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AI can code, but it can't build software

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Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#81

Post by hamasho »

bloppe wrote: post #29
hamasho wrote: post #22

The problem with vibe coding is it demoralizes experienced software engineers. I'm developing a MVP with vibes and Claude Code and Codex output work in many cases for this relatively new project. But the quality of code is bad. There is already duplicated or unused logic, a lot of code is unnecessarily complex (especially React and JSX). And there's little PR reviews so that "we can keep velocity". I'm paying much le…

> I'm paying much less attention for quality now. After all, why bother when AI produce working code? I hear this so much. It's almost like people think code quality is unrelated to how well the product works. As though you can have 1 without the other. If your code quality is bad, your product will be bad. It may be good enough for a demo right now, but that doesn't mean it really "works".

I know how important code quality is. But I can't (or don't have energy to) convince junior engineers and sometimes project managers to submit good quality code instead of vibe-coded garbage anymore.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#82

Post by takoid »

Calamityjanitor wrote: post #57

I feel you can apply this to all roles. When models passed highschool exam benchmarks, some people talked as if that made the model equivalent to a person passing highschool. I may be wrong, but I bet even an state of the art LLM couldn't complete high school. You have to do things like attending classes at the right time/place, take initiative, keep track of different classes. All of the bigger picture thinking and…

How would LLMs ever be able to attend classes at the right time/place, assuming the classes are in-person and not remote? Seems like an odd and irrelevant criticism.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#83

Post by cdelsolar »

I definitely disagree. I'm a software engineer, but have been heavily using AI the last few months and have gotten multiple apps to production since then. I have to guide the LLM along, yes, but it's perfectly capable of doing everything needed up to and including building the cloudformation templates for Fargate or whatever.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#84

Post by ewoodrich »

bradfa wrote: post #7

The context windows are still dramatically too small and the models aren’t yet seeming to train on how to build maintainable software. There is a lot less written down about how to do this on the public web. There’s a bunch of high level public writing but not may great examples of real world situations that happen on every proprietary software project, because that’s very messy data locked away internal to companies…

> aren’t yet seeming to train on how to build maintainable software.

A while ago I discovered that Claude, left to its own devices, has been doing the LLM equivalent of Ctrl-C/Ctrl-V for almost every component it's created in an ever growing .NET/React/Typescript side project for months on end.

It was legitimately baffling seeing the degree to which it had avoided reusing literally any shared code in favor of updating the exact same thing in 19 places every time a color needed to be tweaked or something. The craziest example was a pretty central dashboard view with navigation tabs in a sidebar where it had been maintaining two almost identical implementations just to display a slightly different tab structure for logged in vs logged out users.

I've now been directing it to de-spaghetti things when I spot good opportunities and added more best practices to CLAUDE.md (with mixed results) so things are gradually getting more manageable, but it really shook my confidence in its ability to architect, well, anything on its own without micromanagement.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#85

Post by Animats »

OK, he makes a statement, and then just stops.

In some ways, this seems backwards. Once you have a demo that does the right thing, you have a spec, of sorts, for what's supposed to happen. Automated tooling that takes you from demo to production ready ought to be possible. That's a well-understood task. In restricted domains, such as CRUD apps, it might be automated without "AI".

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#86

Post by jcelerier »

prmph wrote: post #27
simonw wrote: post #4

This is a good headline. LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Writing code isn't the same thing as delivering working software. A human expert needs to identify the need for software, decide what the software should do, figure out what's feasible to deliver, build the first version (AI can help a bunch here), evaluate what they've built, show it to users, talk to them about whether it's fit for purpose, iterate…

> LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Just this past weekend, I've designed and written code (in Typescript) that I don't think LLMs can even come close to writing in years. I have a subscription to a frontier LLM, but lately I find myself using like 25% of the time. At a certain level the software architecture problems I'm solving, drawing upon decades of understanding about maintainable, performant, and verif…

> The people saying LLMs can code are hard for me to understand. They are good for simple bash scripts and complex refactoring and drafting basic code idioms and that's about it

that's like, 90% of the code people are writing

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#88

Post by drcxd »

thegrim33 wrote: post #66

And here I am, using AI twice within the last 12 hours, to ask it two questions about an extremely well used, extremely well documented, physics library, and both times having it return to me sample code which makes use of library methods which don't exist. When I tell it this, I get the "Oh, you're so right to point that out!" response, and get new code returned, which still just blatantly doesn't work.

Hello, have you ever tried using the coding agents?

For example, you can pull the library code to your working environment and install the coding agent there as well. Then you can ask them to read specific files, or even all files in the library. I believe (according to my personal experience) this would significantly decrease the possibility of hallucinating.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#89

Post by kaashif »

jfim wrote: post #15
simonw wrote: post #4

This is a good headline. LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Writing code isn't the same thing as delivering working software. A human expert needs to identify the need for software, decide what the software should do, figure out what's feasible to deliver, build the first version (AI can help a bunch here), evaluate what they've built, show it to users, talk to them about whether it's fit for purpose, iterate…

> I guess the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers I'd argue that they can't, at least on a short timeframe. Not because LLMs can't generate a program or product that works, but that there needs to be enough understanding of how the implementation works to fix any complex issues that come up. One experience I had is…

If an LLM can get you 90% of the way there, you need fewer engineers. But the engineer you need probably needs to be a senior engineer who went through the pain of learning all of the details and can function without AI.

If all juniors are using AI, or even worse, no juniors are ever hired, I'm not sure how we can produce those seniors at the scale we currently do. Which isn't even that large a scale.

Re: AI can code, but it can't build software

#90

Post by dreamcompiler »

I've worked in a few teams where some member of the [human] team could be described as "Joe can code, but he can't build software."

The difference is what we used to call the "ilities": Reliability, inhabitability, understandability, maintainability, securability, scalability, etc.

None of these things are about the primary function of the code, i.e. "it seems to work." In coding, "it seems to work" is good enough. In software engineering, it isn't.

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