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diwankHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

yup

yup. I started a fully autonomous, 100% vibe coded side project called steadytext, mostly expecting it to hit a wall, with LLMs eventually struggling to maintain or fix any non-trivial bug in it. turns out I was wrong, not only has claude opus been able to write up a pretty complex 7k LoC project with a python library, a CLI, _and_ a postgres extension. It actively maintains it and is able to fix filed issues and feature requests entirely on its own. It is completely vibe coded, I have never even looked at 90% of the code in that repo. it has full test coverage, passes CI, and we use it in production! granted- it needs careful planning for CLAUDE.md and all issues and feature requests need a lot of in-depth specifics but it all works. so I am not 100% convinced by this piece. I'd say it's def not easy to get coding agents to be able to manage and write software effectively and specially hard to do so in existing projects but my experience has been across that entire spectrum. …

Original discussionWhy LLMs can't really build software504 source comments · at import
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JimDabellHN

LLMs can’t build software because we are expecting them to hear a few sentences, then immediately start coding until there’s a prototype. When they get something wrong, they have a huge amount of spaghetti to wade through. There’s little to no opportunity to iterate at a higher level before writing code. If we put human engineering teams in the same situation, we’d expect them to do a terrible job, so why do we expect LLMs to do any better? We can dramatically improve the output of LLM software development by using all those processes and tools that help engineering teams avoid these problems: https://jim.dabell.name/articles/2025/08/08/autonomous-softw...

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sjdbdjskbzbaHN

> It is completely vibe coded, I have never even looked at 90% of the code in that repo. it has full test coverage, passes CI, and we use it in production! This horrifies me. I checked your website and all your recommendations are from people who appear to have an Indian background, but you’re based in the US? And you claim they’re the most innovative companies yet I doubt anyone has heard of them? Looking over the repo and it seems like a mess (commits are meaningless and code is all over the place). I’m sorry this feels incredibly scammy.

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aethrumHN

Huh, interesting. Though I do wonder if the best possible thing an AI could help code would be another AI tool

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thegeomasterHN

Thanks for sharing this! It's difficult to find good examples of useful codebases where coding agents have done most of the work. I'm always actively looking at how I can push these agents to do more for me and it's very instructive to hear from somebody who has had success on this level. (Would be nice to read a writeup, too)

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