21–30 of 119 posts
I believe vibe coding has always existed. I've known people at every company who add copious null checks rather than understanding things and fixing them properly. All we see now is copious null checks at scale. On the other hand, I've also seen excellent engineering amplified and features built by experts in days which would have taken weeks.
If you gave an experienced house framer a hammer, hand saw and box of nails and a random person off the street a nail gun and powered saw who is going to produce the better house?
A confident AI and an unskilled human are just a Dunning-Kruger multiplier.
> Every few years a new tool appears and someone declares that the difficult parts of software engineering have finally been solved, or eliminated. To some it looks convincing. Productivity spikes. Demos look impressive. The industry congratulates itself on a breakthrough. Staff reductions kick in in the hopes that the market will respond positively. As a software engineer, I'd love if the industry had an actual brea…
I don't really believe this is possible. Or, it's the sort of thing that gets solved at a "product" level. Reality is complicated. People are complicated. The idea that software can exist without complexity feels sort of absurd to me.
That said, to your larger point, I think the goal is basically to eliminate the middle class.
It also made good engineering easier. AI is an amplifier of existing behavior.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
My chairs resemble each other. Have you tried ikea? If you are talking about code which isn’t what I said, then we aren’t there yet.
It’s a bad analogy because the benefits of industrial machines were predictable processes done efficiently.
Making clay pottery can be simple. But to make “fine china” with increasingly sophisticated ornamentation and strength became more complex over time. Now you can go to ikea and buy plates that would be considered expensive luxuries hundreds of years ago.
I feel I become more like a Product than Software Engineer when reviewing AI code constantly satisfying my needs.
And benefits provided by AI are too good. It allows to prototype near to anything in short terms which is superb. Like any tool in right hands can be a dealbreaker.
"AI" (and calling it that is a stretch) is nothing more than a nail gun. If you gave an experienced house framer a hammer, hand saw and box of nails and a random person off the street a nail gun and powered saw who is going to produce the better house? A confident AI and an unskilled human are just a Dunning-Kruger multiplier.
There's this mistake Engineers make when using LLMs and loudly proclaiming its coming for their jobs / is magic... you have a lot of knowledge, experience and skill implicitly that allows for you to get the LLM to produce what you want.
Without it... you produce crappy stuff that is inevitably going to get mangled and crushed. As we are seeing with Vibe code projects created by people with no exposure to proper Software Engineering.
"Coding was never the hard part. Typing syntax into a machine has always been the least interesting part of building a system." and I think these people are benefitting from it the most, people with expertise, who know their way around and knew what and how to build but did not want to do the grunt work
Slight adjustment, but I'd see "maintaining code" is the same as before, matters more the people and their experience and knowledge how to manage that. But agree that the literal typing was never the difficult part, knowing what code should and shouldn't be written was a hard part, and still remains a hard part. Right now, "what code shouldn't be written" seems to have become an even more important part, as it's so e…
unless you understand every inch of system and foresee what issues can be created by what kind of change, things will break when using AI
1. Programmers viewing programming through career and job security lens 2. Programmers who love the experience of writing code themselves 3. People who love making stuff 4. People who don't understand AI very well and have knee-jerk cultural / mob reactions against it because that's what's "in" right now in certain circles.
It is fun to read old issues of Popular Mechanics on archive.org from 100+ years ago because you can see a lot of the same personality types playing out.
At the end of the day, AI is not going anywhere, just like cars, electricity and airplanes never went anywhere. It will obviously be a huge part of how people interact with code and a number of other things going forward.
20-30 years from now the majority of the conversations happening this year will seem very quaint! (and a minority, primarily from the "people who love making stuff" quadrant, will seem ahead of their time)