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Vibe code is legacy code

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Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#41

Post by NitpickLawyer »

MrGilbert wrote: post #7

And what you will get in return is professional software developers looking at vibe-coded modules that already went into production, stating that "we will never ever touch this", as they don’t want to be responsible for something they would have never put into production in the first place. Now, they see themselves challenged to defend against the non-technical departments, because all they see are some elitist devel…

Asking someone to maintain a "vibecoded" project isn't vibecoding anymore, by definition. I feel this whole thing is going the "AGI" way. Everyone is shouting above everyone else, using different definitions and biases, and there is 0 productive discussion going on.

Vibe coding - you don't care about the code. You don't look at the code. You just ask, test that what you received works, and go on with your life.

LLM-assisted coding - you care about the code. You will maintain that code. You take responsibility and treat it as any other software development job, with everything that's required.

Same same, but different.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#42

Post by whatever1 »

If the code will be reviewed from the LLM of the future, then why does it matter? Let it review a trillion lines of code for a simple calculator app.

I think that we devs are now very skeptical because we are the ones that have to fix the sh that llms spit out. But likely we will be taken out of the loop completely.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#43

Post by WD-42 »

hibikir wrote: post #4

I think you are not going far enough though: All code is legacy code. So vibe coding's ability to make writing more code faster isn't special because it's code nobody understands: Your hand-rolled code is also bad. Once you embrace the fact that all the code is legacy, then it's clear how writing more code, faster cannot be helpful from a maintenance POV: You are just creating more work for yourself. And no, librarie…

I'm sorry, but how is all code legacy code? Have you never written or worked on a project for which you got such a deep understanding that you could track down the likely source of a bug in your head before even fully reading the issue? Visualize how you'd add a feature before opening the editor? This is not legacy code just because it's old.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#44

Post by JohnMakin »

bluefirebrand wrote: post #32
JohnMakin wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even thinking outside of product view point - speaking technically, I can't think of anything worse than junior dev's or PM's determining what they want technology-wise. At least once a week in my entire career I've had to shoot down awful ideas because they would be unnecessarily risky, won't possibly scale beyond minor use case, etc. I would hazard a guess it's going to be extremely profitable being a consultant in…

> I would hazard a guess it's going to be extremely profitable being a consultant in the next few years. I hope so. This is something I'm hoping to get into. As long as companies are trying to push their internal teams to use AI tools, I think it makes sense to position myself to follow along after them and clear the mess

same

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#45

Post by skydhash »

stevekrouse wrote: post #14
hibikir wrote: post #4

I think you are not going far enough though: All code is legacy code. So vibe coding's ability to make writing more code faster isn't special because it's code nobody understands: Your hand-rolled code is also bad. Once you embrace the fact that all the code is legacy, then it's clear how writing more code, faster cannot be helpful from a maintenance POV: You are just creating more work for yourself. And no, librarie…

Fair! I agree that we want as little code as we can get away with. We love pull requests with a lot of red (deleted lines). Like you say about libraries, it is possible to have code that isn't your problem. It's all about how leaky the abstraction is. Right now LLMs write terrible abstractions, and it's unclear how long it'll take for them to get good at writing good code. I am excited to invest more in tools to make…

But we have plenty of tools that helps us understanding code. Things like inspectors (UI,network,..), tracing (including the old printf), debuggers (stack frame for function calls and variable values), grep (for context and overview) and static analysers.

I see people going all in with LLMs and forgetting that those even exists. It's hard to take such people seriously.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#46

Post by bobjordan »

Coding with AI is just a different kind of work than what those of us that coded before AI are used to doing. But, reading and understanding the code AI produces is required for anything complex. I had an inventory control app that I started five years ago without AI and picked the project back up this year. I had like 15-20 database tables in the app when I started with AI this year. Now, I have a "platform" database, a "tenant" database, about 125 tables in the tenant database and 30 in the platform database, full test suite that integrates both databases, like 100 services, etc., it would have taken me *YEARS AND YEARS* to do what I've done in the last 90 days with AI assistance. The biggest challenge has just been keeping up with all the code output and ensuring no technical debt accrues and it is all leveraging existing code. Ultimately, you have to understand what you've already built to ensure the AI uses it instead of constantly reinventing it. But, generating what would have taken years of my life in a few months? PRICELESS.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#47

Post by user3939382 »

When you have 100+ tables and 100k+ loc you’re incapable of the context needed to write features without bugs which is why we have tests. LLMs are capable of like 5% of the context you are:

Full context > human context capacity > LLM context capacity.

We should all be able to agree on this and it should settle the debates around the efficacy of vibe coding.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#48

Post by dweekly »

dabber21 wrote: post #24

we need a mandatory warning label for any services that were vibe coded. I really don't want to sign up for a service and then get my shit leaked immediately

It will be interesting to see when this inverts - when it becomes scary to use an application that has only had humans review it and declare it safe and secure.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#49

Post by cpursley »

I don't agree with this, my code quality is much better now. But you have to stay on the LLM's ass in terms of guidance and review it all (this is a given). I think part of it is the LLMs writes more "standard" code instead of getting creative with architecture, etc. It helps to create guides and correct context, proper test coverage just as you would if working with other people.

Re: Vibe code is legacy code

#50

Post by ay »

simonw wrote: post #5

This is really clear and well argued. I particularly enjoyed this line: > If you don't understand the code, your only recourse is to ask AI to fix it for you, which is like paying off credit card debt with another credit card.

This is a super apt analogy. Every time I decided to let LLMs “vibe-fix” non-obvious things for the sake of experiment, it spiraled into an unspeakable fubar territory, which needed to be reverted - a very similar situation to this financial collapse.

Invariably, after using the brain, the real fix was usually quite simple - but, also invariably - was hidden behind 2-3 levels of indirection in reasoning.

On the other hand, I had rather pleasant results when “pair-debugging”, my demanding to explain why or just correcting it in the places when it was about to go astray certainly had effect - in return I got some really nice spotting of “obvious” but small things I might have missed otherwise.

That said, definition of “going astray” varies - from innocently jumping into what looked like unsupported conclusions to blatantly telling me something was equal to true right after ingesting the log with the printout showing the opposite.

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