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Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

arxiv.org

141–150 of 259 posts

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#141
The new layer of abstraction is tests. Mostly end-to-end and integration tests. It describes the important constraints to the agents, essentially long lived context.

So essentially what this means is a declarative programming system of overall system behavior.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#142
post #33

This is pretty recent - the survey they ran (99 respondents) was August 18 to September 23 2025 and the field observations (watching developers for 45 minute then a 30 minute interview, 13 participants) were August 1 to October 3. The models were mostly GPT-5 and Claude Sonnet 4. The study was too early to catch the 5.x Codex or Claude 4.5 models (bar one mention of Sonnet 4.5.) This is notable because a lot of acade…

[flagged]

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#143
post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yea. Nobody wants to be a full-time code reviewer.

Hi it's me, the guy who wants to be a full-time code reviewer.

If you really did that full time and never wrote code, you’d be a terrible reviewer.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#144

You know what. After seeing all these articles about AI/LLM for these past 4 years, about how they are going to replace me as software developers and about how I am not productive enough without using 5 agents and being a project manager. I. Don't. Care. I don't even care about those debates outside. Debates about do LLM work and replace programmers? Say they do, ok so what? I simply have too much fun programming. I…

I hear you but I feel like you (and really others like you, in mass) should not be so passive about your replacement. For most programmers, simply flipping burgers for money to enjoy programming a few hours a week is not going to work. Making a living is a thing. If you are reduced to having to flip burgers that means the economy will gave collapsed and there won’t be any magic Elon UBI money to save us.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#145
post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I never said anything about being worse, dumber, and definitely not slower. And keep in mind worse is subjective - if something doesn't require edge case handling or correctness, bugs can be tolerated etc, then something with those properties isn't worse is it? I'm just saying that since there is such a wide range of experiences with the same tools, it's probably likely that developers vary on their evaluations of th…

Okay, I certainly agree with you that different use cases can dictate different outcomes when using AI tooling. I would just encourage everyone who thinks similar to you to be cautious about assuming that someone who experiences a different result with these tools is less skilled or dealing with a less difficult use case - like one that has no edge cases or has greater tolerance for bugs. It's possible that this is t…

Yeah I agree, it doesn't really have to do with skill or different use cases, it's just what your threshold is for "working" or "good".

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#146

Earlier quoted context omitted.

25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach.

I'm too young to have used VB in the workforce, but I did use it in school, and honestly off that alone I'm inclined to agree. I've seen VB namedropped frequently, but I feel like I've yet to see a proper discussion of why it seems like nothing can match its productivity and ease of use for simple desktop apps. Like, what even is the modern approach for a simple GUI program? Is Electron really the best we can do? MS…

You can add Macromedia Flash to that list - nothing has really replaced it, and as a result the world no longer has an approachable tool for building interactive animations.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#147
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how I can prove it, but ~25 years ago building software without open source sucked . You had to build everything from scratch! It took months to get even the most basic things up and running. I think open source is the single most important productivity boost to our industry that's ever existed. Automated testing is a close second. Google, Facebook, many others would not have existed without open source…

25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach.

How are you measuring productivity?

What one can make with VB6 (final release in 1998) is very far from what can make with modern stacks. (My efficiency at building LEGO structures is unbelievable! I put the real civil engineers to shame.)

Perhaps you mean that you can go from idea to working (in the world and expectations of 1998) very quickly. If so, that probably felt awesome. But we live in 2025. Would you reach for VB6 now? How much credit does VB6 deserve? Also think about how 1998 was a simpler time, with lower expectations in many ways.

Will I grant advantages to certain aspects of VB6? Sure. Could some lessons be applicable today? Probably. But just like historians say, don't make the mistake of ignoring context when you compare things from different eras.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#148
post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure how I can prove it, but ~25 years ago building software without open source sucked . You had to build everything from scratch! It took months to get even the most basic things up and running. I think open source is the single most important productivity boost to our industry that's ever existed. Automated testing is a close second. Google, Facebook, many others would not have existed without open source…

25 years ago, I was slinging apps together super fast using VB6. It was awesome. It was a level of productivity few modern stacks can approach.

Agentic coding is just another rhyme of 25 y/o frenzy of "let's outsource everything to India." The new generation thinks this time is really special with us. Let's check again in 25 years

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It feels like we all signed up to be ICs, but now we’re middle managers and our reports are bots.

I forget where I saw this (a Medium post, somewhere) but someone summed this up as "I didn't sign up for this just to be a tech priest for the machine god".

Someone commented yesterday that managers and other higher-ups are "already ok with non-deterministic outputs", because that's what engineers give them.

As a manager/tech-lead, I've kind of been a tech priest for some time.

Re: Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

#150

You know what. After seeing all these articles about AI/LLM for these past 4 years, about how they are going to replace me as software developers and about how I am not productive enough without using 5 agents and being a project manager. I. Don't. Care. I don't even care about those debates outside. Debates about do LLM work and replace programmers? Say they do, ok so what? I simply have too much fun programming. I…

I hear you but I feel like you (and really others like you, in mass) should not be so passive about your replacement. For most programmers, simply flipping burgers for money to enjoy programming a few hours a week is not going to work. Making a living is a thing. If you are reduced to having to flip burgers that means the economy will gave collapsed and there won’t be any magic Elon UBI money to save us.

We will have bigger problems when that happens. I am not worried.
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