“Vibe Coding” vs. Reality

I think "one shot ready for production code" is what AI cannot do yet. Which is why I am not worried for another 12 months at least :)

Are we talking about the reality where the size of the global software outsourcing market is $618 billion and growing? https://groovetechnology.com/blog/software-development/outso...

This article is a bit more balanced, though, and clearly isn't criticising use of AI in programming, but specifically the "Jesus take the wheel" style of vibe coding. It's the same old "if you write code as cleverly as you possibly can, you are not smart enough to debug it", but to the next level, where people are writing code that they aren't even smart enough to read.

We have a fair number of offshore resources that are used for dev. They developers are fully integrated into the team, are in all the stand-ups, and substitute for the usual role of junior programmers. They don't get the grunt-work shoveled on them, they get the same work as everyone else, they're just expected to not be as fast.

In 6 months 2 out of 4 of them been sacked, and surprise, not because we could replace their work with LLM output, but because their use of LLMs was so unrestrained and scattershot the pull requests they submitted had become nightmares. One thing mentioned in the article about unit test creation was something we saw as well. Perhaps this is partly due to working an existing code base where the LLM loses some of its advantage, and certainly some of it was cultural in that progress was thought more important than actual manageable code. The two sacked fellows where told, literally, from my own mouth, multiple times, "You cannot just ask Copilot to write you code, paste the entire thing into Visual Studio with no thought of what has changed, with the end goal of just compiling and meeting the single set of acceptance criteria on your story. You're breaking other things and introducing bugs." It went on deaf ears, and now they're gone. They were nice people, I didn't know how to get through to them, but they were convinced the LLMs were the way to go.

I use LLMs to help write code every day, and I wouldn't want to be without it, but I'm fairly surgical about it. Most of the time Copilot gives you a page of say, React code, or EF Core queries, you have to be really careful about anything you didn't explicitly ask for. Honestly, there is a time savings, but there is not a quality increase. The benefit is subverted by the time it takes to figure out how to ask correctly, the time to vet the output, and the time to fix the little tiny insidious bugs it can introduce.

So, don't go vibe coding and lose your job, is something to think about. I have to admit that it has worn me down meeting these interesting people from far-flung locations only to watch them flounder and get let go.

But we have to endure these tedious self-congratulatory "mwa ha well it's still not as good as my code" posts.

No shit. Nobody is saying AI can write a web browser or a compiler or even many far simpler things.

But it can do some very simple things like making basic websites. And sure it gets a lot of stuff wrong and you have to correct it, or fix it yourself. But it's still usually faster than doing everything manually.

This post feels like complaining about cruise control because it isn't level 5 autonomy. Nobody should use it because it doesn't do everything perfectly!