Perverse incentives of vibe coding

And indeed, the highly complex tasks I’ve handed to them have largely resulted in failure: implementing a minimax algorithm in a novel card game, crafting thoughtful animations in CSS, completely refactoring a codebase. The LLMs routinely get lost in the sauce when it comes to thinking through the high level principles required to solve difficult problems with computer science. In the example above, my human implemented version of minimax from 2018 totals 400 lines of code, whereas Claude Code’s version comes in at 627 lines. The LLM version also requires almost a dozen other library files. Granted, this version is in TypeScript and has a ton of extra bells and whistles, some of which I explicitly asked for, but the real problem is: it doesn’t actually work. Furthermore, using the LLM to debug it requires sending the bloated code back and forth to the API every time I want to holistically debug it. In an effort to impress the user and over-deliver, LLMs end up creating a rat’s nest o ... Read full article.