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Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

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Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#11

Post by raincole »

johnfn wrote: post #2

The article throws out a lot of potential issues with AI generated code, but doesn't stop for a moment to consider if solutions currently exist or might exist to these problems. - Before LLMs, provided that your team did some of their due diligence, you could always expect to have some help when tackling new code-bases. Has the author never worked on legacy code before? - (oh, and it has forgotten everything about th…

> Why does it require 100% accuracy 100% of the time?

I've said this before, but I'd say it again: anti-AI people, instead of AI users, are usually those who expect AI to be magical panacea.

The vibe reminds me of some people who are against static typing because "it can't catch logical error anyway."

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#12

Post by AntwaneB »

johnfn wrote: post #2

The article throws out a lot of potential issues with AI generated code, but doesn't stop for a moment to consider if solutions currently exist or might exist to these problems. - Before LLMs, provided that your team did some of their due diligence, you could always expect to have some help when tackling new code-bases. Has the author never worked on legacy code before? - (oh, and it has forgotten everything about th…

Hello, author here. Thanks for your comment.

I agree with your first point, maybe AI will close some of those gaps with future advances, but I think a large part of the damage will have been done by then.

Regarding the memory of reasoning from LLMs, I think the issue is that even if you can solve it in the future, you already have code for which you've lost the artifacts associated with the original generation. Overall I find there's a lot of talks (especially in the mainstream media) about AI "always learning" when they don't actually learn new anything until a new model is released.

> Why does it require 100% accuracy 100% of the time? Humans are not 100% accurate 100% of the time and we seem to trust them with our code.

Correct, but humans writing code don't lead to a Bus Factor of 0, so it's easier to go back, understand what is wrong and address it.

If the other gaps mentioned above are addressed, then I agree that this also partially goes away.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#13

Post by lovich »

ndneighbor wrote: post #3
johnfn wrote: post #2

The article throws out a lot of potential issues with AI generated code, but doesn't stop for a moment to consider if solutions currently exist or might exist to these problems. - Before LLMs, provided that your team did some of their due diligence, you could always expect to have some help when tackling new code-bases. Has the author never worked on legacy code before? - (oh, and it has forgotten everything about th…

Yea, I found the article to be overly reductive. I work on a shared ownership codebase, which at times, I am not going to be able to pull the original author at all times when I work on my branch. At least having a partner explain some aspects is a huge unlock for me. Maybe the OP shadowboxing a world with no humans, but no humans is already a status quo issue that my team and I face sometimes.

He’ll, have they never had to maintain applications where the source code was lost? I haven’t had to do it too often, and I wouldn’t claim I’m very good at it, but on more than a handful of occasions I have had to decompile binaries to figure out what the fuck it was doing before I could write a wrapper around it to try and mitigate its unfixeable issues

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#14

Post by bgwalter »

raincole wrote: post #11
johnfn wrote: post #2

The article throws out a lot of potential issues with AI generated code, but doesn't stop for a moment to consider if solutions currently exist or might exist to these problems. - Before LLMs, provided that your team did some of their due diligence, you could always expect to have some help when tackling new code-bases. Has the author never worked on legacy code before? - (oh, and it has forgotten everything about th…

> Why does it require 100% accuracy 100% of the time? I've said this before, but I'd say it again: anti-AI people, instead of AI users, are usually those who expect AI to be magical panacea. The vibe reminds me of some people who are against static typing because "it can't catch logical error anyway."

No, we treat it as a bureaucratic, distracting and infantile way of software engineering that does not work.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#15

Post by bigiain »

juancn wrote: post #10

I think the article underestimates how much intent can be grasped from code alone. Even without comments. Humans (and I strongly suspect LLMs, since they're statistical synthesis of human production) are fairly predictable. We tend to tackle the same problems the same way. So how something is solved, tells you a lot about why, who and when it was solved. Still, it's a valid point that much of the knowledge is now obs…

> I think the article underestimates how much intent can be grasped from code alone.

That's very scale related.

I rarely have any trouble reading and understanding Arduino code. But that's got a hard upper limit (at least on the common/original Arduinos) of 32kB of (compiled) code.

It's many weeks or months worth of effort, or possibly impossible, for me to read and understand a platform with a hundred or so interdependent microservices written in several languages. _Perhaps_ there was a very skilled and experienced architect for all of that, who demanded comprehensive API styles and docs? But if all that was vibe coded and then dropped on me to be responsible? I'd just quit.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#16

Post by p1necone »

If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever.

Where llms excel is in situations like:

* I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes.

* I want to set up test data and the bones of unit tests for - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes (note I said to use the llms for a starting point - don't generate your actual test cases with it, at least not without very careful review - I've seen a lot of really dumb ai generated unit tests).

* I want a visual web editor for that saves to an sqlite db and has a separate backend api, bam 3 days work done in 2 minutes.

* I want to apply some repetitive change across a large codebase that's just too complicated for a clever regex, bam work you literally would have never bothered to do before done in 2 minutes.

You don't need to solve hard problems to massively increase your productivity with llms, you just need to shave yaks. Even when it's not a time save, it still lets you focus mental effort on interesting problems rather than burning out on endless chores.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#17

Post by mmhmmmmmm »

AntwaneB wrote: post #12
johnfn wrote: post #2

The article throws out a lot of potential issues with AI generated code, but doesn't stop for a moment to consider if solutions currently exist or might exist to these problems. - Before LLMs, provided that your team did some of their due diligence, you could always expect to have some help when tackling new code-bases. Has the author never worked on legacy code before? - (oh, and it has forgotten everything about th…

Hello, author here. Thanks for your comment. I agree with your first point, maybe AI will close some of those gaps with future advances, but I think a large part of the damage will have been done by then. Regarding the memory of reasoning from LLMs, I think the issue is that even if you can solve it in the future, you already have code for which you've lost the artifacts associated with the original generation. Overa…

[dead]

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#18

Post by sfink »

lovich wrote: post #13
ndneighbor wrote: post #3

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea, I found the article to be overly reductive. I work on a shared ownership codebase, which at times, I am not going to be able to pull the original author at all times when I work on my branch. At least having a partner explain some aspects is a huge unlock for me. Maybe the OP shadowboxing a world with no humans, but no humans is already a status quo issue that my team and I face sometimes.

He’ll, have they never had to maintain applications where the source code was lost? I haven’t had to do it too often, and I wouldn’t claim I’m very good at it, but on more than a handful of occasions I have had to decompile binaries to figure out what the fuck it was doing before I could write a wrapper around it to try and mitigate its unfixeable issues

The author was just saying that this will become the norm, not the exception. Ok, not this bad -- we can at least expect to have access to the AI-generated code for at least a little while longer. (I can imagine a future where AI programming gets just robust enough that some early adopter types will take their whiteboard sketches and prompts and prose test case descriptions, generate the code, compile it to a binary, then throw out the code. It's more agile! You can tweak the spec slightly and just turn the crank again!)

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#19

Post by bigiain »

d_watt wrote: post #6

It's potentially the opposite. If you instrument a codebase with documentation and configuration for AI agents to work well in it, then in a year, that agent will be able to do that same work just as well (or better with model progress) at adding new features. This assumes your adding documentation, tests, instructions, and other scaffolding along the way, of course.

I wonder how soon (or if it's already happening) that AI coding tools will behave like early career developers who claim all the existing code written by others is crap and go on to convince management that a ground up rewrite is required.

(And now I'm wondering how soon the standard AI-first response to bug reports will be a complete rewrite by AI using the previous prompts plus the new bug report? Are people already working on CI/CD systems that replace the CI part with whole-project AI rewrites?)

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#20

Post by bigiain »

schlowmo wrote: post #9

At least we also have LLMs to generate our status updates during outages of our SaaS products while groping around in the dark.

This is why it's important to be experienced in a range of different SaaS and AI tools.

So that when one of your employers has a SaaS related outage, you can just switch to one of your other employers and keep working.

All hail the 100x AI assisted developers doing 10x jobs at 5 different companies at the same time!

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