I disagree. Every python package we install seems to install dozens of libraries, each of which can could harbour malware. Many of them are only used for a single function within them. We have no idea of what most of the packages are for. It's a lot.

I dunno, often people say libraries are over used, at least in the JavaScript world.

My celery/RabbitMQ-based web crawler failed because of the Cloudflare CAPTCHAs, I figured it was best to empty out the queue and archive it. I asked copilot what to do and it told me to use a CLI program. “Does that come with RabbitMQ?” “No, you download it from GitHub”. It offered to write me a Python script but the CLI program did exactly what I needed. It got an option wrong but I’d expect the same if I asked a friend for help.

I don't know about vibe coding (I'm not a fan of vibe coding) but LLM agents make me more likely to use good libraries, not less, because they instantly know how to use them; there's less intellectual friction to breaking them out (don't have to find and add the dep, don't have to look for the example code). These kinds of things made me ultra-likely to just hand-code crappier versions of stuff libraries did, before I got LLM-assisted.

I don't know if this is true. An LLM just today recommended a library I had never heard of, and after doing some due diligence, it looks solid.

This is analogous to folks who claim nobody is going to be able to learn software engineering any more. I think it is just the opposite. LLMs can be an awesome tool for learning.

I'm having a problem like this now. I have a library that handles very complex hardware drivers and linkages.

I want people in the company to use it, but it's big and complicated (lots of chipsets and Bluetooth to boot).

I'm trying to design the library so the MCP can tell the LLM to pull it from our repo, read the prompt file for instructions and automatically integrate with the code.

I can't get it to do it consistenlty. There is a big gap in the current LLM tech where there is no standard/consistent way to tell an LLM how to interface with a library (C/Python/Java/etc.)

The LLM more often than not will read the library and then start writing duplicate code.

Maddening.

>Vibe coding is more fun than reading documentation. Shit, vibe-coding can be more fun than ordinary coding.

In my experience the big problem is that the documentation is always terrible, you can't ask open-ended questions on stack overflow, the library's reddit (if any) has zero users, and anything asked on their discord is not searchable.

It's incredible that we still don't have a stack overflow that is just a forum.

When I read the title, I thought this was about physical libraries, which would make this statement very true!

A bit of duplication is better than a lot of dependency.

If your vibe coding prompt generated a 1000 line output, you should probably ask if there is a library that would do that for you. If not, library is not worth it to shorten a one pager.

”Dunning-Kruger effect leads us to understimate the complexity of the problem solved by the library we're considering.”

Invoking the smarter-than-thou effect is not a great starting point.

See e.g. https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S01602...

If we’re considering a library, it would be prudent of us to take a look at the source code to see what exactly we’re pulling in. In the process, we would learn about the lay of the land, the API and the internals, and get at least an overview of the complexity of the problem it solves.

I'd much rather learn a library than create it from scratch. The two main issues are licensing concerns and being able to find ones that actually do what you need.

The Dunning Kruger Effect? It applies to unqualified people in a group… wrong usage

Totally disagree. I avoided python for way too long because of how people were abusing pip/anaconda. Especially with such a complete standard library there's no reason to be dragging in external libraries most of the time (except numpy and maybe pytorch if you're doing ML.)

"naive"

(or "naïve")

Unrelated: I initially expected this articles to be referring to public libraries. I think that would be a challenging connection to prove despite it making intuitive sense.

On the article: some use cases eg handling dates, fault tolerant queues have so many edge cases and are so mission critical that relying on a battle tested tool makes a lot of sense.

However, in my career I’ve seen a lot of examples of a package being installed to avoid 40-50 lines of well thought out code and now a dependency is forever embedded in the system.

I think there is a catch with replacing libraries with LLM generated code. Part of the benefit of skipping third party libraries is the domain knowledge that gets built up: this is potentially lost with llm generated code.