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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.
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
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.
There are definitely people who cut & pasted from stack overflow in the work environment, too. The difference is that I, as the clean-up crew, could google their code and find the post it came from … and then I could read the comments and figure out wtf they thought they were trying to do. When they paste LLM-generated code in, there’s no trace of where the dumbfuckery came from.
Just thinking about it makes me glad I’m near retirement.
that was exactly my point, for the “non experts” googling and using AI is very much not the same, as googling provides them with a lot more actual information (quality, alternatives)
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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.
So glad to see others that do that. Still haven’t really tried to understand what vibe coding is, as I try and ignore passing terms, but I was starting to think it was just using the AI assistants in any way. I use it in the same way as you and find it perfectly fine for that purpose but I can’t imagine using it for anything more.
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.
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’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.
100%. Half the time I see the first couple lines of AI code and I’m like, nah, that’s not right. Let’s do it myself lol
“you’ll own nothing and be happy” applies to skills now.
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 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.
This is the opposite of that 'teach a man to fish and he’ll never grow hungry" etc.
Build a man a fire and he will be warm for a day, light him on fire and he will be warm for the rest of his life.
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.
Really wish they’d be a direct link to the source, not solely a screenshot. Is this the Web?
On the other side, if it’s “deskilling” to do vibe coding instead of real coding isn’t this person saying that the barrier to entry for coding has been lowered?
Either vibe coding is not effective and is therefore not taking away the skill of coding or it is effective enough to replace aspects of coding that you would otherwise need to develop the skill to do.
Like if I’m an engineer or a real estate agent or a business…dude, and I want to use coding in my field but I don’t have the time or desire to start learning a whole skill (anywhere from having children to just learning too many skills already) I assume vibe coding is my best friend.
I think it can do some stuff, especially some entry level tedium.
So far I haven’t seen a single success on the specific things I’ve tried it for, even when pretty short, other than exceedingly trivial things like reminding me whether this language has a join as a string method or as an array method of o don’t use it that often.
I do see potential for an awkward gap between unskilled and skilled where an entry level person doesn’t have as clear a path to getting actually better. In math this generally happens in school, where they keep students from using the most effective tools until they prove they can do without it. So education might have to go a bit further into programming skills rather than delegating quite so much to the professional workplace that may be less inclined.
Im not going to lie, I totally vibe code. Ive been using it to build guis that help speed up repetitive processes. Vibe coding has been helping me learn too code. I think people abuse it for sure. The code still needs to be checked since LLMs are about as trustworthy as Quora.
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))
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
So was Mountain Dew. That doesn’t mean people had to drink it.
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.
No, it’s about deskilling the workforce. Not an individual
That just sounds like a conspiracy theory.
You don’t need a conspiracy to motivate companies to make you dependent on their subscription service. Their goal is not to deskill workers for evil’s sake. They the norm to be using their systems instead of your brain.
I don’t need a conspiracy to motivate companies to make me dependent on whose subscription service?
They the norm to be using their systems instead of your brain
Did you miss some words here?
Might be, but it’s obvious that they want people to rely on their products and then sell it as a subscription. Like everything else
Who are the various "they"s in that sentence?
OpenAI wants people to rely on their products, sure. But, they’re not in a position to “deskill” people. In the grand scheme of things they’re just a small vendor. A random software company in Montana isn’t going to deliberately deskill their employees to improve OpenAI’s bottom line.
Large tech are all in cahoots here, their motivation aligns
Ms, OpenAI, google, apple. All need line to keep going up by making people increasingly reliant on their live services
I’m not necessarily saying that deskilling is the goal, but it certainly helps them.
I mean it’s only a problem depending on the cost of the tools? Renting 4-5k a year worth of tools to make 150k might be ok to some people. While you are at risk of every increasing prices you could just use the time that it’s cheap now to when it gets expensive later to educate yourself.
What’s the alternative give some college 250k plus crazy interest rates and 4 years of your life?
Just like with all tools blue collar or white they are worth what you can earn from using them.
You can use local models for free, it’s just slower.
And local is usually less parameters. Reasoning on a local model is very poor.
Why would you not want to use all the tools available to be as efficient as possible?
The point of work is not efficiency. If you don’t own your work and you can’t control your data, you are more vulnerable to exploitation. You may not be compensated fairly for your efforts.
I get what your saying but on a personal level I enjoy being able to complete tasks as efficiently and quickly as possible. This is divorced entirely from compensation. Who doesn’t?
Sorry, but I disagree with your statement that means are divorced from compensation. There’s this guy, I forget his name, but he made a really big fuss about how workers need to control the means of production. Ideally we’d work using whatever means we like and be compensated fairly, but that’s not the nature of the markets.
Some random dudes argument doesn’t seem to have much to do with me setting my hourly rates.
Sorry, found it. You should check it out, he seems pretty sure. https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/61
That book isn’t taken seriously by the majority of the educated people. Your literally arguing against making your own life easier. We were talking about AI tools before you went off on a commie-tangent.
Haha, having to spell out what you thought was obvious. You must be replying to vibe arguing!
There’s a lot of dev teams that have to use local because their code is proprietary and they don’t want it getting outside the network.
Shitholes rearing their head thr last 5 6 years made a lot of people forget , America is also a massive shithole
