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.
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?