Vibe Coding

[Joost Buijs]

This is a nice story about vibe coding: https://brandonharris.io/Garbage-Pail-Code/

[Ed Gilbert]

This is a nice story about vibe coding: https://brandonharris.io/Garbage-Pail-Code/

Thanks Joost, that was very entertaining!

[MichelG]

Bert, I guess we just have to wait and see.

Currently companies are putting billions (even trillions) of dollars into AI-fabrics, when AI doesn't live up to expectations there is a big change that at some point they will fail. At least I won't put my money on it.

If they fail, the upside is that memory (and other hardware too) will get cheaper than it ever was before.

Joost

The companies might fail and go broke because they spend too much, but AI itself will not fail. For me, AI is a fact of life. It is here. They are smarter than me. If they never get smarter than they are now, that would be ok, it is smart enough.

I use AI up to 8 hours per day on my job. Projects that would have taken me months we can do in weeks or even faster. Our changelog is exploding with new features we produce.

In our software, there are bugs that for years we haven't been able to find or reproduce. We gave up on them, and accepted the occiasional crash. Now Fable reproduces and then solves such bugs in minutes.

Handcoding has been fun for the last decades. But it is a thing of the past, like analog photography. You still can do it, but it is just for the fun of it.

Michel

[Joost Buijs]

The companies might fail and go broke because they spend too much, but AI itself will not fail. For me, AI is a fact of life. It is here. They are smarter than me. If they never get smarter than they are now, that would be ok, it is smart enough.

I use AI up to 8 hours per day on my job. Projects that would have taken me months we can do in weeks or even faster. Our changelog is exploding with new features we produce.

In our software, there are bugs that for years we haven't been able to find or reproduce. We gave up on them, and accepted the occiasional crash. Now Fable reproduces and then solves such bugs in minutes.

Handcoding has been fun for the last decades. But it is a thing of the past, like analog photography. You still can do it, but it is just for the fun of it.

Maybe AI knows more, but that doesn't necessarily mean that it is smarter. I agree that bugs are sometimes difficult to find because a human always tend to overlook these. Fable seems to do a good job, there is nothing wrong with that, but I'm very reluctant to have AI generate pages of code for me.

I agree, for things that don't have to be highly optimized like a GUI, code generated by AI is good enough, but for things that have to be highly optimized like a chess engine, or a draughts engine, it is not good enough yet.

[MichelG]

AI can certainly generate a bitboard move generator, a neural-network evaluator, or a transposition table. But asking for these components is only the beginning. Knowing how to combine them, tune them, generate the right training data, choose the right experiments, interpret the results, and improve the engine over time still requires a good understanding of the domain.
Friendly, Sidiki

Still, AI is breaking into this as well.

I asked codex to write a new basic alpha/beta function and then list all the ideas that are used in chess engines. It came up with 12 ideas.

Then i asked to try them all, run the required experiments, keep the code if it found and improvement, and discard it otherwise.

It build and tested all ideas. First idea 1, play 50000 games against the original, and it went on with idea 2, etc.

It took all night, and in the end, the a/b function it created was on par with the one in dragon.

The point is, Codex came up with the ideas (well, as learned from humanity), did all the implementations, did all the experiments. All it needed was a single prompt that pointed it in the right direction.

As for optimisations, in my experience AI excels in it. In some cases i tell it to go and optimize a function. It will have ideas, test them by creating experiments, and then accept them or reject them. And it can keep trying until you are out of tokens.

For now we still need a mix between human input and AI as a tool. Humans outsmart the AI on general concepts and architecture, and are better in having novel ideas. AI can be really dumb sometimes. But the shift to AI-only will continue.

To me, it is exciting to see this revolution first hand, but it is also a bit scary. I wonder how the roles of human vs AI will continue to play out in the coming years/months.

[Sidiki]

Hi Michel,

I completely agree with your observations. What you describe is exactly where AI is becoming incredibly powerful: implementation, experimentation, optimization, and iteration at a scale no human can match.
My point was not that AI cannot build a strong engine. Clearly it can, especially with tools like Codex. My point is that someone still has to define the objective, provide the framework for evaluation, and understand what the results actually mean.
In my own project, the biggest performance gains did not come from asking AI to write an alpha-beta search. They came from decisions about training data, error learning, reinforcement mechanisms, testing methodology, and continuous tuning. AI accelerates all of this, but the direction still matters.
I also believe the balance will continue to shift toward AI. The question is no longer whether AI can code an engine, but how much of the research cycle it will eventually automate. We are probably witnessing the beginning of that transition.

Friendly, Sidiki

[BertTuyt]

Another iteration with Codex.
This time the float network (256x32x32x1) was converted into an int16.

158 games, 5 min/80 moves, 6p db, 1 core, both book.
Result 2 wins Kingsrow - 156 draws.

I don't think the program is really better, this is all within the statistical margins, but at least the depth has increased which always helps.

(Kingsrow did not include the last draw game).

Here the dxp file.

dxpmatch_20260724.pdn

(156.71 KiB) Downloaded 1 time

Bert

[gwiesenekker]

Hi Bert,

What are the results if you use 1 minute/75 moves? If I use 5 min/80 moves GWD draws all the time against Kingsrow, with 1 minute/75 moves sometimes GWD loses a game (but also sometimes wins).

GW

[BertTuyt]

Gijsbert,

nope so far i only tested with 5 minute games.
The background, with the reduction in depth, and the current network speed (and the processor I use), I often stay in the critical depth-area for Damage with 1 min games.
Therefore my focus is to increase nodes/second with the current network, or find a network with better quality.
Then at one point the 5 minutes games should end in 158 draws, which is then the signal to go to another time setting.
But as long as I lose games with 5 minutes, I have other tasks with higher priority.

Bert