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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

#111

Post by Frieren »

> 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. Either a mentor, or at least some (even if maybe partially outdated) documentation. With LLMs, this is gone.

I love the conclusion. When no human holds the knowledge it is like the bus already struck everybody at the company.

I have worked in teams that share knowledge often and extensively. Anybody can go on a vacation with little disruption as other's can take the tasks. Everybody is happier and projects work better.

(If your first tough is that you can be replaced easily and you will be fired. Then you live in a dystopian class-warfare country where the owner-class will fire you because they enjoy making the working-class suffer. I am sorry for you, but have hope. That can be changed with good laws and employee protections.)

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#112

Post by thefz »

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…

It's like artificial intelligence isn't intelligent at all but rather semi-useful for tedious, repetitive and non creative tasks. Who would have thought.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#114

Post by bigiain »

kmoser wrote: post #105
bigiain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alread…

As the cost of AI-generated code approaches zero (both in time and money), I see nothing wrong with letting the AI agent spin up a dev environment and take its best shot. If it can prove with rigorous testing that the new code works is at least as reliable as the old code, and is written better, then it's a win/win. If not, delete that agent and move on. On the other hand, if the agent is just as capable of fixing bu…

I kinda hate the idea of all that.

But I can see it "working". At least for the values of "working" that would be "good enough" for a large portion of the production code I've written or overseen in my 30+ year career.

Some code pretty much outlasts all expectations because it just works. I had a Perl script I wrote in around 1995-1998 that ran from cron and sent email to my personal account. I quit that job, but the server running it got migrated to virtual machines and didn't stop sending me email until about 2017 - at least three sales or corporate takeovers later (It was _probably_ running on CentOS4 when I last touched it in around 2005, I'd love to know if it was just turned into a VM and running as part of critical infrastructure on CentOS4 12 years later).

But most code only lasts as long as the idea or the money or the people behind the idea last - all the website and differently skinned CRUD apps I built or managed rarely lasted 5 years without being either shut down or rewritten from the ground up by new developers or leadership in whatever the Resume Driven Development language or framework was at the time - toss out the Perl and rewrite it in Python, toss out the Python and rewrite it in Ruby On Rails, then decide we need Enterprise Java to post about on LinkedIn, then rewrite that in Nodejs, now toss out the Node and use Go or Rust. I'm reasonably sure this year's or perhaps next years LLM coding tools can do a better job of those rewrites than the people who actually did them...

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#115

Post by AntwaneB »

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.

Author here, you're right, but by definition when you do all of this the Bus Factor has already increased:

> This assumes your adding documentation, tests, instructions, and other scaffolding along the way, of course.

It's not just about knowledge in someone's brain, just about knowledge persistence.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#117

Post by jrs235 »

kmoser wrote: post #105
bigiain wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alread…

As the cost of AI-generated code approaches zero (both in time and money), I see nothing wrong with letting the AI agent spin up a dev environment and take its best shot. If it can prove with rigorous testing that the new code works is at least as reliable as the old code, and is written better, then it's a win/win. If not, delete that agent and move on. On the other hand, if the agent is just as capable of fixing bu…

Will the cost of AI-generated code approach zero? I thought the hardware and electricity needed to power and train the models and infer was huge and only growing. Today the free and plus plans might be only $20/month, once moats are built I assume prices will skyrocket a order of magnitude or few higher.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#118

Post by jrs235 »

bigiain wrote: post #23
fzeroracer wrote: post #8

Unfortunately the corporate machine has been converging on a bus factor of 0. I've been part of multiple teams now where I was the only one holding knowledge over critical subsystems and whenever I attempted to train people on it, it was futile. Mainly because they would get laid off doing 'cost-savings measures'. There were times where I was close to getting fed up and just quitting during some of the high profile o…

My guess? The AI companies will keep the free and $20/month plans to entice developers and their managers. They will have $200/month plans with bigger context windows to allow effective work on larger that toy codebases. But sooner or later companies with large scale projects are going to need a much larger context window, that _that_ will suddenly become a $200k/year/developer subscription. There's a lot of correlat…

Interesting. I just posted a similar comment as a sister comment to yours above (at least at the time of reading the thread) to another persons comment about cost of AI code going to zero... Which was basically the same as you believe here.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44970251

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#119

Post by robertlagrant »

fragmede wrote: post #76
trod1234 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The author though neglects what a bus factor of 0 means in real terms and how it gets there, aside from the description of the definition upfront where all knowledge lost. A company acceptable with a bus factor of zero is a company that is not willing to pay the economic advantage to the expertise required to do the work. The economic demand, of humanity competing with AI is zero because AI does things its good at wi…

As programmers, the bus factor is something to be noted and avoided, but in medicine, it goes the other direction. Private practice is one doctor, and a whole support staff for that single individual. Why are we so eager to be replaceable?

Doctors keep patient notes, and EHRs and patients can recall histories separately to that doctor. Doctors also go through relatively standardised training. That single individual is important, but it's not the same.

What's more the same would be if they were practicing healthcare on a species that they had invented, and no one knew anything about it, and the species was crucial to a company's survival.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#120

Post by serf »

ch4s3 wrote: post #67
sothatsit wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Having the LLM write a program to make the changes is much more reliable. I ended up doing this when switching our 50k-LOC codebase to pnpm workspaces, and it was such a good experience. It still took me a day or two of moulding that script to get it to handle the dozens of edge cases, but it would have taken me far longer to split things up by hand. I still feel like I am under-using the ability of LLMs to spit ou…

That’s not even a very large code base. My experience is definitely that anything with more than 100K-loc really makes the LLMs struggle.

there is more to it than that. it's about modularization as well.

I run LLMs against a 500k LoC poker engine and they do well because the engine is modularized into many small parts with a focus on good naming schemes and DRY.

If it doesn't require a lot of context for an LLM to figure out how to direct effort then the codebase size is irrelevant -- what becomes relevant in those scenarios is module size and the amount of modules implicated with any change or problem-solving. The LLM codebase 'navigation' becomes near-free with good naming and structure. If you code in a style that allows an LLM to navigate the codebase via just an `ls` output it can handle things deftly.

The LLMification of things has definitely made me embrace the concept of program-as-plugin-loader more-so than ever before.

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