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Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

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Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#71

Post by 3vidence »

p1necone wrote: post #16

If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever. Where llms excel is in situations like: * I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes. * I want to set up test data and the bones of unit te…

YES, this is the way to make AI tools pretty much a strictly positive productivity tool on large codebases.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#72

Post by smaudet »

merlincorey wrote: post #37
p1necone wrote: post #16

If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever. Where llms excel is in situations like: * I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes. * I want to set up test data and the bones of unit te…

> * I want to apply some repetitive change across a large codebase that's just too complicated for a clever regex, bam work you literally would have never bothered to do before done in 2 minutes. You would naively think that, as did I, but I've tested it against several big name models and they are all eventually "lazy", sometimes make unrelated changes, and worse as the context fills up. On a small toy example they…

"bam work you literally would have never bothered to do before done in 2 minutes."

And I would never want to use a piece of software written by you ever.

If you think that writing the code was the hard part, your code was probably always shite.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#73

Post by rerdavies »

zzzeek wrote: post #35

just not even ten years ago the discussion here was all about "software engineering" trying to be more legitimized as a formal engineering practice, if there should be licensing, if there should be certifications, lots of threads about formal methods to prove algorithms work, and look where we are now. Arguing if humans should even care look at the code we are producing and shipping. crazy shit man

Pretty sure that was 25 years ago, not 10 years ago. And then, 20 years ago, we were coming to terms with the fact that all of that stuff was a spectacular failure. And then, 15 year ago, we had found much better ways to do things.

I don't miss that phase of the evolution of software development practice at all.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#74

Post by foxfired »

I used a similar metaphor in the past referencing "They Machine Stops" [0] by E.M. Forster. Yes, in the near future, we will still be able to read code and figure out what it does. I work on legacy code all the time.

But in the long term, when experienced developers actually feel comfortable letting LLMs write large swats of code, or when the machine no longer needs to generate human readable code, then we will start forgetting how it works.

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43909111

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#76

Post by fragmede »

trod1234 wrote: post #39
s1mplicissimus wrote: post #29

I agree with the premise and the conclusion, but over almost 20 years of writing, adapting and delivering software I've more than once been in exactly the same situation. Noone to ask, the only person even vaguely familiar with software development left half a year ago. Half of the processes have changed since the software was written, and the people who owned them have left, too. So while I agree that LLMs will acce…

The author though neglects what a bus factor of 0 means in real terms and how it gets there, aside from the description of the definition upfront where all knowledge lost. A company acceptable with a bus factor of zero is a company that is not willing to pay the economic advantage to the expertise required to do the work. The economic demand, of humanity competing with AI is zero because AI does things its good at wi…

As programmers, the bus factor is something to be noted and avoided, but in medicine, it goes the other direction. Private practice is one doctor, and a whole support staff for that single individual. Why are we so eager to be replaceable?

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#77

Post by bongodongobob »

smaudet wrote: post #72
merlincorey wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> * I want to apply some repetitive change across a large codebase that's just too complicated for a clever regex, bam work you literally would have never bothered to do before done in 2 minutes. You would naively think that, as did I, but I've tested it against several big name models and they are all eventually "lazy", sometimes make unrelated changes, and worse as the context fills up. On a small toy example they…

"bam work you literally would have never bothered to do before done in 2 minutes." And I would never want to use a piece of software written by you ever. If you think that writing the code was the hard part, your code was probably always shite.

Yeah well you definitely already do and don't know it so please spare us the pearl clutching.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#78

Post by patcon »

p1necone wrote: post #16

If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever. Where llms excel is in situations like: * I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes. * I want to set up test data and the bones of unit te…

I like the spirit of these, but there are waaaay more. Like you only mentioned the ones for professional and skilled coders who have another option. What about all the sub-examples for people all the way from "technically unskilled" to "baby-step coders". There's a bunch of things they can now just do and get in front of ppl without us.

Going from "thing in my head that I need to pay someone $100/h to try" to "thing a user can literally use in 3 minutes that will make that hypothetical-but-nonexistent $100/h person cry"... like there is way more texture of roles in that territory than your punchy comment gives credit. No one cares is it's maintainable if they now know what's possible, and that matters 1000x more than future maintenance concerns. People spend years working up to this step that someone can now simply jank out* in 3 minutes.

* to jank out. verb. 1. to crank out via vibe-coding, in the sense of productive output.

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#79

Post by johnfn »

AntwaneB wrote: post #12
johnfn wrote: post #2

The article throws out a lot of potential issues with AI generated code, but doesn't stop for a moment to consider if solutions currently exist or might exist to these problems. - Before LLMs, provided that your team did some of their due diligence, you could always expect to have some help when tackling new code-bases. Has the author never worked on legacy code before? - (oh, and it has forgotten everything about th…

Hello, author here. Thanks for your comment. I agree with your first point, maybe AI will close some of those gaps with future advances, but I think a large part of the damage will have been done by then. Regarding the memory of reasoning from LLMs, I think the issue is that even if you can solve it in the future, you already have code for which you've lost the artifacts associated with the original generation. Overa…

> Regarding the memory of reasoning from LLMs, I think the issue is that even if you can solve it in the future, you already have code for which you've lost the artifacts associated with the original generation. Overall I find there's a lot of talks (especially in the mainstream media) about AI "always learning" when they don't actually learn new anything until a new model is released.

But this already exists! At work, our code is full of code where the original reasoning for the code is lost. Sometimes someone has forgotten, sometimes the person who wrote it is no longer at the company any more, and so on.

> Correct, but humans writing code don't lead to a Bus Factor of 0, so it's easier to go back, understand what is wrong and address it.

But there are plenty of instances where I work with code that has a bus factor of 0.

The conclusion of your article is that vibe coding is "fundamentally flawed". But every aspect you've described about vibe coding has an analog in normal software engineering, and I don't think you would claim that is "fundamentally flawed".

Re: Vibe coding creates a bus factor of zero

#80

Post by pron »

p1necone wrote: post #16

If you're using llms to shit out large swathes of unreviewed code you're doing it wrong and your project is indeed doomed to become unmaintainable the minute it goes down a wrong path architecturally, or you get a bug with complex causes or whatever. Where llms excel is in situations like: * I have that I want to apply to - bam, half a days work done in 2 minutes. * I want to set up test data and the bones of unit te…

What's interesting is that I wouldn't really call any of the things you list software development. With the exception of the "testing starting point", they're mostly about translating from one programming language/API to another. Useful for sure, but not quite "the future of programming". Also, they all sound like the kind of thing that most "basic" models would do well, which means that the "thinking" models are a waste of money.

Finally, the productivity boost is significant from the perspective of the programmer, but I don't know how big it is from the perspective of the employer. Does this significantly shorten time-to-market?

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