I know vibe-coding is, at the same time, a popular and unpopular topic among programmers. Many see it as some new kind of zero-code programming, others as a powerful “autocompletion on steroids” tool.
In any case, I’d like to know what people here think about it. If you have used it and which problems have you faced.
I’ve done it a lot, honestly. I have many projects in Crystal that I’ve tried to develop using opencode.ai and gemini-cli.
My first paint point is that Crystal is not a mainstream language yet. That makes it complicated. Especially to use idiomatic crystal with agents.
That said, I have some projects that have “taken off” meaning that they actually work, even if I use them myself only. Others have been just impossible to code.
So, what’s up? Have you tried doing this? Is vibe-coding the devil in disguise? What have you stumbled upon?
I was against this for the longest time. Been listening and reading a lot though, it’s been helpful in getting those burnt out with coding or semiretired get back in. I have struggled with focus and haven’t kept projects going for a while and ai assisted coding is giving me new excitement lately. I’ve been honestly amazed at what I’m getting done in Crystal with this stuff.
I have three projects that it’s assisted me so far. I took an abandoned static site generator and almost got it to where it’s a drop in replacement for Jekyll now (still a lot of paper cuts I’m addressing). I had to make a new sass library for Crystal since the c bindings based one can’t be used due to libsass not active anymore. It helped me get a new dart based one going and working (it works on Mac, Linux arm/amd64, and FreeBSD). Then there is an app I’ve dreamed of making for a few months that is becoming kind of crazy how well it’s worked that does a dashboard type thing for rss reading.
Point being, none of this would be anywhere without it. It took me a few weeks to get workflow working and the right apps. Finding for now at least, zed editor + Claude Code + beads is my current setup. Beads helps keep memory and context along with tasks. It was a lot of struggle prior to that, I had tried cline and aider, but they just didn’t work. There are some new tools out but don’t support the cheaper models I use that are OpenAI compatible, once they do, will try that.
It’s been a wild ride, will probably be attempting some more projects soon. Some might be Elixir based unless I try my hand at at lucky or another crystal framework as I have a pretty complicated site I want to try. Not sure how my workflow works with other things, statically compiled probably helps a ton right now.
“Vibe coding” means different things to different people — anything from “input a problem description to the LLM and commit whatever comes out the other side” to “an LLM was used in the writing of the code but a human modified and is ultimately responsible for it”. Simon Willison has been beating the drum that only the former end of the spectrum should be considered “vibe coding”. I think he’s losing that battle to a massive and vocal group of people who only care about using a cool-sounding term, though. Either way …
If vibe coding to you means YOLOing LLM output into your project, then I can imagine that being useful for a proof of concept or as a way to scratch a personal itch, but I wouldn’t want to maintain it. I’ve worked with engineers that would respond to bugs in code written this way with more of the same “vibe coding” style and I’ve seen it spiral out of control quickly. The code ends up far more complicated than it has any right to be.
If you mean simply using any AI-generated code at all, I’m more open to that in a production environment, but at least one person on the team needs to be comfortable with taking responsibility for that code during an incident at 3am.
A huge part of this perspective is that I’ve been working in SRE for almost a decade and I almost always need to see the system as a whole rather than individual services, let alone specific endpoints or classes. Any nontrivial production code needs to have someone responsible for it because, during an incident, you need to be able to bring in someone with expertise. But who’s an expert in code that nobody wrote? Who understands why a specific pattern was used when nobody chose it? I’ve got a pretty decent track record when it comes to inferring context from human-written code, but code written by an LLM is often more verbose and/or more complicated, which makes this more difficult, especially during an incident.
Ultimately, it can be a lot like hiring a consultant to come in and build out a single feature. Once they leave, all context leaves with them unless they wrote documentation. The less effort someone puts into incorporating AI-written code, the less likely they also incorporated the LLM’s prose into documentation. Your team (and even the LLM) are stuck maintaining code with little to no insight into how it came to be in its current state. That’s not a place I like to be.
As far as crystal in particular, I’ve had good almost nothing but good outcomes so far. I don’t tmstray very far from small well-defined tasks with my ai use, though. It has struggled a little bit with macros and can only imagine it’d be much worse with heavt macros that create methods with dynamic names since it largely discovers the code base with grep
I ran into this with macros as well, but I have a ton of conventions and guides for crystal and elixir I use now. It keeps guardrails up, most issues come from the llm being overloaded and it gets stupid. I still try to use those to keep it away from macros though. Once it’s a light time, it fixes it.
The pace of AI-assisted coding is moving faster than I anticipated. While I was a skeptic a year ago, I’ve had to revise my stance after seeing the impact on complex tasks like debugging complex bugs, documentation maintenance and refactoring legacy codebases.
I recently used a ‘vibe coding’ approach to port a JSON validation gem from Ruby to Crystal. While it’s not production-ready yet, it compressed what would have been months of manual porting into a few hours. I’d highly recommend experimenting with LLM agents on your side projects—we’re only scratching the surface of how these tools can simplify our workflows.
Same here; skeptic at first, adopter now. Less voluminous though it may be, there seems to be enough Crystal material for the LLMs to be adequately trained.
I use Emacs in combination with gptel-aibo + gpt-40 and it’s saved me tons of work. I now rarely look at the recommendations and just hit apply…
iow I’ve been gradually settling in into my vibe coder’s chair without remorse and at remarkably low (not sustainable in the long term?) expense (20$ work of tokens bought a year ago).
This was really my first major use case for playing with it. I’m reworking the workflow a bit so slowed down a little, but think I’m getting things where they need to be and it’s less thinking loops now. I really can’t wait to see if this will help bring stuff that was missing in Crystal or else where and allow me to do more than before. Also been playing with it with elixir too and since it’s getting more typed, I think it’s helping as well. Statically typed languages just seem to fail faster but if it compiles it has more guarantees that it’s going to work.
And ten hours later there is a crystal starlark interpreter which AFAIK works just fine. I need to get the official test suite and check it harder but … it does seem to work.
(No, it’s not the whole language, this is not magic)
Ok, maybe it is magic, it now passes all the acceptance tests and I have the agent working in optional features like floats and sets
