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Comment by gitremote

1 day ago

How would someone explain code that was vibe-coded?

You can have the AI explain it to you. There's also a middle ground between vibe coding and "I can code some things but never could have coded this without an AI".

Doesn't even have to be AI. Give me some random file from the Linux kernel and I could probably explain everything to you if you gave me a few hours. But that doesn't mean I would ever be able to write that code.

  • I don’t disagree, but in those interviews the explanation is also a bit of a q&a, so an effective interviewer can detect candidates who only memorized things. Someone who can ace a q&a about Linux code is already better than average.

Isn't that a good thing? The fact that the candidate dumped out code that they didn't write is often called "cheating". The fact that candidates can't explain it (because they didn't write it) means it's a good test of something most interviewers find unacceptable.

Are you asking how they would get that info they didn't have / couldn't come up with? Because you can literally have a chatbot explain every line to you and why it is there and even ask it about things you don't know like a teacher. And for simple problems this will probably work better than with actual humans.

  • I assume questions to explain the code would be extremely specific about why you did something on a specific line, or why you chose to design this part that way instead of another, to detect plagiarism and vibe coding, not a request for a prepared monologue.