"We did it, Patrick! We made a technological breakthrough!"
A place for all those who loathe AI to discuss things, post articles, and ridicule the AI hype. Proud supporter of working people. And proud booer of SXSW 2024.
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 think the rough ride is a necessary learning experience
An interesting point I heard the other day: if AI can replace entry level jobs, doing simple scripts that AI can definitely do (because it essentially just spits out the stack overflow/Reddit/etc training data verbatim), then companies no longer need entry level programmers.
If they don't need entry level programmers, how do you get future senior programmers? Skipping directly to advanced stuff without getting practical experience on the simple stuff is incredibly hard.
What happens when the current senior programmers retire in larger numbers, and there's very few replacements because the ladder is gone?
That's a problem for Q72 and they're incapable of looking past Q4. Besides, they'll have already jumped ship by then, what do the execs care if they make this quarter just ever so slightly more profitable
Agree. Software engineering is a marathon - not a sprint. These AI tools are useful to get something up real quick, but I have a hard time seeing how they can be useful for long term maintenance work.
Software engineering is a marathon - not a sprint.
Oh BOY do I have this 'brand new shiny' thing called Agile at almost every fucking company ever.
It’s still a marathon, even if the name ”sprint” is used. The point is the same: software engineering is about ensuring long term maintenance. It’s about building software that can sustain through multiple sprints.
The typical code from an AI agent can barely sustain a single sprint without having to restart from scratch.
I know, but in most companies they don't give a fuck.
What's done is done, sure there can be some minor maintenance, but goodness forbids you need to rewrite something that handles the 10x throughtput that built up over the years.
I am usually able to get some cleanup tasks in, but from what I've heard, not many people are.
It's just sad, that some think 'sprint' means 'this is done and dont dare to tell me you need more time, what have you been doing the last X sprints?'.
Every couple of weeks, have to stop, go through every line and module, and throw out pretty much 90% of the code
It offers a good starting point
It doesn't sound like a good starting point if you have to throw out 90% of it every couple of weeks.
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 like google-coding in 2010; nothing you search for is exactly what you need, but it could help you see why your code isn't working.
I really don’t dig that comparison. When you look up a snippet on stackoverflow, for example, you can immediately see the quality of the answer, as well as feedback from real people
Yeah like if you start coming across snippets that aren't even properly indented, you know you're digging the real bottom of the barrel (been there while struggling to fix email templating I knew nothing about back in the day). Now, the code you get from the LLM looks totally legitimate to the untrained eye, and it may even generate a convincing explanation.
You won't have any indication when it's dead wrong until you try to run it. And even then, it may be "working" in a way unintended because you don't actually understand what you copy+pasted, because neither does the LLM ofc.
I can't even imagine the spaghetti bowl you can get yourself into if you just keep vibe coding yourself deeper and deeper, while understanding nothing.
The spaghetti bowl is the real problem. You can make something that works, but it's so fragile because the solution is rarely general and never elegant. The snippet might be surprisingly elegant, but it will reimplement the same code 3 different ways in 3 different places and the whole thing turns into a mess
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:
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.
the amount of mistakes and and hallucinations ai has makes it actually take longer to code.
it’s the same old garbage in, garbage out….
it can kinda help you get started but that only saves you 10 minutes of reading documentation that you have to read anyway to make sure it didn’t make something up.
It seems OK at spewing out a bit of code it found on StackOverflow, or even joining two bits of code together, but it really falls apart when you poke at the edges of it's knowledge.
And the problem is, neither you nor it knows where those limits are, and it very quickly goes from confident copy and paste to confident bullshit.
It even knows what excuses smell like, so it'll give you one at random when you call it out.
Debugging is the hardest part, and now you get to spend all your time doing it
I have no idea what vibe coding is, can someone ELI5 it to me?
I have tried AI to get some rough C# for my hobby game but even that was unusable.
‘Vibe coding’ is where you code only with prompts and never look at the generated code.
Seems like a great way to create insecure unmaintainable code if you ask me.
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.
Good for you to want to learn a new skill and taking things that LLMs spit out with healthy skepticism. I'm afraid future generations will lack such motivation.
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
If it's for personal use and hobby stuff, you could try to learn and code it yourself!
Knowing how to make scripts yourself for specific small tasks is a useful skill, and since it's for yourself you don't need to stress about getting too deep into it :)
If you are an absolute beginner I can recommend "Python 4 everybody".
Edit: added a link incase someone is interested.
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.
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))
"you'll own nothing and be happy" applies to skills now.
This also applies to writing emails. Some folks were bad enough at it before. Now, they'll never learn, and can't even proof read what the AI wrote....so their emails aren't any better now, than they were before.
I struggle so much with this. People were already bad at reading emails and following instructions (e.g. ask them to answer 4 questions which I have helpfully listed below, in bold, and they answer the first one and call it a day) but now they just let the a.i. handle it. So instead of not getting answers, I get incorrect and unreviewed answers that just sound like they might be right.
Then of course when I do the work, and it turns out to be completely useless because it was based on bad information, and it needs to be completely redone. That means wasted hours of time and productivity for me with nothing to show for it. All because someone else wanted to save 5 minutes.
I had to google Vibe Coding. Seems like it's not actual coding and you'd then have to check the code yourself and at that point why bother? Easier to start with something that makes sense then the understand and fix a cluster fuck.
Nah, that would be programming with AI.
In vibe "coding", you ask the AI for the code and just run it. If it doesn't do what you want it to do, you just ask the AI again, or another AI. Ad infinitum.
Check the code yourself? That's like 5th century pleb work, vibe "coders" would be wasting their precious time when they can just ask another AI to do it.
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.
It's been aggressively pushed upon new programmers though, a whole generation who might potentially never develop skills to begin with
You are thinking to short term
This is not about you, but the next generations
If you run your AI, point doesn't matter. However, what matters more is the fact that if you don't use a skill, you just straight up lose it and that's what AI is doing to developers. Mfs straight up forget how to write code
I learn a lot debugging the code I get from AI, and occasionally, I learn a thing or two.
As usual, people assign conspiratorial motives and strategies to behavior that's really an extremely simple straight line between two points: "AI software has a lower apparent cost than hiring another developer, so let's use AI."
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.
Really wish they'd be a direct link to the source, not solely a screenshot. Is this the Web?
This is the opposite of that 'teach a man to fish and he'll never grow hungry" etc.