AI Is Making Developers Dumb

I experimented with vibe coding [0] yesterday to build a Pomodoro timer app [1] and had a mixed experience.

The process - instead of typing code, I mostly just talked (voice commands) to an AI coding assistant - in this case, Claude Sonnet 3.7 with GitHub Copilot in Visual Studio Code and the macOS built-in Dictation app. After each change, I’d check if it was implemented correctly and if it looked good in the app. I’d review the code to see if there are any mistakes. If I want any changes, I will ask AI to fix it and again review the code. The code is open source and available in GitHub [2].

On one hand, it was amazing to see how quickly the ideas in my head were turning into real code. Yes reviewing the code take time, but it is far less than if I were to write all that code myself. On the other hand, it was eye-opening to realize that I need to be diligent about reviewing the code written by AI and ensuring that my code is secure, performant and architecturally stable. There were a few occasions when AI wouldn't realize there is a mistake (at one time, a compile error) and I had to tell it to fix it.

No doubt that AI assisted programming is changing how we build software. It gives you a pretty good starting point, it will take you almost 70-80% there. But a production grade application at scale requires a lot more work on architecture, system design, database, observability and end to end integration.

So I believe we developers need to adapt and understand these concepts deeply. We’ll need to be good at:

  - Reading code - Understanding, verifying and correcting the code written by AI
  - Systems thinking - understand the big picture and how different components interact with each other
  - Guiding the AI system - giving clear instructions about what you want it to do
  - Architecture and optimization - Ensuring the underlying structure is solid and performance is good
  - Understand the programming language - without this, we wouldn't know when AI makes a mistake
  - Designing good experiences - As coding gets easier, it becomes more important and easier to build user-friendly experiences

Without this knowledge, apps built purely through AI prompting will likely be sub-optimal, slow, and hard to maintain. This is an opportunity for us to sharpen the skills and a call to action to adapt to the new reality.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding

[1] https://my-pomodoro-flow.netlify.app/

[2] https://github.com/annjose/pomodoro-flow

I get what you say but I must insist. Abstractions don't properly surface the underlying causes when they break.

This creates a barier in gaining experience on the topic that matters in order to solve your problem. Let me try to give an example (please don't neat pick, it is just an example):

A front-end dev who has never bundled an app like we did in the old days (manual scripts or manual gulp, grunt, webpack pipelines) but use a off-the-shelf webpack config (lets say CRA) has great trouble understanding why some webpack plugin doesn't work as expected, or they might not even understand how importing an svg into their jsx actually works. Yes this is due to lack of experience, but their current level of working isn't exposing those details directly so they can't gain experience, the waters are way too deep.

Saying that writing unit tests isn’t high stakes is a dubious statement. The very purpose of unit tests is to make sure that programming errors are caught that may very well be high stakes.

I dont think it is making developers dumb, you still need to audit and review the code. As long as you augment your writing by relying on base templating, finding material to read or have it explain code. It is really good.

This should be (the major) part of the code review.