Don't you think the next step is a programming language that isn't even meant to be human readable? What's the point of using an LLM to generate python or Swift or whatever? The output of the LLM should be something that runs and does whatever it's been asked to do... why should the implementation be some programming language that was designed for humans to grok? Once that's true the idea of it being maintainable becomes moot, because no one will know what it is in the first place. I don't think we're there yet, but that seems like the eventual destination.
Vibe code is legacy code
61–70 of 473 posts
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#62> We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code. Wow, no. Bad misunderstanding of what legacy means. Long-lived organizations all eventually go through tech renovations, where they re-platform their business functionality onto more modern systems. But sometimes, the cost/benefit analysis to that re-platforming doesn't make sense... yet. The pieces of the business still running on the former p…
Peter Principle for codebases - codebase will continue to grow until nobody understands it, and then it will tread water until enough key personnel leave and then suddenly eng capacity is below the cost of servicing the debt and this is the point at which all control is fully lost. Eventually a younger sharper competitor will acquire it for the users or it will go through M&A repackaging or some other way to extract the last drops of money before discarding it
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#63IMO, the time of "code as math" is over. No sufficiently large software system that interacts with the real world is provable to be correct like a mathematical statement is. They are all complicated, engineered systems that are backed by a mix of formal guarantees, earned design principals, experimental testing, rules of thumb, acceptable performance envelopes, etc This is what all software will become, down to the s…
> An unreadable 100K loc program backed by 50K tests, guaranteeing behavior to the client requirements
Until the next set of needed changes due to exterior requirements. And this software is one of the pillar in the business. That is when you switch vendors if you were buying the service.
That is why support is always an essential part of B2B or even serious B2C. The world will change and you need to react to it, not just have the correct software now.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#64If 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.
The vast majority of people cannot do the structured thinking to model the real world in a fashion that a computer can understand. That is a key attribute of a good dev. If someone can do this, and describe it well enough to a LLM, they are a dev. It's not devs that will be taken out of the loop, unless you define a dev as someone who is just a translator between human language and machine code.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#65> We already have a phrase for code that nobody understands: legacy code. Wow, no. Bad misunderstanding of what legacy means. Long-lived organizations all eventually go through tech renovations, where they re-platform their business functionality onto more modern systems. But sometimes, the cost/benefit analysis to that re-platforming doesn't make sense... yet. The pieces of the business still running on the former p…
This definition doesn't make any sense to me. If code at an org is working, and there are people or at least a person at that company that understands it, how is it legacy? Just because it's been around for a while? At what age according to your definition, does perfect working code that can be improved or added to by currently employed developers, become "legacy"? I feel like you are falling into the "keeping up wit…
It becomes legacy once the organization understands that the codebase, or platform, or business case, is obsolete. It does not mean it's immediately phased out; it may continue working for decades more with some love and attention, but it's clear that it is in the past rather than the future. The easiest way to tell if a project is legacy is how desirable it is for programmers in the company to work on.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#66Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
Strong agree! For example, we at Val Town just invested very heavily in getting a good ol' fashioned language server to work in our product to power hover-overs and type information in our web editor. That'll likely be our next company blog post...
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#67A story about a non-technical friend: friend vibe coded a SaaS last year and started generating revenue with almost no marketing; all word of mouth and inbound in a niche industry. Used Replit and Supabase to build the thing; I am still really impressed by what he was able to do given how complex the app ended up becoming as he interacted with customers.
What I think happened: there are two incumbents in this space that are not happy about him showing up and charging a fraction of their monthly cost for a better, more modern product (their products are Windows-based desktop software). So they hired hackers to hack his SaaS (because these hackers have never demanded money). Unfortunately, that vibe-coding resulted in some bad code that made it easy to hack. First, the user list was leaked on the FE of the code and the hacker emailed all of the customers. Second, the hacker got a hold of his Stripe key and issued every customer a refund. Third, the hacker has been trying to inject XSS attacks into app (we'll see a random `alert()` tag in some fields)
I think indeed, vibe-coded software in the hands of the inexperienced is instant tech debt. But at the same time, he was able to prove out a viable business in a matter of a few months with no engineering background and no technical capability.
Now he's hiring a developer to shore it up.
Was it worth it? Yes, it is terrible, shoddy, insecure code, but he proved out a viable business with just a few hundred dollars of investment.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#68IMO, the time of "code as math" is over. No sufficiently large software system that interacts with the real world is provable to be correct like a mathematical statement is. They are all complicated, engineered systems that are backed by a mix of formal guarantees, earned design principals, experimental testing, rules of thumb, acceptable performance envelopes, etc This is what all software will become, down to the s…
// When I wrote this code, only Copilot and I understood what I did. Now only Copilot knows.
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
#69programming as theory building mentioned
Re: Vibe code is legacy code
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