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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.
I tried using chatgpt to write a basic batch file, it ended up such a horrendous mess that i gave up halfway through. Fucker got told four times, still kept putting the REM on the same line as actual code.
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 know nothing about back in the day). Now, the code you get from the LLM looks totally legit to the untrained eye, and it may even generate a convincing explanation.
But 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.
You can see the quality if you’re an experienced coder. My comment lacks personal context in that I was in school in 2010 and there were plenty of my classmates who would plug snippets into their projects without fundamentally understanding what it did or learning what the project was supposed to teach us. Similar to a shortcut with AI in 2025.
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
In that case it’s not talking about “deskilling”, it’s about “not skilling in the first place”.
But, those are completely different things. I was never skilled in riding horses, the way I assume my great grandparents were. I didn’t learn how to use a sliderule like my grandfather did. But, I still learned skills that were valuable for the moment in history where I grew up. There’s never any guarantee that a baby born today will get to the age of 20 with skills that are useful enough that someone will pay them to use those skills.
As for programming, it isn’t some kind of nefarious goal to make sure that tomorrow’s children won’t know how to do it. It’s an immediate short-term goal to try to save money by not having to hire people with specialty skills. If that gamble pays off, then it will be like using a sliderule. Kids won’t learn it because it isn’t a skill that’s in demand anymore. If AI turns out to be a niche thing, rather than a massively transformational technology, then tomorrow’s kids will learn to be programmers in whatever languages are hot in 20 years.
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.
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.
yep. i’ve tried it a bit and the errors are blended in so well and seem so plausible, it’s worse than stack overflow….
even when just getting default arguments for a function it makes stuff up.
i do see it getting better at errors like that, but not much better….
Debugging is the hardest part, and now you get to spend all your time doing it
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 still think that local models in places without internet are better then offline documentation.
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.
This 11 year old adult swim comedy video doesn’t even feel that ridiculous anymore.
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, of 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.
Looks like they don’t understand what “vibe coding” means beyond that it involves AI and therefore has a black hat and is bad. That’s what happens when people learn everything from memes.
As I understand it, it was originally meant for “throwaway weekend projects”, but then the MBAs got a hold of the term and if you look at job postings nowadays, some companies are really pushing for “AI-first” workers.
The desire obviously isn’t just to increase existing dev velocity, but the devalue skills and experience that come from formal education and years of practical learning. Basically to reduce the bargaining power / cost of programmers.
TBH I always felt the same way with “Blueprint” programming where you plug nodes into nodes.
To this day never once used them.
It’s basically the same as programming, just very indirect and slow- but it still requires you to fundamentally understand the concepts of the ‘modules’ you are using. Vibe coding has borderline random elements.
Are there seriously scientists who think AI assistants are good enough for the job?
I run free local models…
This, i hope we just dislike the monopolization of AI here and not the technology in general. Self hosting is the way.
Right?
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.
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
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.
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?’.
Plus “getting something up real quick” is the fun part.
The first draft is fun.
The second draft is pain.
The third draft is cathartic.Figure out features, add add add.
Add/change features, realise the spaghetti mess and poor design decisions you made in the first draft.
Clean everything up with better design and code.
Drag feels schadenfreude for them. If they’re going to fire their workforce to chase trends, it would be fun for them to go out of business about it.
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?
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.
I think you mean “sifting through several pages of worthless search results while looking for something the AI spit out”
The internet is worse and it can still get worse.
Bad search results and Bad documentation specifically are a different problem tho
They’re a problem being made worse by AI.
While I agree with you, the unfortunate trend of common folks is to take the easiest path to accomplish their goal.
If that means using a tool they don’t understand to achieve a solution instead of being forced to learn from tinkering, I think most people will opt for that route.
They won’t take that extra step to comprehend what the AI spits out.
Those kind of people would have behaved the same anyway, copy pasting from the internet or wasting others’ time some different way.
I guess we could argue whether giving them AI will act as a multiplier for their damage output or will reduce it because the AI will be savvier than them, but personally I don’t see things changing much.
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.
Calculators don’t hallucinate
They error out all the time with bad input. But the tech has long been perfected on the basics, you’re right about that. But naive to think AI will never get to that point for any tasks.
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.
Also I just dont get why you would ever generate code
Like, you have no idea how to code something? Sure, just ask it about methods how to do it. But generating code too? Cant you RTFM?
I think you’re severely underestimating how lazy some people are, lol. I totally get what you’re saying, and from a logical perspective it makes sense. It’s just that if you survey enough people, i really think you’d be surprised at how little effort some are willing to put forth for just about anything
Isn’t the reason obvious? To save time? I’m not saying it’s a good thing but it seems prettyyyy obvious why people are doing it.
But it’s going to take hours of debugging every time. If you actually learn how to write code, you’ll get better at it over time and reuse common functions. It’ll take less time as you get better.
Well… Just because you can code does not guarantee you will find it enjoyable. It’s pretty common for people to like certain aspects of coding but not others. For instance, I personally find writing unit tests boring. So if something came by that made writing them less mundane I would certainly be enticed.
Yeah no. For example microcontrollers, which are how I learned it. There are so absurdly many traps to fall into that even within the first 10 things I did I ran into some obscure detail of the ATmega328p. And the kept happening ever since, each time lots of googling and trial and error. Now with GPT you know how much time this saves? Not just the coding itself, but also these absurd details that only an expert knows. Yes perhaps it does the same error, but after reiterating it usually sees the problem. I can also throw some datasheet for some chip at it and get exactly how to program it with what setting etc. It enables me to do FAR more advanced things. And the new 3o and 4o mini are really much better again. Code often works out of the box now.
I love how people simply downvote me for saying these things. As if me repairing an E-Bike is somehow a bad thing, just because an LLM was what enabled me to actually do it. As is programming for some reason should be an arcane art. As if technology has not always been changing in exactly the same way. With people saying “The way you do it is wrong!” and 20 years later nobody does it the old way. LLM have exploded in a few years and have come extremely far, what do you think they are capable of in 10 years? All those silly little mistakes they still do, gone.
Save Time where? If you want to code more than snake, you need to have a basic knowledge of coding anyway, and once you know how to code, you will want to code in your own style. And if you just want to make basic programs, just fork someones github project and change a few lines.
You’re saying this with your understanding of the field. The people pushing this are either untrained (and thus don’t know what’s going wrong) or are trying to milk money out of the former.
Not all code needs to be held to the highest standard. Sometimes you really just want a throwaway script.
Vibe coding is basically having no idea about coding and using the AI to make snippets of Code for you
Like if you want to programm snake, you would prompt it:
- Tell me what parts of code are required to programm snake in python
then it would tell you like:
- you need a programm to make a grid system
- you need an array which can go down a tickrate
- etc pp
so you tell it like:
- Generate me code, that does xy
- Generate me code that takes the input of xy and does z with it
and so forth, then you just paste everything into a txt and ask the AI to debug it for you and hope it works
The people who need vibe coding shouldn’t be using it. And the people who can use it, don’t need it.
Idk about the last bit. I’ve done some vibe
codingdebugging to fix game mods written in languages and frameworks I don’t know and have no interest in learning at the moment. I still look over the output, but given a lack of knowledge, I’d still consider it vibe basedI don’t have the bandwidth to know enough about everything I encounter to be passable, and sometimes I just want to make some random thing work with the minimal amount of effort so I can get back to the actual task at hand.
This sounds terrible, lol! Are there any examples that can be pointed to? I’d love to see one of these constructs.
On tilvids.com some dude called picopixl is doing tutorials about this
https://tilvids.com/w/oyddhsnfHUFToBEmpEZpEg
And yeah, its pretty great what it could do, but for someone who (is his own words) can tweak the code so it works, it tool longer to make a Prompt than just coding the Game yourself
Also, Tetris in JS is like Babys first JS project, so even if you really wanted to just get Tetris from somewhere, you could have just git pulled any github project
