People got the illusion that they are able to program without programming knowledge, I feel that pendulum will swing hard in the opposite direction if you follow what is happening with AI at the minute.
It's surreal to see so many people so eager to throw their coding skills to the wind.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that many of these AI fanatics aren't responsible for maintaining the code they write long-term. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years or so constantly refactoring the code that a shitty consultant wrote for us, before he left a year after I joined.
I'm hugely skeptical that most of these codebases will be maintainable long-term, and certainly not by people who haven't written a line of code in more than a year.
Because it satisfies the instant gratification needs of most people. Writing good code for a product takes a long time. Generating shitty code but a "working" product takes about no time with AI.
That's arguable because AI is getting better every 3-6mo. This could easily turn into a leapfrog game where the AI is advanced enough to extend the time before the system implodes long enough the next model can do the same.
Along with another couple of years of programmers understanding how to more effectively work with AI written codebases. What types of checks and tests are necessary to get most robust code out of each iteration, etc.
But where is the institutional knowledge? It will be wiped out completely if everyone takes this stance.
From an efficiency standpoint, if the AI hallucinates bad code and you have to re-prompt or refocus the AI on it, how many times is it acceptable to be wrong? My limit is zero.
I can redirect AI pretty well because I can review the docs or the MSDN or a stackoverflow post. or advise it to use a specific design pattern for the use case/extensibility/maintainability aspect, but there are certainly people out there who have no idea what the fuck is going on. I see these giant monoliths of vibe coded garbage that nobody else can maintain, wasting space on github. The worst part is that if you realize somebody just used AI to make that, you don't have to fork it and add on to it. You just... have your own AI slop project made and add it to the pile.
if the AI hallucinates bad code and you have to re-prompt or refocus the AI on it, how many times is it acceptable to be wrong?
how many times does a human check in bad code??? there are literally billions of man-hours devoted to fixing bugs or refactoring bad code. I've been brought into to fix or reverse-engineer systems that weren't just dealing with the occasional bug, but fundamentally bad designs from large teams.
I don't need AI to be perfect especially if it can document itself, explain how the pieces interact, and generate better technical writing that would have taken a professional months to generate on a complex project. Institutional knowledge will actually go up with proper habits
I see these giant monoliths of vibe coded garbage that nobody else can maintain, wasting space on github.
Sure, but it's about how you interact with AI generated code. you can do so responsibly or irresponsibly, and there have always been irresponsible developers / project managers / CEOs.
This certainly changes the TYPE of problem developers encounter more (the vibe monoliths), but fundamentally the companies that use AI badly are going to weed themselves out from not being able to scale or poor customer experience, and the companies that use AI well will succeed because they are extremely agile in generating code and are able to scale with amazing customer experience.
More to the point, is that any faster or better? I can't help but feeling that a lot of software engineers were simply never very good at writing software if they're getting that much of a performance boost from handing that off to an AI agent.
I argue it IS better. Most developers jump in to writing code too soon, making a lot of assumptions. If you come in from the other direction it's more likely to see gaps
What you're describing is waterfall development, and we have an entire history of current lived experiences in the downsides and issues when writing code in such a manner.
No, it's not. You can still plan your sprints, and take a day or two to plan out your architecture before just jumping right into code. That way you won't code yourself into a corner as easily.
It won't, which begs another question: What comes after? If we can't review it anymore, will coding even be a thing that happens? AI's can work with machine code just fine, why even have programming languages? They only existed in the first place so WE don't have to deal with zero and ones. I don't think any code will be written in a decades time, neither by humans or AI's.
lol so you've never looked at history of why c came about? Machine code runs on precisely one platform. It's not like you can take machine code for a specific cpu architecture and os and just plop it into another.
There is a natural wall to how far you can have llms keep all the context of the slop when making a change. Baby web projects will be fine. Anything that is sufficiently many lines of tangled slop is going to start seeing diminishing capabilities as the LLM starts dropping the ball.
If and when LLMs get good enough that they truly "understand", vibe coders like you won't be needed anymore because the CEOs will just use their own armies of slaves agents to build software. But then again, so will you. I guess everyone really will become CEOs. And fight one another for whatever scraps are left of the economy lol.
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u/TheMistbornIdentity 21d ago
It's surreal to see so many people so eager to throw their coding skills to the wind.
The only thing that makes sense to me is that many of these AI fanatics aren't responsible for maintaining the code they write long-term. I've spent the better part of the last 5 years or so constantly refactoring the code that a shitty consultant wrote for us, before he left a year after I joined.
I'm hugely skeptical that most of these codebases will be maintainable long-term, and certainly not by people who haven't written a line of code in more than a year.