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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

#81

Post by TuringNYC »

scarface_74 wrote: post #70
TuringNYC wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Is there really a large difference between 0 and 1 when the average tenure of a software developer is 3 years or less at any given company? Spot on. 1 might as well be zero. Totally unfair to the worker also, who now cannot take time off.

When I was an architect for startups between 2016-2020 doing mostly green field development using new to the company AWS technologies, I made damn sure that any knowledge was disseminated so I could both take a vacation without being interrupted and I could “put myself out of a job”. I considered it a success when I realized a company doesn’t need me anymore and I can move on and talk about what I did at my next inte…

Agree, and also, promotion is hard if you are too tied to a specific system. Diagonal cross-department promotion becomes especially hard if you are a single point of failure.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#82

Post by seba_dos1 »

scarface_74 wrote: post #61
seba_dos1 wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviewing the code you didn't write takes much longer than the one you did.

Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote. Hell reviewing code I wrote six months ago might as well be someone else’s code. My job right now depending on the week is to either lead large projects dealing with code I don’t write or smaller “full stack” POCs- design, cloud infrastructure (IAC), database, backend code and ETL jobs and rarely front end code. Even before LLMs if I had to look…

> Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote.

Yes, and water is wet, but that's not exactly relevant. If you have an LLM generate slop at you that you have to review and adjust, you need to compare the time this whole process took you rather than just the "generating slop" step to the time needed to write the code by yourself.

It may still save you time, but it won't be anywhere close to 2 minutes anymore for anything but the most trivial stuff.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#84

Post by novok »

patcon wrote: post #78
p1necone wrote: post #16

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 te…

I like the spirit of these, but there are waaaay more. Like you only mentioned the ones for professional and skilled coders who have another option. What about all the sub-examples for people all the way from "technically unskilled" to "baby-step coders". There's a bunch of things they can now just do and get in front of ppl without us. Going from "thing in my head that I need to pay someone $100/h to try" to "thing…

The fact that people could make excel monstrosities has never really been a real threat to the job security of programmers. IMO it increased it. LLMs are the new excel

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#85

Post by elliotto »

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…

Why would the damage have been done by then? What does that even mean?

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#86

Post by matt_kantor »

johnfn wrote: post #79
AntwaneB wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. But this already exists! At wor…

I can't speak for the author, but I would definitely claim that having a bus factor of zero for any remotely-mission-critical piece of software is "fundamentally flawed", no matter the cause. I'd say the same for a bus factor of one in most settings.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#87

Post by JustExAWS »

seba_dos1 wrote: post #82
scarface_74 wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote. Hell reviewing code I wrote six months ago might as well be someone else’s code. My job right now depending on the week is to either lead large projects dealing with code I don’t write or smaller “full stack” POCs- design, cloud infrastructure (IAC), database, backend code and ETL jobs and rarely front end code. Even before LLMs if I had to look…

> Reviewing code another person wrote also takes longer than code I wrote. Yes, and water is wet, but that's not exactly relevant. If you have an LLM generate slop at you that you have to review and adjust, you need to compare the time this whole process took you rather than just the "generating slop" step to the time needed to write the code by yourself. It may still save you time, but it won't be anywhere close to…

I have been developing a long time - 10 years as a hobbyist and 30 years professionally. For green field work especially since all of the code I write these days are around the AWS SDKs/CDKs, I find the code is just as structured as what I would write.

The only refactoring I ended up doing on my current project is extracting functions from a script and creating a library that I reused across other functionality.

Even then I just pasted the library into a new ChatGPT session and told it the requirements of my next piece of functionality and told it to use the library.

I don’t trust an LLM to write more than 200 lines of code at the time. But I hardly ever write more than 200-300 lines at a time.

I can tell you that my latest project has around 1000 lines of Node CDK code between multiple apps (https://aws.amazon.com/cdk/) and around 1000 lines of Python code and I didn’t write a single line of any of it by hand and from reviewing it, it didn’t make any choices that I wouldn’t make and I found some of the techniques it used for the CDK code were things I wouldn’t have thought about.

The SQL code it generated for one of the functions was based on my just giving it the inbound JSON and the create table statements and it didn’t idiomatic MySQL, with parameters (ie no sql injection risk) and no unsafe code.

This was a 3 week project that I would have at least needed one if not two junior/mid level devs to do without Gen AI. Since I also had to be in customer meetings, write documentation and help sells on another project coming up.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#88

Post by johnfn »

matt_kantor wrote: post #86
johnfn wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. But this already exists! At wor…

I can't speak for the author, but I would definitely claim that having a bus factor of zero for any remotely-mission-critical piece of software is "fundamentally flawed", no matter the cause. I'd say the same for a bus factor of one in most settings.

I think that's moving goalposts. The original post never talks about vibe-coding mission-critical software - and I wouldn't advocate for that, either. The post says that all vibe coding is fundamentally flawed.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#89

Post by petesergeant »

p1necone wrote: post #16

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 te…

Still fleshing out this idea, but it feels recently like LLMs are helping me "throw the first one away". Get the initial starting momentum on something with the LLM, continue to iterate until it mostly works, and then go in and ruthlessly strip out the weird LLMisms. Especially for tedium work where nothing is being designed, it's just transformations or boilerplate.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#90

Post by 0xWTF »

This concept of deploying unreviewed vibe code strikes me as very similar to using a fallen log as a bridge to cross a ravine. Yes, it works, until the day it doesn't. And that day is likely to be much sooner than if it had been a concrete-reinforced steel design signed out by a PE.
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