Software engineering has always been about managing complexity, not writing code. Code is just the artifact. No-code, low-code is all code but doesn't make for a good software engineered application
AI can code, but it can't build software
21–30 of 185 posts
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#22The problem with vibe coding is it demoralizes experienced software engineers. I'm developing a MVP with vibes and Claude Code and Codex output work in many cases for this relatively new project. But the quality of code is bad. There is already duplicated or unused logic, a lot of code is unnecessarily complex (especially React and JSX). And there's little PR reviews so that "we can keep velocity". I'm paying much less attention for quality now. After all, why bother when AI produce working code? I can't justify and don't have energy for deep-diving system design or dozens of nitpicking change requests. And it makes me more and more replaceable by LLM.
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#23This is a good headline. LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Writing code isn't the same thing as delivering working software. A human expert needs to identify the need for software, decide what the software should do, figure out what's feasible to deliver, build the first version (AI can help a bunch here), evaluate what they've built, show it to users, talk to them about whether it's fit for purpose, iterate…
> I guess the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers I'd argue that they can't, at least on a short timeframe. Not because LLMs can't generate a program or product that works, but that there needs to be enough understanding of how the implementation works to fix any complex issues that come up. One experience I had is…
LLMs are great for learning though, you can easily ask them questions, and you can evaluate your understanding every step of the way, and gradually build the accuracy of your world model that way. It’s not uncommon for me to ask a general question, drill deeper into a concept, and then either test things manually with some toy code or end up reading the official documentation, this time with at least some exposure to the words that I’m looking for to answer my question.
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#24I've been working with a data processing pipeline that was vibe-coded by an AI engineer, and while the code works, as software that has to fit into a production environment, it's a mess. Take logging for example. The pipeline is made up of AWS lambdas written in python. The person who built it wanted to add context to each log for debugging and the LLM generated hundreds of lines of python in each lambda to do this (no common library). But he (and the LLM) didn't understand that there were a bunch of files that initialized their own loggers at the top of the file, so all that code to set context in the root logger wouldn't get used in those files. And then he wanted to parallelize some tasks, and both he and the LLM didn't understand that the logging context was thread-local and wouldn't show up in logs generated in another thread. So what we ended up with was 250+ line logging_config.py files in each individual lambda that were only used for a small portion of the logs generated by the application.
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#25> I don’t really know why AI can't build software (for now)
Could be because programming involves:
1. Long chains of logical reasoning, and
2. Applying abstract principles in practice (in this case, "best practices" of software engineering).
I think LLMs are currently bad at both of these things. They may well be among the things LLMs are worst at atm.
Also, there should be a big asterisk next to "can write code". LLMs do often produce correct code of some size and of certain kinds, but they can also fail at that too frequently.
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers I'd argue that they can't, at least on a short timeframe. Not because LLMs can't generate a program or product that works, but that there needs to be enough understanding of how the implementation works to fix any complex issues that come up. One experience I had is…
LLMs are great for learning though, you can easily ask them questions, and you can evaluate your understanding every step of the way, and gradually build the accuracy of your world model that way. It’s not uncommon for me to ask a general question, drill deeper into a concept, and then either test things manually with some toy code or end up reading the official documentation, this time with at least some exposure to…
If I wanted a confident and simple answer with no regard for veracity, I would just ask a politician.
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#27This is a good headline. LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Writing code isn't the same thing as delivering working software. A human expert needs to identify the need for software, decide what the software should do, figure out what's feasible to deliver, build the first version (AI can help a bunch here), evaluate what they've built, show it to users, talk to them about whether it's fit for purpose, iterate…
> LLMs are remarkably good at writing code.
Just this past weekend, I've designed and written code (in Typescript) that I don't think LLMs can even come close to writing in years. I have a subscription to a frontier LLM, but lately I find myself using like 25% of the time.
At a certain level the software architecture problems I'm solving, drawing upon decades of understanding about maintainable, performant, and verifiable design of data structures and types and algorithms, are things LLMs cannot even begin to grasp.
At that point, I find that attempting to use an LLM to even draft an initial solution is a waste of time. At best I can use it for initial brainstorming.
The people saying LLMs can code are hard for me to understand. They are good for simple bash scripts and complex refactoring and drafting basic code idioms and that's about it.
And even for these tasks the amount of hand-holding I need to do is substantial. At least Gemini Pro/CLI seems good at one-shot performance, before its context gets poisoned
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#28Earlier quoted context omitted.
> I guess the big question is if experienced product management types can pick up enough coding technical literacy to work like this without programmers I'd argue that they can't, at least on a short timeframe. Not because LLMs can't generate a program or product that works, but that there needs to be enough understanding of how the implementation works to fix any complex issues that come up. One experience I had is…
LLMs are great for learning though, you can easily ask them questions, and you can evaluate your understanding every step of the way, and gradually build the accuracy of your world model that way. It’s not uncommon for me to ask a general question, drill deeper into a concept, and then either test things manually with some toy code or end up reading the official documentation, this time with at least some exposure to…
This is how I use them- but I also use them to write initial UI's (usually very primitive). Because I've got an issue where the UI has to be perfect, and if I can blame somebody/something other than me I can ignore it until the UI becomes important enough.
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#29The problem with vibe coding is it demoralizes experienced software engineers. I'm developing a MVP with vibes and Claude Code and Codex output work in many cases for this relatively new project. But the quality of code is bad. There is already duplicated or unused logic, a lot of code is unnecessarily complex (especially React and JSX). And there's little PR reviews so that "we can keep velocity". I'm paying much le…
> I'm paying much less attention for quality now. After all, why bother when AI produce working code?
I hear this so much. It's almost like people think code quality is unrelated to how well the product works. As though you can have 1 without the other.
If your code quality is bad, your product will be bad. It may be good enough for a demo right now, but that doesn't mean it really "works".
Re: AI can code, but it can't build software
#30This is a good headline. LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Writing code isn't the same thing as delivering working software. A human expert needs to identify the need for software, decide what the software should do, figure out what's feasible to deliver, build the first version (AI can help a bunch here), evaluate what they've built, show it to users, talk to them about whether it's fit for purpose, iterate…
> LLMs are remarkably good at writing code. Just this past weekend, I've designed and written code (in Typescript) that I don't think LLMs can even come close to writing in years. I have a subscription to a frontier LLM, but lately I find myself using like 25% of the time. At a certain level the software architecture problems I'm solving, drawing upon decades of understanding about maintainable, performant, and verif…
I find LLMs most helpful when I already have half of the answer written and need them to fill in the blanks.
"Take X and Y I've written before, some documentation for Z, an example W from that repo, now smash them together and build the thing I need"