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Professional software developers don't vibe, they control

arxiv.org

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

#181

Post by ActionHank »

simonw wrote: 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…

For what it’s worth I know this is likely intended to read as the new generation of models will somehow better than any paper will be able to gauge, that hasn’t been my experience.

Results are getting worse and less accurate, hell, I even had Claude drop some Chinese into a response out of the blue one day.

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

#182

Post by [deleted] »

aaronblohowiak wrote: post #179
bbor wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m glad someone else noticed the time frames — turns out the lead author here has published 28 distinct preprints in the past 60 days, almost all of which are marked as being officially published already/soon. Certainly some scientists are just absurdly efficient and all 28 involved teams, but that’s still a lot . Personally speaking, this gives me second thoughts about their dedication to truly accurately measuring…

are they a PI with a lab? in this field, does the PI get first or last author?

[deleted]

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

#183

Post by recursive »

9rx wrote: post #175
recursive wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Programming languages are structured and have specifications. It is possible to know what code will do just by reading it.

Well designed ones do, at least. LLMs, in their infancy, still bring a lot of undefined behaviour, which is you end up stuck in the code for a few minutes -> compile -> wait -> repeat cycle. But that is not a desirable property and won't remain acceptable as the technology matures.

I don't see any way this is changing, acceptable or not.

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

#185

Post by 9rx »

recursive wrote: post #183
9rx wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well designed ones do, at least. LLMs, in their infancy, still bring a lot of undefined behaviour, which is you end up stuck in the code for a few minutes -> compile -> wait -> repeat cycle. But that is not a desirable property and won't remain acceptable as the technology matures.

I don't see any way this is changing, acceptable or not.

It is quite possible the tools will never improve beyond where they sit today, sure, but then usage will naturally drift away from that fatiguing use (not all use, obviously). The constant compile/wait cycle is exhausting exactly because it is not productive.

Businesses are currently willing to accept that lack of productivity as an investment into figuring out how to tame the tools. There is a lot of hope that all the problems can be solved if we keep trying to solve them. And, in fairness, we have gotten a lot closer than we were just a year or so ago towards that end, so the optimism currently remains strong. However, that cannot go on forever. At some point the investment has to prove itself, else the plug will be pulled.

And yes, it may ultimately be a dead end. Absolutely. It wouldn't be the first failure in software development.

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

#186

Post by danavar »

So much of my professional SWE jobs isn't even programming - I feel like this is a detail missed by so many. Generally people just stereotype SWE as a programmer, but being an engineer (in any discipline) is so much more than that. You solve problems. AI will speed up the programming work-streams, but there is so much more to our jobs than that.

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

#187

Post by ipdashc »

whateverboat wrote: post #169
ipdashc wrote: post #104

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hnaGZHe8wws This is a nice video on why Electron is the best you might be able to do.

Thanks for the link - this is a cool video. Though it seems like it's mostly focusing on the performance/"bloat" side of things. I do agree that's an annoying aspect of Electron, and I do think his justifications for it are totally fair, but I was more so thinking about ease of use, especially for nontechnical people / beginners.

My memory of it is very fuzzy, but I recall VB being literally drag-and-drop, and yet still being able to make... well, acceptable UIs. I was able to figure it out just fine in middle school.

In comparison, here's Electron's getting started page: https://www.electronjs.org/docs/latest/ The "quick start" is two different languages across three different files. The amount of technologies and buzzwords flying around is crazy, HTML, JS, CSS, Electron, Node, DOM, Chromium, random `charset` and `http-equiv` boilerplate... I have to imagine it'd be rather demoralizing as a beginner. I think there's a large group of "nontechnical" users out there (usually derided by us tech bros as "Excel programmers" or such) that can perfectly understand the actual logic of programming, but are put off by the amount of buzzwords and moving parts involved, and I don't blame them at all.

(And sure, don't want to go in too hard on the nostalgia. 2000s software was full of buzzwords and insane syntax too, we've improved a lot. But it had some upsides.)

It just feels like we lost the plot at some point when we're all using GUI-based computers, but there's no simple, singular, default path to making a desktop GUI app anymore on... any, I think, of the popular desktop OSes?

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

#188

Post by zwnow »

Carrok wrote: post #67
zwnow wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

.env files are used to develop as well, for some things like PayPal u dont have to change the credentials, you just enable sandbox mode. If I had some LLM attached to my codebase, it would be able to read those credentials from the .env file. This has nothing to do with deployment. I never talked about deployment.

If you have your PayPal creds in your repository, you are doing it wrong.

.gitignore is a thing

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

#189

Post by throw-12-16 »

lesuorac wrote: post #5

> Most Recent Task for Survey > Number of Survey Respondents > Building apps 53 > Testing 1 I think this sums up everybody complaints about AI generated code. Don't ask me to be the one to review work you didn't even check.

I fired someone over this a few months ago.

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

#190

Post by throw-12-16 »

websiteapi wrote: post #15

we've never seen a profession drive themselves so aggressively to irrelevance. software engineering will always exist, but it's amazing the pace to which pressure against the profession is rising. 2026 will be a very happy new year indeed for those paying the salaries. :)

Software Engineers will still exist.

Software Devs not so much.

There is a huge difference between the two and they are not interchangeable.

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