Comment by geoduck14
6 days ago
You think that the only code that is valuable is code that is written by a professional SWE.
There are LOADS of people who need "a program" but aren't equipped to write code or hire an SWE that are empowered by this. And example: last week, I saw a PM vibe code several different applications to demo what might get built after it gets prioritized by SWEs
I can share my experience I am not a software engineer. I am the "other" type of Engineer (chemical engineer). I tend to use AI in the same way I use google or Stack Overflow, mostly when I get stuck on syntax and my code editor isn't helping me, I know what I am attempting to do "should" be possible but I can't get the syntax right. For example a recent question I asked was
"Python, create an xarray with two dimensions from a pandas df"
It gave me a few lines of example code which was enough for me to figure out where I had messed up the syntax in my own code.
I have seen one of my junior coworkers copy+paste entire chunks of code from chatbot conversations and to be honest what he has produced is underwhelming the code is poorly structured difficult to reason about I have low confidence he understands what the bot has produced (and why it did things the way it did) and I don't have high confidence we'd be able to trust the accuracy of the figures this code was outputting.
Not really I’m fine with anyone knocking stuff together but I think people should be aware of the limitations and dangers. Writing like this does nothing to inform and is overly positive IMO.
It’d be like insisting llms will replace authors of novels. In some sense they could but there are serious shortcomings and things like agents etc just don’t fix them.