Hello programmers! I’ve been making a living for a couple of decades figuring out stuff for people and coding whatever will make them happy. It’s fun. I’ve grown to prefer the people to the coding but I still get a kick out of the whole thing.
The problem is: at the job we’re being asked to pivot to vibe coding. At this point the order is to use it for all code, read the slop carefully, argue with the machine for way too long and only then open that PR. Massive productivity gains are expected. I’m appalled from an ethical, philosophical and professional standpoint. We’re a non-profit ngo ffs. My colleagues are fine with it. If I get even slightly critical the group goes awkwardly silent and I get comments on how all the programmers they know from other places don’t code anymore.
If this is how it goes from now on, I’m out. Is it really though? Are all businesses switching to vibe coding? Have some of you started switching career? I think I want to go to meatspace. Hand-made coding could make a cute hobby.
Almost everyone in the industry worth their weight is using LLMs now. Top tier models create really solid code nowadays.
This is not my experience. What worries me, is that I see posts like this all across the internet:
Anyway, if it works well for you, then I am happy for you. If you feel the need to evangelise, I think it would be more effective if you include some of your personal experience and include what is bad along with what is good.
Here is my personal experience from this Thursday:
The issue there is that yo are using a model that is well behind the frontier for coding (google havent released a new pro model for a year now) and using the chatbot interface. When people talk about using LLMs for coding it is using agents that can take action, see when things go wrong, do their own research and correct their failures. If you had been doing that I doubt you would have lost a day having to fix things up.
You still might have had to do the work by hand, thats an outcome that can happen, but it would have got to the point of “this service cant do that” by itself without time wasting back and forth with you.
We’re going towards a world where we can’t trust code anymore than we can trust images or videos. People all over the place are entrusting their entire jobs to AI and consumers have to deal with the output.
Software engineering has always been bad. People just copy pasted stack overflow. Now an LLM copies stack overflow and the documentation.
If you seriously think that’s what software engineering was and still is, I feel sorry for you. You think opensource software is just a series of copy-pastes from stack overflow with no understanding?
Nah but that is a straw man argument you just brought up to argue against. That’s not very nice of you in a good faith argument.
I think the engineering part is misleading. If we’d built bridges like we build software. I’ve seen my fair share of legacy code in companies and it is far from what people think of it seems. Actually, that would be critique I have of LLMs. That they copy the style of a project, even if it is horrible.
That said, good models absolutely are helping with real world problems and Lemmy claims it’s literally the spawn of Satan. It’s a bit silly over a tool that has it’s uses. The effects on ram prices and datacenters in general leave plenty of room for us to bicker over, but it’s undeniably a good tool for both debugging and some coding.
How is saying “Software engineering has always been bad. People just copy pasted stack overflow.” a good faith argument? Is hyperbole a good faith argument? “Honey, you never put the dishes into the washer the correct way, you just copy different styles from youtube.” Is that good faith? Don’t try and gaslight me.
If you want to have a good faith argument, we can do that.
Sure, actual engineers that have to pass a state exam in order to be called engineer probably do smirk at the term “software engineer”, and yes, code that comes out of companies is often hastily slapped together to achieve the goal being first to market, delivering something that works, not properly thought out to be future safe, and so on. But there is quite a different between a code-base written by juniors in the language or field and seniors in the language or field.
Simply waving away those differences and reducing it to “copy pasted stack overflow” which is now automated, while obviously hyperbole, is IMO pretty far from reality.
My experience has not been that way. LLMs have so far introduced whichever style of code they were trained on, unless given rules and forcefully linted into adopting a better style. But there is only so much a linter can do.
I agree, LLMs have their place. But there are worlds between “LLMs = never”, “LLMs sometimes” and “my job consists of prompting AI”. Maybe we do agree, but your initial message was, to me, unnecessary hyperbole, which prompted my reaction.
Sure thing, it just irks me that Lemmy overall is so negative. It’s basically the opposite of hacker news around here. Having looked at models and what they can do in recent months has been overall positive. Today I used it to write me a firmware for some Chinese hardware I had lying around that had little to no documentation and now does what I want it to do. There’s no harm in that.
Which models did you use so far?