It seems like a big part of the divide is that people who learned software engineering find vibe coding to be unsuitable for any project intended to be in use for more than a few while those who learned coding think vibe coding is the next big thing because they never have to deal with the consequences of the bad code.
AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
41–50 of 382 posts
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#42[flagged]
Please don't use uppercase for emphasis. If you want to emphasize a word or phrase, put *asterisks* around it and it will get italicized.
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#43[flagged]
I've seen some discussions and I'd say there's lots of people who are really against the hyped expectations from the AI marketing materials, not necessarily against the AI itself. Things that people are against that would seem to be against AI, but are not directly against AI itself: - Being forced to use AI at work - Being told you need to be 2x, 5x or 10x more efficient now - Seeing your coworkers fired - Seeing hi…
If you keep digging, you will also find that there's a small but vocal sock puppet army who will doggedly insist that any claims to productivity gains are in fact just hallucinations by people who must not be talented enough developers to know the difference.
It's exhausting.
There are legitimate and nuanced conversations that we should be having! For example, one entirely legitimate critique is that LLMs do not tell LLM users that they are using libraries who are seeking sponsorship. This is something we could be proactive about fixing in a tangible way. Frankly, I'd be thrilled if agents could present a list of projects that we could consider clicking a button to toss a few bucks to. That would be awesome.
But instead, it's just the same tired arguments about how LLMs are only capable of regurgitating what's been scraped and that we're stupid and lazy for trusting them to do anything real.
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#44Yep it is why the work getting over the threshold is just as long as it was without AI.
Someone mentioned it is a force multiplier I don't disagree with this, it is a force multiplier in the mundane and ordinary execution of tasks. Complex ones get harder and hard for it where humans visualize the final result where AI can't. It is predicting from input but it can't know the destination output if the destination isn't part of the input.
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#45Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen some discussions and I'd say there's lots of people who are really against the hyped expectations from the AI marketing materials, not necessarily against the AI itself. Things that people are against that would seem to be against AI, but are not directly against AI itself: - Being forced to use AI at work - Being told you need to be 2x, 5x or 10x more efficient now - Seeing your coworkers fired - Seeing hi…
The most credible argument against AI is really the expense involved in querying frontier models. If you want to strengthen the case for AI-assisted coding, try to come up with ways of doing that effectively with a cheap "mini"-class model, or even something that runs locally. "You can spend $20k in tokens and have AI write a full C compiler in a week!" is not a very sensible argument for anything.
Because hardware costs never goes down and energy efficiency never go up overtime?
Whatever the value/$ is now, do you really think it is going to be constant?
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
HN has a huge anti AI crowd that is just as vocal and active as its pro AI crowd. My guess that this is true of the industry today and won’t be true of the industry 5 years from now: one of the crowds will have won the argument and the other will be out of the tech industry. Vibe coding and slop strawmen are still strawmen. The quality of the debate is obviously a problem
I don’t understand why people are so resistant to the idea that use cases actually matter here. If someone says “you’re an idiot because you aren’t writing good, structured prompts,” or “you’re too big of an idiot to realize that your AI-generated code sucks” before knowing anything about what the other person was trying to do, they’re either speaking entirely from an ideological bias, or don’t realize that other peo…
We don’t know anything about the commenters other than that they aren’t getting the same results with AI as we are. It’s like if someone complains that since they can’t write fast code and so you shouldn’t be able to either?
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#47I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…
And what if the foundation was made by the AI itself? What’s the excuse then?
Then you are boned unless it was architected well. LLMs tend to stack a lot of complexity at local scopes, especially if the neighboring pages are also built poorly.
E.g pumping out a ton of logic to convert one data structure to another. Like a poorly structured form with random form control names that don’t match to the DTO. Or single properties for each form control which are then individually plugged into the request DTO.
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#48Earlier quoted context omitted.
And what if the foundation was made by the AI itself? What’s the excuse then?
Your responsibility as a developer in this new world is design and validation. A poor foundation is a design problem. Throw it away and start again.
We’ve always been responsible for design and validation. Nothing has changed there.
It’s funny how the vibe coding story insists we shouldn’t look at the code details but when it’s pointed out the bots can’t deal with a “messy” (but validated) foundation, the story changes that we have to refactor that.
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#49I think AI is just a massive force multiplier. If your codebase has bad foundation and going in the wrong direction with lots of hacks, it will just write code which mirrors the existing style... And you get exactly was OP is suggesting. If however, your code foundations are good and highly consistent and never allow hacks, then the AI will maintain that clean style and it becomes shockingly good; in this case, the p…
Can the AI help with refactoring a poor codebase? Can it at least provide good suggestions for improvement if asked to broadly survey a design that happens to be substandard? Most codebases are quite bad as you say, so this is a rather critical area.
Re: AI makes the easy part easier and the hard part harder
#50Earlier quoted context omitted.
I've seen some discussions and I'd say there's lots of people who are really against the hyped expectations from the AI marketing materials, not necessarily against the AI itself. Things that people are against that would seem to be against AI, but are not directly against AI itself: - Being forced to use AI at work - Being told you need to be 2x, 5x or 10x more efficient now - Seeing your coworkers fired - Seeing hi…
The most credible argument against AI is really the expense involved in querying frontier models. If you want to strengthen the case for AI-assisted coding, try to come up with ways of doing that effectively with a cheap "mini"-class model, or even something that runs locally. "You can spend $20k in tokens and have AI write a full C compiler in a week!" is not a very sensible argument for anything.
How much would it cost to pay developer to do this??