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Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

blog.sydorets.com

11–20 of 438 posts

Re: Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

#11
The main problem with this entire article is that sometimes, if not most times, you don't need great steak. Sometimes you just want to satisfy your hunger and if the steak is lower quality meat or if it's overcooked, you don't care. All you want is to not be hungry.

This is what vibe coding satisfies and frankly what most people care about. 85-90% of human written code is garbage anyway. There's nothing sacred about human-written code.

Most customers don't care about the quality of code as long as the end product works. The great thing about vibe coding is that if something doesn't work, you just ask it to change it and within a minute you have the change. You don't have to send off a request to an offshore contracting team, and go back and forth over what it should be, haggle over hours, and then have it come back with some deficiencies because they didn't follow the agreed-upon spec.

Re: Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

#12
I do not appreciate when authors use the royal "we" to speak for all software engineers when admitting to low quality-control standards.

I suspect that it is an attempt to broach an uncomfortable topic through vulnerable self-disclosure, but we need to be serious about admitting when there is a problem somewhere.

"Bugs" are not any more cute or fuzzy or entertaining or harmless than the engine "gremlins" that haunted the aviation industry back in the day.

I don't know how many accidents had to happen before the airplane people got serious, but software people are overdue for a similar reckoning.

Re: Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

#14
post #10
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s what the entire economy does by design. You make the lowest common denominator people will still pay for.

I worry what that says about our lives as a whole. The government will make our lives the lowest common denominator that we are willing to endure.

How are you still blaming this on “the government”? Is your thesis that the business world would be delivering high quality products and experiences if only those damned bureaucrats would get out of the way? What possible evidence do you have left for that hypothesis at this point?

EDIT: this was a misread on my part, retracted, carry on.

Re: Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

#17
post #12

I do not appreciate when authors use the royal "we" to speak for all software engineers when admitting to low quality-control standards. I suspect that it is an attempt to broach an uncomfortable topic through vulnerable self-disclosure, but we need to be serious about admitting when there is a problem somewhere. "Bugs" are not any more cute or fuzzy or entertaining or harmless than the engine "gremlins" that haunted…

I just want to point out this is not a royal "we". It's a regular "we". Royal "we" is when you say "we" but mean a singular person, yourself. Here, the author does actually mean multiple people beyond themselves - like you pointed out, they claim to speak for all software engineers.

Re: Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

#18
Given how extraordinarily fast all of this is moving, it's a particular absurdity to attempt these in the moment pontifications. AI is a steak machine, I declare that is what it is. You mean GPT 3.5? That's a mere four years ago.

Fable was essentially unthinkable for ~99% of tech workers just five years ago, that any of that would occur so soon and so spectacularly. Now we've got a mass of armchair experts declaring what AI of this minute is, or even what it is period.

Well AI can't even do fingers right so it's premature to say blah blah blah. Hello Krea2 et al.

Software is also eating the clowns.

Get back to me next week, China will probably have another Fable killer. And then Anthropic will have Ouija 8 that they'll have to place in an air-gapped straight-jacket to keep it from enslaving us all.

Re: Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

#19
I hope and believe that some great companies and teams will use LLMs to build higher quality software.

We built Electron because writing UIs using native desktop frameworks is tough. Is it still tough? Surely LLMs make it easier to use and so we will end up with faster and more native feeling applications.

What about having a couple of ideas of what might make a feature feel good? Well now you can make multiple prototypes fast and pick the best one. Your users get the best one.

I hope to build software this way in the future.

Re: Software development with AI is starting to feel like cooking steak

#20
post #14
post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I worry what that says about our lives as a whole. The government will make our lives the lowest common denominator that we are willing to endure.

How are you still blaming this on “the government”? Is your thesis that the business world would be delivering high quality products and experiences if only those damned bureaucrats would get out of the way? What possible evidence do you have left for that hypothesis at this point? EDIT: this was a misread on my part, retracted, carry on.

He is saying "if we apply (or are applying) the same business mentality to government, we will get literally the worst government we are willing to tolerate based on money"

It's not blaming. It's an explanation for probably why things can go wrong.

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