91–97 of 97 posts
Why would they be here to stay? The crux of the author's argument is that using them is detrimental in the long term. The correct response to that is not a lukewarm response of "maybe do some coding now and again", it is "don't use tools that make you worse".
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There are companies building entire applications, indeed replicating the functionality of existing SaaS applications to test their original applications,with no humans in the development loop. We're looking at the twilight of programming as a human skill. The LLMs are just that good.
I mean... It takes 10 minutes of testing to know this is bullshit. At least in the near term. I've sat with an agent and played the part of a vibe coder. Not looking at the code, frankly providing more guidance and feedback then a vibe coder could, and even in a thousand line app it falls to absolute shit fast. It does get something that "technically" works, but it will collapse in on itself in no time. The act of de…
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I mean... It takes 10 minutes of testing to know this is bullshit. At least in the near term. I've sat with an agent and played the part of a vibe coder. Not looking at the code, frankly providing more guidance and feedback then a vibe coder could, and even in a thousand line app it falls to absolute shit fast. It does get something that "technically" works, but it will collapse in on itself in no time. The act of de…
"Vibe coding" with a single agent is really only a thing for small-scale projects. Really you want to be orchestrating many agents: some generating code, some reviewing, and some testing, feeding back into the generators. Cloudflare developed a clone of Next.js this way and are putting it into production. No humans in the main development loop.
> I do read the code, but reviewing code is very different from producing it, and surely teaches you less. If you don’t believe this, I doubt you work in software. I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them. If I am fixing bugs in my own (mostly self-education) programs, I read my program several times, over and over again. If writing programs taught me something, it is how to read progr…
> I work in software and for single line I write I read hundredths of them. I'm not sure whether this should humble or confuse me. I am definitely WAY heavier on the write-side of this equation. I love programming. And writing. I love them both so much that I wrote a book about programming. But I don't like reading other peoples' code. Nor reading generally. I can't read faster than I can talk. I envy those who can.…
Not that I had an opportunity to write new code, but most of my work through my experience was either to fix bugs or to add new functionality to an existing system with as little code as possible. Both goals mean reuse and understanding of the existing code. For both "reuse" and "understanding" you have to thoroughly read existing code a dozen or so times over.
Tests (in TDD) can show you presence of bugs, not the absence of them. For the absence of bugs one has to thoroughly know problem domain and source code solving the problems.
Code reviews are a cinch because if you get confused by the real code you can switch to reviewing the tests and vice versa.
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It's obvious from the context here what the intended meaning was. Everyone makes typos sometimes.
It is literally not clear. OP could mean that they read hundredths of lines of code for each code they write ie 100 lines of code written and 1-3 lines read. That is in fact literally what they wrote.
My last PR of three lines of code moved into conditional tasked me to read about 8000 lines of code to understand and justify the reason to do exactly that.
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All fair, but I think a different interpretation could be that AI allows you to vastly expand the scope of the possible, such to create a situation again where things are challenging and frustrating and fun.
This is the part that interests me most. The IKEA analogy from the parent comment assumes the carpenter's only option is to build the same furniture faster. But what if the carpenter uses the prefab stuff for the boring parts and spends their real energy on the joints and details that actually matter? I've noticed this pattern in music too - the people who understand theory deeply use generative tools in ways that be…
Maybe, but it feels very hard to predict. Neither I nor most engineers I know ~truly~ understands how a computer works at the deepest lowest level. And for those who do, they probably don't understand the deepest lowest levels of chips, and for those who understand that, they probably don't truly understand how those chips are made, and so and so on. Modern life is built on abstractions upon abstractions, and no one can understand it all from the ground up.
My question is whether AI will give us another abstraction on top of what we have, or if it'll just get so smart that it'll do everything, leaving us with no way to contribute (and most likely becoming extinct).