On 12/26/25 1:08 PM, B9 wrote:
For the sake of science, I'm glad to see George has let Claude file the bug report instead of
typing it up himself. Understanding the code — or trying to — would end George's experiment in
"vibe coding" in which one "embraces exponentials and forgets the code exists".
I'm fascinated seeing a hybrid approach happening in real-life: We have a vibe
coder making a patch for existing code that an expert coder will examine.
Clearly it saved George, the vibe coder, time and effort. If he had to
understand the original program, identify the bug, and learn enough to write a
patch, he probably wouldn't have even tried.
Now, the question is: How much time and effort will it cost Ken, the expert
programmer, to handle the AI generated report? Would it have taken Ken more or
less time if he had used Claude interactively to fix the bug?
Bug reports with patches have traditionally been very helpful, but there are
costs, especially with AI. Does Claude's description match the code generated?
Has it identified the actual source of the error? Is it the correct fix? Does
the patch break anything else? Does it add extraneous changes? Does it take an
incremental approach when refactoring would be more appropriate (or vice
versa)? Are the changes written in a way that will be easy to understand and
maintain in the future?
Ken, if you don't mind, please let us know what your experience is and if you
would welcome more patches from vibe coders in the future.
I welcome ALL patches / PRs, vibe coded or not.
I already expected the issues to be related to GUI calls made from
outside the main GUI thread. I had to deal with those in the original
implementation of the remote control interface and setup a GUI update
queue for remote operations to be posted to. I figured it was some
missing component where either I forgot to honor that thread boundry,
tried to honor it but didn't get fully implemented, or maybe just missed
a thread locking / unlocking somewhere. FLTK has a way to lock the main
UI thread so updates can be made form a separate thread, so it could
also be related to that.
I do a bit of combo Vibe / Human In the Loop (HIL) coding at work. I
recently vibe coded a Python QT5 UI for use at the upcomming CES in
Vegas Jan 6th-8th, but it wasn't pure Vibe coding as I dug in to
understand every function / every line of what was generated and
hand-edited as needed, vibe coded small updates, etc.
Ken
