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

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

#51

Post by kakacik »

lmz wrote: post #24
kakacik wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

SV echo chamber here it seems. No, most businesses globally don't work in idiotic and often amoral mode of 'move fast and break things' (and unlawful on top of that, but who has time for some boring stuff like that when greed fully takes over). Banks will not work like that for next 10 years at least. The tiny amount of money one could save on those big banking projects by using llms aggressively will bite back immed…

> most businesses globally don't work in idiotic and often amoral mode of 'move fast and break things' Not sure what business you are in but the non tech industries (corporate IT, in house apps) have not, in general, been associated with quality. Cost cutting, outsourcing to the lowest bidder: yes. Quality: no.

Mostly banking but dipped my feet in many other areas in the past (telco, insurance, municipalities, army etc).

Its true budgets are often the problem, but not much 'move fast and break things' mantra of SV, rather 'move as much as low budget and corresponding quality and bureaucracy allows you to'

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

#52

Post by yhcj »

marcta wrote: post #5
k310 wrote: post #3

> After this project, I'm done. I might turn into a yoga teacher. I gather that you don't have the "juice" to demand better. Even AI testing AI would be better (in some parallel universe?) than not testing at all. So become a consultant, preaching the simple gospel of "test this goddamn thing before unleashing it, or the tougher gospel of "Well if AI is doing all the work, then why don't you find a job that tolerates…

Which business will hire a consultant who doesn't fully endorse the AI-everything religion?

yeah that's exactly my worry. I'm sure there could be some opportunities if I were in the US but I'm neither a citizen nor a resident. I've worked remotely my whole life and not looking to relocate.

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

#54

Post by yhcj »

p2detar wrote: post #43

> 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 th…

That's the thing, that's how he started, but knowing his personality, I knew the temptation would be too high. I warned him.

Then yesterday when I started asking him questions about how certain stuff worked, he had absolutely no clue.

He didn't even read the docs summarizing what the PR did.

In his mind AI is just assisting him. It's just like the alcoholic saying "one more drink won't harm me, I can quit any time".

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

#55

Post by lxgr »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #46
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?

If you're working with agents that severely misaligned you'll probably have issues way beyond fake tests.

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

#56

Post by yhcj »

cladopa wrote: post #38

AI is not the problem here, but the difference in deep beliefs of the company founders. When I had partners in my business I studied them first deeply like I was going to marry them because I WAS going to marry them! You should agree on your values or else the company will go nowhere. One founder will raw one way and the other the opposite making the boat to stay in the same place. I have a software company and the o…

Thanks for your input. I find testing (especially FE, where a single change can ripple through the whole chain) is actually a great way to use LLMs

It's sad because I've known this guy for 20 years and since the beginning he had a tendency towards "work smarter, not harder", a good motto at the time you're 20 but I often saw it crippling him in the long run, while having short-term gains.

Long-term, funny enough, he said he wanted back into this project because he was very unsatisfied with "easy money" (we both got into SEO at the right time and made a ton of easy money) and wants something stimulating for his brain.

In the meantime I had kids, worked my ass off to get the health and fitness level I want (he also wants it... alas nothing changes).

I'm kind of quite committed to this and we're maybe 30% away from finishing, but I almost debate sometimes if I should just do the FE vibe-coded and let him see that it won't be as good as I can manually do it (FE is hard in the end). Just get it out of the door, keep the customers that we have and let it kind of die down.

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

#57

Post by orwin »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #46
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?

Exactly what happened in a PR from a few months ago, from the beginning it felt wrong, pytest was moved from the dev group to the main import section. Then imported in our models. To add ignores everywhere.

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

#58

Post by yhcj »

socketcluster wrote: post #37

This is literally the recipe for the coming software apocalypse. Just watch the software engineers who say "Let's be careful" lose their jobs and get replaced by non-technical vibe-coders churning out 10K lines of dirty insecure, unmaintainable code per day... Ticking time bomb. I swear, good engineers are going to move to North Korea to monetize because of the amount and size of 'opportunities' this will create. It…

exactly how I feel. I mean let's face it, we were overpaid and underworked because we were considered magicians, but the magic is gone.

What I fear is that it's impossible for the untrained to see the difference between a highly-technical developer and the vibe-coder.

Software is so buggy nowadays (just look at Facebook, or Facebook Ads. Crazy) I wonder what's going to happen in the long run.

I was banking on the opportunities it will create but nah, have you tried debugging AI-generated codes of thousands of lines where the original dev doesn't exist? It's a mess I don't wanna clean up.

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

#59

Post by greggoB »

hombre_fatal wrote: post #48
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…

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.

> 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.

This just recurses the original problem by an additional step: assuming someone is even bothered to write the prompt, they are just as unlikely as before to check what it spits out.

AI may be a productivity amplifier for some, but I don't think it's far-fetched to describe it as a laziness magnifier for the majority.

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

#60

Post by sillyfluke »

tpxl wrote: post #30
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…

The differentiator right now is taste. Most people have none (like the business partner in the OP), and some people have plenty (like you seem to have). These two sets of people will produce wildly different results with the same tools. Two things you can do regarding programming here. 1. Be a consultant for a high wage, use AI, produce good results quickly - little to negative intellectual joy here. You still have t…

1. is a bit contradictory or at the least a "devils in the details" wishful fantasy which hasn't been showcased convincingly in the wild yet (by "the wild", I mean software eng shops and corps). It's assumed the devs who have taste were able to implement their taste fine pre-AI, sure, but the whole gotcha in 1. is that the ones with good taste currently are not confident in implementing their good taste while simultaneously "producing good results quickly using AI".
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