Fuck AI

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.

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.

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:

1. Monkey code (random applets that are almost entirely business logic and non-critical)
2. Actual code (most things)
3. 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 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.

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?

I run free local models...

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

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.

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.

It took me way too long to get what deskilling means

my best of is: Desk-illing, des-killing, or deskil-ling

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 copilot at work. the predictive generation is pretty good i.e you start writing a for loop and it finishes it for you with all the variable names used correctly (most of the time). This also has the added benefit of making you name your variables clearly. the better they are the better the predicitions will be. i wouldnt trust it to do more than that though

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

This has been happening for quite a while. Do you know how to work a sewing machine? Have you ever repaired your clothes? Oh well, back to Walmart.

Are there seriously scientists who think AI assistants are good enough for the job?