71–80 of 154 posts
'The problem' is this species prefers doing instead of thinking. 'Vibe coding' is merely an instance.
‘Vibe coding’ isn’t software engineering. It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of unchecked AI output by clicking “accept all” on the output. You would certainly NOT use ‘vibe coded’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems. The ones pushing “vibe coding” are the same ones who are all invested in th…
‘OUTSOURCING’ isn’t software engineering. It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of CHEAP output by clicking “I AGREE” on a contract . You would certainly NOT use ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems. An incident involving using ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware is just waiting to happen. ... oh,…
One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users. I've changed my outlook on vibe coding after seeing the results of this wholesome vibe coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJUXocn7aE . This guy didn't just make…
Yeah, the most important part of that video is where he says: "it works well enough" . I think there's lots of room for this kind of bespoke software that's fundamentally unmaintainable -- and not something anyone could reasonably afford to make with professionals -- but good enough for purpose. This seems like a great, life-changing example, but it's still subject to the same thing the article is talking about. I've…
1°) Know how to diagnose and fix critical problems by themselves, because there will be bugs in production for which AI won't be any help
2°) Write maintainable code, AI doesn't care at all of maintainability of code while devs should (must imho) consider pasting AI code as a merge/pull request.
For 2°) IIRC, I read somewhere that more and more code published on i.e. github is AI-generated. While this means the quality of code is decreasing, i.e. Copilot is also trained on more and more % of AI-generated code. So the quality of AI-generated code is decreasing globally.
As time passes, I think skilled devs will become more skilled and unskilled will become more unskilled.
One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users. I've changed my outlook on vibe coding after seeing the results of this wholesome vibe coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJUXocn7aE . This guy didn't just make…
Hence why software developers are out of job, eventually. The day of only a few people around the factory floor to babysit the robots will come, but lets keep celebrating the day they start unloading them from the delivery trucks for installation.
One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users. I've changed my outlook on vibe coding after seeing the results of this wholesome vibe coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJUXocn7aE . This guy didn't just make…
I love this so much. It's hacky, janky, and absolutely phenomenal and life changing. This is like perfectly in the spirit of the hacker ethos. This dude scraped together pieces around him and made a useful product that solves the problems he wants to solve, the way he wants to solve them. The code is probably garbage. You can tell the UI is weird and jumpy. He's using timed delays to manipulate the browser with keybo…
I would strongly disagree on this count. Hacker ethos, at least as traditionally understood, emphasizes grokking and elegance.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> vibe coding allowed me to figure out some rough edges of my design document, and experiment with "what would it look like built with threads? As async code? As procedural?” This doesn’t fall under my understanding of the phrase “vibe coding”. In the tweet from Karpathy which many point to for coining the phrase, he says that when vibe coding you essentially “forget the code exists”. I think it’s distinct from regul…
We used to call that "the zone", and it's not exclusive to coding.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
‘OUTSOURCING’ isn’t software engineering. It throws away decades of software engineering principles in favour of CHEAP output by clicking “I AGREE” on a contract . You would certainly NOT use ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware that powers key control systems in critical infrastructure such as energy, banking, hospitals and communications systems. An incident involving using ‘OUTSOURCED’ slopware is just waiting to happen. ... oh,…
I mean that's not a great counterexample because outsourcing is famously difficult to get right, and from my own experience often results in exactly the kind of terrible code quality GP is talking about.
Yes, outsourcing is famously difficult to get right, and yet we've been doing it in every industry for decades now. And the famous examples become famous when something fails (boeing et. all) but there are also success stories out there. The trick, as always, is in the implementation.
My other point was that every "new thing" gets the same treatment. It doesn't work. Oh, it works but on toy problems. Well, it works on some complicated problems, but it's expensive. Ok, it works on a variety of problems, it's cheap, but it's unmaintainable. And so on, and so forth.
The real problem with "vibe coding" (or any coding, or with any product what so ever) is that the end user probably is not a programmer, and therefore cannot have professional judgement on the quality of the implementation. The only thing typical end user care is the perceived behavior, not the implementation details. As it is easier and cheaper to do anything, the result is low-quality products. This of course serve…
It’s implied that programs are personal but product code goes through peer review, checking the premise of the change as well as the implementation. When someone reviews vibe coded patches and gives feedback, what should the reviewer expect the author to do? Pass the feedback onto their agent and upload the result? That feels silly. How has code review changed in our brave, vibey new world? Are we just reviewing idea…
The next step seems that we will write programs in prompts. Maybe we will get a language that is more structured than the current natural language prompts and of much higher order than than our current high level programming constructs and libraries.