Having been a coder for decades before AI came on the scene, I don't understand how inexperienced programmers could possibly write a serious amount of working code with AI.
It's wrong, like, at least half the time, but as an experienced coder, I can look at the "code" it generated and know what it was trying to do, and then write it correctly. I do find AI useful when I'm not sure how to go about solving a particular code-related issue, but ... it just gives me something to think about, not an answer I can use directly.
It’s worse than that.
The goal isn’t to sell coding superpowers to programmers. It’s to drive a wedge between employer and employee. Make both of them dependent on an intermediary instead of each other.
Think DoorDash but for coding gigs. You don’t have a job, but a series of push notifications offering a chance to review an 18-line PR for $3.81.
Remember to respond within the next 90 seconds to maintain your priority status, and don’t decline too many offers.
Edit: See also, chickenized reverse-centaurs.
It's the same cycle since the '70s. Whether it's COBOL or VB.NET or vibe coding, the premise hasn't changed.
There's three broad categories of code:
- Monkey code (random applets that are almost entirely business logic and non-critical)
- Actual code (most things)
- Crazy shit like kernel or browser code.
I can see vibe coding, situationally, lower the barrier to entry of (1). But also that's no different from COBOL or VB.NET which both promise "MBAs can now write code", which conveniently never extends to maintaining said code. And vibe coding doesn't help with that either, ChatGPT is an awful debugger.
Your boss thinks ChatGPT will help with (2), but it either won't or only very slightly as an advanced autocomplete. For any problem-solving that requires more specific domain knowledge than can automatically find its way into their tiny context windows, LLMs are essentially useless.
.... So I'm not worried. Today's vibe coders are yesterday's script kiddies.
I've been using chatgpt to help me build a Bubble website. That is, I am doing all the work, I just bounce questions of how to achieve things and structure conditional statements correctly.
Because I'm basically sanity checking everything it says vs copying blindly, it's interesting to see just how much it gets caught in a loop of misinformation. I'm lucky to be one of those learners who just needs an example, even if it's a shitty one, to figure it out myself, so I often find myself using it simply to see how it's NOT done.
But yeah, I know jack shit about coding but I'm sure AI code sucks ass.
It's very helpful that there are a handful of nonsense phrases that AI has scraped by reading journal articles wrong. They're commonly published in magazine format with a bunch of narrow columns, so there's some gibberish that AI scraped by reading across the page instead of down the columns. I want to make a database of those nonsense phrases so that I can just Ctrl+F in a journal article to see if I should just skip reading it because it's AI garbage.
"you'll own nothing and be happy" applies to skills now.
Really wish they'd be a direct link to the source, not solely a screenshot. Is this the Web?
On the other side, if it's "deskilling" to do vibe coding instead of real coding isn't this person saying that the barrier to entry for coding has been lowered?
Either vibe coding is not effective and is therefore not taking away the skill of coding or it is effective enough to replace aspects of coding that you would otherwise need to develop the skill to do.
Like if I'm an engineer or a real estate agent or a business...dude, and I want to use coding in my field but I don't have the time or desire to start learning a whole skill (anywhere from having children to just learning too many skills already) I assume vibe coding is my best friend.
It's not possible to make you unskilled if you're skilled. At worst, you'd get rusty. It is possible that your skills might not be in high demand anymore though.
The only thing that would make programmers not be in demand is if "vibe coding" were truly producing a better product than traditional programming. So far, the only ones making that claim are the ones desperately trying to sell "AI" before the bubble bursts. It's true that there are some companies that really want to believe it. But, companies are always desperately hoping for something that can allow them to fire their expensive workers. It's rare that that works out.
Well if it helps for y'all to know, if I can't put my measly webpage making skills to decent use in the course of a weeks time, I'll be buying the services of a freelancer because hoooooly shite am I rusty.
(I need to update my basic website and am terribly lazy. Maybe making some extra cash would make a kid somewhere happy.)
((Don't message me here though I don't check messages))
It's exactly the opposite of teaching a man to fish, this is telling that man to depend on whatever floats down the river and just pick whatever seems edible, if the man gets enough or poisons himself nobody will know, because the skill to fish would have been lost.
Like people who only had a smartphone for everything, they'll never know the advantages of an actual computer and will struggle with it when they need to use one.
Shitholes rearing their head thr last 5 6 years made a lot of people forget , America is also a massive shithole
You can always tell when your on a new bug when you ask about error “exception when calling…” and AI returns your exact implementation of the error back as a solution.
Not really intelligent
I think this so much less convincing than selling AI as a replacement for skilled labor, not as a way to intentionally deskill actual software engineers.
Capitalism already has a way of preventing you from making your own commodities - you sell your time, and the less they pay you for it relative to how much you need to live, the less time you have for yourself to put towards self sufficiency. We don't have many FOSS products, not because nobody has the knowledge or skill to make them, but because nobody has the time to make them.
There are plenty of reasons to hate corporate-owned AI products, we don't need to be hallucinating new ones.
I use ai to become a better coder, not to replace me.
Vibe coding is stupid
Are there seriously scientists who think AI assistants are good enough for the job?
I still think that local models in places without internet are better then offline documentation.
No. Not really. “Computer” also used to refer to a human profession. I believe “programmer” will be exclusively referring to an AI role in a generation or two.
But that will enable more people to become software designers and architects. Like a mathematician, they’ll need to understand how to perform programming tasks manually, but won’t need to do so in day to day work.
Yeah definitely not our profit driven models.
AI can do it cheaper... so just have the AI do it. Its that simple, people really don't like it when things are so simple but can't do anything about it. So they just make shit up like this.
He still got a point, but premise is pretty ridiculous.
Here's a fun thing. Using the latest AI to code backend and front-end code. Every couple of weeks, have to stop, go through every line and module, and throw out pretty much 90% of the code, manually refactor, and rewrite it.
It offers a good starting point, but the minute things get slightly complicated, you have to step in. I feel bad for people who think this will make it so they don't need experienced developers and architects. They're in for a rough ride.
I'll go against the grain here: I'm not worried. If you actually care about what you do, even vibe coding can teach you something, it could be a starting point. The internet is not going away, and just looking up this or that thing the AI spit out will help you learn what you're working with.
Is it the same as an uni CS course? No of course, but how many of us got our start just tinkering with stuff we didn't understand?
As someone who can't code, I spent some time vibe coding a python bot that would take screenshots of a webpage and post them to Discord, but after an hour of creating more errors with each iteration, I gave up. I rather just get someone skilled and pay them for it as opposed to wasting time with something that thinks it's always right
A friend of mine wanted to make an incremental game. I told them "hey that's a pretty good project to learn programming with" but they insisted on using an LLM. Then they proudly showed me what they got so far, it was a decent looking singular html page, but without any game logic whatsoever. Most of the code was just stylesheets - and even those had some questionable things going on lol
I don't get the concern trolling? If it's so bad, use it, if you don't want to, don't. It seems to me like usual it cannot handle context for long enough to build anything useful, and when you do it becomes extremely over architectured. But others losing their coding skills because they are lazy? I don't know if that's even a problem. Those that want to learn learn. Those who do not, will never code. In the future they can pay for the privilege apparently. I don't see it as a problem. It will only be more useful to actually know how to code. Exponentially. I would never build something lasting on a framework built like this though and would love if we could distinguish generated libraries easily to avoid vulnerabilities and maintainability issues
I'm glad my expertise is in the humanities 😊
