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Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

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Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#131

Post by simonw »

achierius wrote: post #109
simonw wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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."

> Saying that Andrej Karpathy is "an AI researcher, but not a software engineer" isn't a very credible statement. 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?

His GitHub contributions graph (1,261 contributions in 2024) looks pretty healthy to me. https://github.com/karpathy

He spends a lot of time as an educator these days.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#134

Post by ken47 »

The hype levels are so overwhelming that AI coding could never hope to meet them. I've tried having a highly-ranked AI coding app write unit tests for a relatively complex codebase. 80% of the generated test cases failed. But an experienced human such as myself could use those as a starting point since it took care of some of the tedious boilerplate. It genuinely saved me some time and annoyance, but could never hope to replace even the lowliest competent junior dev.

That's what AI is good for right now - boilerplate acceleration. But that's clearly not enough to drive the immense transfers of capital that this high ecosystem demands.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#135

Post by kibwen »

seangrogg wrote: post #105
__loam wrote: post #87

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is an obviously terrible idea that will lead to regressions on every deployment.

How long should we wait after promotions before prompting to add logging back to the service?

Who needs logging when we can just ask the LLM to confabulate the logs?

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#136

Post by Workaccount2 »

ken47 wrote: post #134

The hype levels are so overwhelming that AI coding could never hope to meet them. I've tried having a highly-ranked AI coding app write unit tests for a relatively complex codebase. 80% of the generated test cases failed. But an experienced human such as myself could use those as a starting point since it took care of some of the tedious boilerplate. It genuinely saved me some time and annoyance, but could never hope…

AI is to SWEs what self-driving cars (or like features on new cars) are to taxi drivers. A neat thing that may make some basic things a little easier.

But it's the wrong perspective. Think instead what a self driving car is to someone who cannot drive. It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in or can only handle basic local trips. It's a total game changer. AI is unlocking computers for people who have never written a line of code in their life.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#137

Post by threeseed »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #136
ken47 wrote: post #134

The hype levels are so overwhelming that AI coding could never hope to meet them. I've tried having a highly-ranked AI coding app write unit tests for a relatively complex codebase. 80% of the generated test cases failed. But an experienced human such as myself could use those as a starting point since it took care of some of the tedious boilerplate. It genuinely saved me some time and annoyance, but could never hope…

AI is to SWEs what self-driving cars (or like features on new cars) are to taxi drivers. A neat thing that may make some basic things a little easier. But it's the wrong perspective. Think instead what a self driving car is to someone who cannot drive. It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in or can only handle basic local trips. It's a total game changer. AI is unlocking computers for…

Your analogy makes no sense. There is no equivalent of an operator who will fix your code if it fails.

You're asking someone with zero coding experience to jump in and fix bugs so niche or complex that the LLM is incapable of doing it.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#138

Post by Workaccount2 »

ndepoel wrote: post #18

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…

Software is going to completely change. The writing is on the wall, it's just a matter of who can step back to see it.

Giga-projects with 50k, 100k, 500K, lines of code are going to get decimated. By and large these programs are written to capture large audiences by offering a massive feature set. But how often is any one user ever actually needing those 100k LOC?

If LLMs can start nailing 5K LOC projects pretty reliably, and the technical moat cleared away (i.e. using an IDE to run code). Software businesses are going to see a collapse in users as people just churn out bespoke single task software for their own use case each day.

If you think it's fine because you can't prompt Gemini "Create an excel clone", you are doing the equivalent of drawing a robot with a vinyl record player in 1950 and calling it "Entertainment of the future!". In a world with functional robots, portable vinyl players for it to play music make no sense.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#139

Post by cjfd »

Workaccount2 wrote: post #136
ken47 wrote: post #134

The hype levels are so overwhelming that AI coding could never hope to meet them. I've tried having a highly-ranked AI coding app write unit tests for a relatively complex codebase. 80% of the generated test cases failed. But an experienced human such as myself could use those as a starting point since it took care of some of the tedious boilerplate. It genuinely saved me some time and annoyance, but could never hope…

AI is to SWEs what self-driving cars (or like features on new cars) are to taxi drivers. A neat thing that may make some basic things a little easier. But it's the wrong perspective. Think instead what a self driving car is to someone who cannot drive. It doesn't matter if it sometimes disengages to have an operator step in or can only handle basic local trips. It's a total game changer. AI is unlocking computers for…

"Think instead what a self driving car is to someone who cannot drive."

It would be a very dangerous thing if said self-driving car crashes ten times every ride.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#140

Post by pabs3 »

ndepoel wrote: post #18

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…

Reminds me of this post:

https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/how-tech-loses-out/

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