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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

#71

Post by vidarh »

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…

It's a sea change because a lot of this code looks plausible and seems to work to someone inexperienced at assuring quality, and it will take some time before the people emboldened by that learn.

I just yesterday had an agent produce a prototype that appeared to work and that looked plausibly well engineered, except I knew from experience that what it had done should be doable with a tenth of the codebase.

Someone without experience might've just accepted that prototype. It took one prompt to get it turned into a reasonable MVP, but you'd need to know what to ask, and you'd need to know you needed to ask.

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

#72

Post by piva00 »

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 one of my most repeated tropes on HN is bringing up that scale and degree matter. A problem of a kind is of a completely different kind when the scale is another order of magnitude.

A simple example: with picture editing software people have been able to create believable fake content for a long time, it did require skill which limited the scale, with genAI creating in seconds, by anyone, a much more plausible fake image than most people were able to before creates a whole other kind of problem that didn't exist before.

It's a tired argument to reduce issues to analogous which existed before and discard how the scale and degree of it changes the class of problem...

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

#73

Post by aprilthird2021 »

Our_Benefactors wrote: post #10
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…

This is what’s know as “cope”. People are not being hired on the basis of how well they know how to not use AI. That is the basis of what people were hired on before AI, because no alternative existed.

> People are not being hired on the basis of how well they know how to not use AI.

Oh look a thing I never said being refuted

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

#74

Post by aprilthird2021 »

probably_wrong wrote: post #8
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…

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 often read here comments along the lines of "there will be plenty of jobs for AI-unfuckers"

That's not what I've said though.

> "sometimes things are broken, are then fixed with a broken solution, and will remain broken till the end of time".

That's true of a lot of software. But the big bucks things right now have too much money riding on them to be broken and remain broken. Every big tech co right now is talking about and sharing solutions for how to handle the wave of AI generated code that hits their systems from internal devs every day. Reliability is not at levels it was before. Change safety is far more challenging. Move fast and break things was shelved long ago at these companies. It's only popular in the public imagination.

That's not to say these companies will stop using AI. Absolutely not. It's a great tool, but like all tools it needs an ecosystem built around it. It needs evals, debugging, maintenance, telemetry, etc. It ultimately needs goals and directions driven by human beings who understand the domain well enough to steer. And that's why devs like OP are important now and will remain so for quite a while bc the rise of AI is the rise of many new and challenging engineering problems.

> 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

So what? How does this change anything I said? Being proficient with AI agents is far easier if you have the domain knowledge about what they should produce and far harder if you have no idea.

And anyways, what you're asked in interviews is not a mirror of the job. I see many people every day at work who are lauded and praised for using their knowledge to course correct and improve AI agents and other AI workflows. The idea that there will come a point where they work perfectly and don't need to be messed with, well that's also true of software and services. But it doesn't mean big tech companies with quite stable main services just stopped hiring people years and years ago

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

#75

Post by [deleted] »

netdevphoenix wrote: post #68
lxgr wrote: post #55

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

It seems to me that chances of misalignment are a function of accumulated usage time. Eventually, it will happen.

[deleted]

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

#76

Post by aprilthird2021 »

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…

> I still think knowing what you should build will be important for the next 12-24 months.. but I have to be honest.. after that.. I don't know.

I'll bet we'll all still work in software in 24 months

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

#77

Post by aprilthird2021 »

rubzah wrote: post #42
XenophileJKO wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 stil…

> these damn models are already so good at handling complexity, that they can actually work fine with a byzantine code base

Not really. They're only as good as whatever they are prompted for. If you prompt them for the wrong thing, they'll do it. Great tools, human error

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

#78

Post by josefritzishere »

I am genuinely worried about skill-rot. My peers code and design skills are degrading so quickly. AI is making each feature harder to debug than the last. That's a skill problem, and if our skills weren't rotting we'd be able to fix it adeptly. But the process seems to ruin our cognitive tools.

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

#79

Post by aogaili »

It seems to me the author is gradually accepting the fact that business people (and their grandparents) can now produce thousands lines of code.

This was not feasible a year ago.

Now, regarding the quality of the code, the edge cases etc, surely someone familiar with the failure modes can review and prompt the AI better. But that doesn't negate the fact that these people are producing huge amount of code using natural language without any programming background.

A skill that used to take many months (if not years to master) and require handcrafting the software line by line is now done in English with almost no understanding of programming primitives.

And I'd argue that if the models, harnesses and IDEs keep getting better then a layman learning few software best practices would outperform a team of senior developers writing code manually.

Therefore, the developers refusing to adapt and adjust will find themselves gradually in a position where a layman can easily outperform their economic output by a huge margins. And in my opinion, the author just found himself in this position, and still in denial of what is happening.

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

#80

Post by potro »

aogaili wrote: post #79

It seems to me the author is gradually accepting the fact that business people (and their grandparents) can now produce thousands lines of code. This was not feasible a year ago. Now, regarding the quality of the code, the edge cases etc, surely someone familiar with the failure modes can review and prompt the AI better. But that doesn't negate the fact that these people are producing huge amount of code using natura…

> But that doesn't negate the fact that these people are producing huge amount of code using natural language without any programming background.

Huge amount of *non-working* code, as illustrated by this article.

Also author is not super clear on this point, but according to article the partner has programming background.

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