Fuck AI

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 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 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 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.

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.

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 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.

TBH I always felt the same way with "Blueprint" programming where you plug nodes into nodes.

To this day never once used them.

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

I run free local models...

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.

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?

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.