at a computer keyboard phenomenon.

Or the car on the highway that bumps left and right on the guardrails until, eventually, it arrives at its destination and nearly everybody is amazed at that great success.

The AI kool-aid drinkers are going to answer: "but that's how human code too".

And I'm really not sure about that.

	▲	bluefirebrand 2 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		It's perhaps how some humans code but frankly if you have those people employed to build software for you, you have big problems