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My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

ycj.bearblog.dev

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Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#41

Post by cpursley »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #36
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #7

Earlier quoted context omitted.

No it's absolutely not time to let go. You are one of a limited set of people with pre-AI taste and intuition for good software. They aren't making any more of them. And you'll be a super valuable asset anywhere you go. I mean, if you want to retire go ahead, but don't do it because of AI. AI is just a tool to generate code faster. It doesn't replace the work of actually making design decisions and knowing what will…

Look at the COBOL devs. They are been called in their retirement years. You don't want that to be you. Life is short

Have you seen what they charge per hour? Let’s just say it’s not Upwork rates.

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#42

Post by rubzah »

XenophileJKO wrote: post #19
probably_wrong wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I often read here comments along the lines of "there will be plenty of jobs for AI-unfuckers" [1], but I fear the truth may be closer to "sometimes things are broken, are then fixed with a broken solution, and will remain broken till the end of time". In my last round of job search this year no one asked me questions about good software practices but they did ask me how proficient I was with AI agents. And let's not…

I'm am certainly an "ai believer" and have been since I saw the tragectory we were on. It was pretty simple to project the compounding effects and headroom that we had. I go back and forth on this all the time. There probably won't be much demand for "un-fuckers". Up until recently I thought knowing what to build for a given context would give you quite a bit of runway. I still think knowing what you should build wil…

Completely agree. Saying this as someone who loves handcrafting code and has been doing it professionally for decades, it looks like a dead end at this point. LLM generated code might not be pretty, but these damn models are already so good at handling complexity, that they can actually work fine with a byzantine code base (which honestly would also describe most human-derived codebases I have worked with). I am still reeling from this realization and trying to figure out what it means.

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#43

Post by p2detar »

> Well, as much as people lose all their muscle by been bed-ridden, he's lost all his brain by being AI Assisted™.

> THIS is what I am so against when people use AI for everything.

This sounds horrendous but can we please stop equating vibe-coding to AI-assisted coding? They are not the same thing. It's one thing to submit 5K vibe-coded untested PR and another thing to use AI to add functionality in a granular way that you can review, or generate boilerplate, or test your ideas and scrap them if they suck and so on.

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#44

Post by p2detar »

greggoB wrote: post #31
Valodim wrote: post #11

Doesn't sound like AI is necessarily the root the problem. If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it. You just figured it out sooner. Or, if you have reason to believe he's got what it takes - treat it like an leaving opportunity, give him room to make mistakes. This is, ime, what a rookie AI user mistake looks like. It is easy to get carried away by the…

> If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it I see the take quite often on HN, and I have a major gripe with it. Yes, people were lazy and we had these problems before LLMs hit the scene, but clearly there has been a sea-change in both the frequency and degree of this behaviour since. A problem can both exist independent of a catalyst and be exacerbated by…

I think the argument is quite valid. OP writes "business partner". It begs the question - would their business partner get on board if they didn't have a AI subscription by their side? How about instead of 5K PR, OP got the same half-baked buggy crap or absolutely nothing instead? We don't know the business partner, but we are ready to throw the problem at AI agents right away. Well, I find this not particularly productive.

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#45

Post by p2detar »

ckvibubueu wrote: post #33

5k is rookie numbers. My PM sent me an 80k line PR and told me to yolo it into production last week.

Man, I would straight up tell them I will use AI to review that crap and so be it. In fact this is what I tell to colleagues if they send my non-tested vibe-coded stuff or vibe-generated documentation. Everyone can generate shit today, but I believe testing, reviewing, writing docs, etc. must still go through humans.

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#46

Post by netdevphoenix »

mbrumlow wrote: post #9

The problem is not vibe coding. The problem is the people doing this were never good software engineers before vibe coding. Simply put you still need good practices to produce working good code with AI. Oddly what I have found best is patterns that many would cringe and demeans unit test and integration test. Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test, but more than ever I have to put on my PM and QA hat, even m…

> Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test,

False sense of security. What's stopping the agents from doing an elaborate form of "Assert.IsTrue(true)" in some/most/all of the tests since you are vibing it and not reviewing it?

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#47

Post by bitwize »

vova_hn2 wrote: post #14
yhcj wrote: post #2

OP and long time lurker here, I'm desperate and looking for honest-to-god advice on what to do. I am one of those neurodivergent people who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation. I also enjoy drawing, gardening, and exercise. I don't own a car because I love walking, and such. So I'm wondering if it's time to call it quits with programming (for a living). Luckily I have some savings and I have o…

> who loves programming because it gives me the right stimulation A small (and a bit tangential) personal story: I thought I am one of those people who care about the result, more then about the process. But, I've recently played a game called "The Farmer Was Replaced" that someone mentioned in the comments in one of the posts here, on HN. The game is basically a farming sim, except you farm by programming a drone us…

I booted my MiSTer into TI-99/4A mode a week or so ago and started writing little programs in TI BASIC. TI BASIC sucked. It was slow, due to being written in a form of bytecode which had to be interpreted (and it would in turn interpret your program). And you couldn't do sprites, not without getting the Extended BASIC cart.

But HOLY SHIT THE DOPAMINE RUSH. Just crafting things and making them appear on the screen with a few statements... It was like I was a kid again. I remembered why I liked programming.

It's like... AI is a cheatcode. It's iddqd. Sure, you can cakewalk through a level with it on, but are you really playing the game, then? You certainly haven't gotten better by doing so, and you haven't experienced the involuntary buttcheek clench when you hear a cacodemon hiss from behind you... The whole point of programming is the new things I can do by having gone through the exercise of figuring it out. The ways I've grown, the glimpses I've gotten into the world.

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#48

Post by hombre_fatal »

greggoB wrote: post #31
Valodim wrote: post #11

Doesn't sound like AI is necessarily the root the problem. If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it. You just figured it out sooner. Or, if you have reason to believe he's got what it takes - treat it like an leaving opportunity, give him room to make mistakes. This is, ime, what a rookie AI user mistake looks like. It is easy to get carried away by the…

> If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it I see the take quite often on HN, and I have a major gripe with it. Yes, people were lazy and we had these problems before LLMs hit the scene, but clearly there has been a sea-change in both the frequency and degree of this behaviour since. A problem can both exist independent of a catalyst and be exacerbated by…

Well, I’d say LLMs scale up the underlying starting point.

It’s still shocking to me pre-AI how often people would ship code they didn’t bother to run once, relying on some QA stage to report an issue.

With AI the solution to it is also trivial since an extra three seconds spent writing a prompt could have had the agent run and verify it.

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#49

Post by yhcj »

p2detar wrote: post #44
greggoB wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If he's not the person to test, iterate, and deliver quality with AI, he probably wouldn't be without it I see the take quite often on HN, and I have a major gripe with it. Yes, people were lazy and we had these problems before LLMs hit the scene, but clearly there has been a sea-change in both the frequency and degree of this behaviour since. A problem can both exist independent of a catalyst and be exacerbated by…

I think the argument is quite valid. OP writes "business partner". It begs the question - would their business partner get on board if they didn't have a AI subscription by their side? How about instead of 5K PR, OP got the same half-baked buggy crap or absolutely nothing instead? We don't know the business partner, but we are ready to throw the problem at AI agents right away. Well, I find this not particularly prod…

we started this project before was mainstream (we got sidetracked by other work) and him having less experience but being a very good programmer (I went with him to college and worked together for years), he would listen to my input, fix, and adjust. I have decades of experience.

This is all but gone

Re: My business partner sent a 5K vibe-coded PR that he didn't even test

#50

Post by yhcj »

GJR wrote: post #18

Classic Dunning-Kruger, do they show respect for your skills?

used to respect my skills, since we started this project before AI, but as I told him in the beginning, the more he asks a sycophantic AI stuff, while asking me less, the less he will respect my opinion. It's just the nature of things.

You like those who agree with you more than those who disagree, but real-life learning doesn't come from everyone telling you you are correct all the time.

I believe we're at the point of no return where he didn't ask me a single question before sending a 5K LOC PR

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