101–110 of 213 posts
Those are just some of the questions that are in my head lately. I would appreciate other people's opinion.
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From that tweet: > I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it That sums up vibe coding, imo. The article talks about code quality with vibe coding, but I think that misses the point. The real problem is code knowledge. When a vibe coder inevitably needs to debug something, if they have no idea what any of the code does, or why it is the w…
> I’ve already had to spend hours at work tracking down bugs that ending up being in there because someone just blindly accepted the code an LLM wrote, I fear it’s only going to get worse And I’ve also had to spend hours at work tracking down badly copy pasted stack overflow code, or from other places in the codebase that didn’t do what the programmer thought it did. A shitty carpenter will build a shitty staircase w…
Different people clearly mean different things when they talk about software quality. There is quality as perceived by the user: few bugs, accurately models the problem they have, no more complicated than necessary, etc. Then there is this other notion of quality as something to do with how the software is built. How neat and clear it is. How easy it is to extend or change. The first kind of quality is the only kind…
Tell that to the vagus nerve in the giraffe.
LLMs are to software engineering as 3D printers are to mechanical engineering.
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Theoretically a PM could say "the code is disposable and obsoleted by the next deployment. let's just document our prompts." I don't know if that's a good idea but a lot of people are going to try it.
This is an obviously terrible idea that will lead to regressions on every deployment.
This all reminds me a lot of the early 2000's, when big corporations thought they could save a lot of money by outsourcing development work to low-income countries and have their expensive in-house engineers only write specifications. Turns out most of those outsourcing parties won't truly understand the core ideas behind the system you're trying to build, won't think outside the box and make corrections where necess…
Have we stopped, really? Last time i was at a faang my org also had offices in one of those “low-income countries”. So in a way we haven’t stopped. Also, depending on how you define “low-income” then up to two thirds of the organisation i worked in was in a low-income country.
Different people clearly mean different things when they talk about software quality. There is quality as perceived by the user: few bugs, accurately models the problem they have, no more complicated than necessary, etc. Then there is this other notion of quality as something to do with how the software is built. How neat and clear it is. How easy it is to extend or change. The first kind of quality is the only kind…
> The first kind of quality is the only kind that matters in the end. How easy it is to maintain and extend does absolutely matter, in a world where software is constantly growing and evolving and never "finished"
Just an observation though:
There seems to be a world in software where "it works" well enough to grow a large user base to achieve a a large valuation and then dip out is also a viable option.
Growing/evolving the code does not matter because the product no longer matters after the founders have made a large sum of money.
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> Saying that Andrej Karpathy is "an AI researcher, but not a software engineer" isn't a very credible statement. I think it is. He is certainly a great AI researcher / scientist, but not really a software engineer. > It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and…
Where did Andrej say it was "the future of software engineering"? He very clearly described vibe coding as an entertaining way to hack on throwaway weekend projects. Try reading the whole tweet! https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 "Would you yourself want vibe-coded software that is in highly critical systems such as in aeroplanes, hospitals, or in energy infrastructure?" Of course not. That's why…
... And then a few weeks later, my boss' boss scolded the team for not having heard of the term, and told us to learn and use vibe coding because it's the future.
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It is a scam. Invented by someone who is an AI researcher, but not a software engineer which the latter rigorously focuses on code quality. "Vibe-coding" as it is defined, throws away all the principles of software engineering and adopts an unchecked approach into using AI generated code with "accept all changes" then duct-taping it with more code on top of a chaotic code architecture or none (single massive file) an…
Saying that Andrej Karpathy is "an AI researcher, but not a software engineer" isn't a very credible statement. If you read to the end of his tweet, he specifically says "It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works."
Broadly I agree with the two other replies: his 'day job' has not been coding in some time, so I would put him in the same bucket as e.g. a manager who got promoted out of writing code 5-10 years ago. I do want to understand where you're coming from here -- do you think that's a fair characterization?
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I think this erratic manner of trying to find the correct way is the issue. I am currently nearing my 2nd year at a company A in my industry, and while I did know they all kinda suck in their own special way, I honestly had no idea it was this bad until I had to try to make this craziness somehow work for us. Even if there are standards, I do not see people following them. Last year, the one girl, who did seem to try…
> Last year, the one girl, who did seem to try to follow some common sense approach, got fired for effectively using common sense against big boss wishes. What did your manager say when you said this to them?