For fun I've been vibe coding something I know well: toolchains. Maybe not the right thing to vibe code. But I can more or less judge the quality of the output.
When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well it picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was like that too, to be fair.
However, when I described the desired passes and their types:
collectDefines :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], Map Text Text)
runLitPool :: [SourceLine] -> Either AsmError ([SourceLine], [(Text, LitKey)])
evalExpr :: Text -> Map Text Text -> Either AsmError Int
etc. It was almost one-shot. About 20 minutes until I was happy. Assembles all the test programs correctly. Code is mediocre in many places. But it would have taken me weeks to implement.
joe_mamba•4m ago
>Code is mediocre in many places.
As if code written by devs at major corporations is flaweless.
mlinhares•1m ago
I keep telling people that they have to design and think about it first and then go to the tool, but they keep saying “Claude can plan too” and obviously it produces some shit that requires a lot of changes while when I get it to go I can almost always one shot the stuff I want because I am actually putting in the time to give it a detailed plan of what to do.
Even just saving me the time to deal with CI is worth it.
laszlojamf•1m ago
I keep hearing that claude is supposedly so agreeable. This doesn't agree with my experience. Claude will often tell me that I'm wrong, and insist on its own solution being right even when I tell it it's wrong.
retrac•22m ago
When left to its own devices with the instructions "make an assembler for the architecture in ISA.md" -- well it picked Python as the implementation language. Tokens lifted through a bunch of regex. No expression parser! Oh dear. My first assembler was like that too, to be fair.
However, when I described the desired passes and their types:
etc. It was almost one-shot. About 20 minutes until I was happy. Assembles all the test programs correctly. Code is mediocre in many places. But it would have taken me weeks to implement.joe_mamba•4m ago
As if code written by devs at major corporations is flaweless.
mlinhares•1m ago
Even just saving me the time to deal with CI is worth it.