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Automatic Programming

antirez.com

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Re: Automatic Programming

#11

Post by RobinL »

antirez wrote: post #3
rvz wrote: post #2

> I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud. Disagree. So when there is a bug / outage / error, due to "automatic programming" are you ready to be first in line to accept accountability (the LLM cannot be) when it all goes wrong in production? I do not think that would even be enough or whether this would wor…

> So when there is a bug / outage / error, due to "automatic programming" you are first in line and ready to accept accountability when it all goes wrong in production? Absolutely yes. Automatic programming does not mean software developers are no longer accountable for their errors. Also because you can use AP in order to do ways more QA efforts than possible in the past. If you decide to just add things without a r…

Agree. Much of the value of devs is understanding the thing they're working on so they know what to do when it breaks, and knows what new features it can easily support. Doesn't matter whether they wrote the code, a colleague wrote it, or an AI.

Re: Automatic Programming

#12

Post by noodletheworld »

Vibe Engineering. Automatic Programming. “We need to get beyond the arguments of slop vs sophistication..."

Everyone seems to want to invent a new word for 'programming with AI' because 'vibe coding' seems to have come to equate to 'being rubbish and writing AI slop'.

...buuuut, it doesn't really matter what you call it does it?

If the result is slop, no amount of branding is going to make it not slop.

People are not stupid. When I say "I vibe coded this shit" I do not mean, "I used good engineering practices to...". I mean... I was lazy and slapped out some stupid thing that sort of worked.

/shrug

When AI assisted programming is generally good enough not to be called slop, we will simply call it 'programming'.

Until then, it's slop.

There is programming, and there is vibe coding. People know what they mean.

We don't need new words.

Re: Automatic Programming

#13

Post by nubg »

margorczynski wrote: post #5

Vibe coding is an idiotic term and it's a shame that it stuck. If I'm a project lead and just giving directions to the devs I'm also "vibe coding"? I guess a large of that is that 1-2 years ago the whole process was much more non-deterministic and actually getting a sensible result much harder.

I think if a manager just gave some high order instructions and then went mostly handsoff until teammembers started quitting, dying etc, only then he steps in, that would be vibe managing. Normal managing would be much more supervision and guidance through feedback. This aligns 100% with TFA.

Re: Automatic Programming

#14

Post by sirwitti »

rvz wrote: post #2

> I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud. Disagree. So when there is a bug / outage / error, due to "automatic programming" are you ready to be first in line to accept accountability (the LLM cannot be) when it all goes wrong in production? I do not think that would even be enough or whether this would wor…

Owning the issue is one thing, but being able to fix issues with a reasonable amount of resources is another.

To me code created like this smells like technical debt. When bugs appear after 6 months in production - as they do, if you didn't fully understand the code when developing it, how much time, energy and money will it cost to fix the problem later on?

More often than I like I had to deal with code where it felt like the developer did'nt actually understand what they were writing. Sometimes I was this developer and it always creates issues.

Re: Automatic Programming

#15

Post by mccoyb »

a better term might be “feedback engineering” or “verification engineering” (what feedback loop do I need to construct to ensure that the output artifact from the agent matches my specification)

This includes standard testing strategies, but also much more general processes

I think of it as steering a probability distribution

At least to me, this makes it clear where “vibe coding” sits … someone who doesn’t know how to express precise verification or feedback loops is going to get “the mean of all software”

Re: Automatic Programming

#16

Post by rtpg »

Every time I hear someone mention they vibed a thing or claude gave them something, it just reads as a sort of admission that I'm about to read some _very_ "first draft"-feeling code. I get this even from people who spend a lot of time talking about needing to own code you send up.

People need to stop apologizing for their work product because of the tools they use. Just make the work product better and you don't have to apologize or waste people's time.

Especially given that you have these tools to make cleanup easier (in theory)!

Re: Automatic Programming

#17

Post by pseidemann »

xixixao wrote: post #6

This is a classic false dichotomy. Vibe coding, automatic coding and coding is clearly on a spectrum. And I can employ all the shades during a single project.

AI is like an instrument which can be played in various ways, different styles and intensities.

One might say it's spec strumming.

Re: Automatic Programming

#18

Post by jakkos »

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift

I feel like this wording isn't great when there are many impactful open source programmers who have explicitly stated that they don't want their code used to train these models and licensed their work in a world where LLMs didn't exist. It wasn't their "gift", it was unwillingly taken from them.

> I'm a programmer, and I use automatic programming. The code I generate in this way is mine. My code, my output, my production. I, and you, can be proud.

I've seen LLMs generate code that I have immediately recognized as being copied a from a book or technical blog post I've read before (e.g. exact same semantics, very similar comment structure and variable names). Even if not legally required, crediting where you got ideas and code from is the least you can do. While LLMs just launder code as completely your own.

Re: Automatic Programming

#19

Post by mgaunard »

I stopped reading at "soon to become the practice of writing software".

That belief has no basis at this point and it's been demonstrated not only that AI doesn't improve coding but also that the costs associated are not sustainable.

Re: Automatic Programming

#20

Post by reidrac »

> Pre-training is, actually, our collective gift that allows many individuals to do things they could otherwise never do, like if we are now linked in a collective mind, in a certain way.

Is not a gift if it was stolen.

Anyway, in my opinion the code that was generated by the LLM is yours as long as you're responsible for it. When I look at a PR I'm reading the output of a person, independently of the tools that person used.

There's conflict perhaps when the submitter doesn't take full ownership of the code. So I agree with Antirez on that part

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