Comment by barrister
17 hours ago
This author, like many others on this site, seem to imply that AI generates "good" code, but it absolutely does not---unless he's running some million dollar subscription model I'm unaware of. I've tested every AI using simple Javascript programs and they all produce erroneous spaghetti slop. I did discover that Claude produces sufficiently decent Haskell code. The point is that the iterative process requires you know the language because you're going to need to amend the code. Therefore vibe in the language you know. Anyone that suggests that AI can produce a solid application on its own is a fraud.
You, like many others, seem to imply that humans write "good" code, but they absolutely do not--unless they are running some million dollar team with checks and cross checks and years of evolving the code over failures. I've tested every junior developer using simple Javascript leetcode quizes and they all produce erroneous spaghetti slop.
The difference is, we forgive humans for needing iteration. We expect them to get it wrong first, improve with feedback, and learn through debugging. But when AI writes imperfect code, you declare the entire approach fraudulent?
We shouldn't care about flawless one-shot generations. The value is in collapsing the time between idea and execution. If a model can give you a working draft in 3 seconds - even if it's 80% right - that's already a 10x shift in how we build software.
Don't confuse the present with the limit. Eventually, in not that many years, you'll vibe in English, and your AI co-dev will do the rest.
> I did discover that Claude produces sufficiently decent Haskell code.
Clojure generation is also very solid. Gemini Pro 2.5/3 is fantastic at it.
A part of me wonders if that is because these languages primarily have senior devs writing code, so the entire training set is "good" code.
The Erlang space vs the Elixir space (can't speak for agent based code generation here) would seem to give credence to this theory.
When I would explore Elixir forums with much larger communities there'd be myriad base level questions with code blocks written as if Elixir and Ruby were interchangable cause the syntax looks similar and thus missing out on many of the benefits of OTP.
But when you'd go to the Erlang community to ask a question, half the time the author of the book or library was one of the like... 20 people online at any given moment, and they'd respond directly. The quality of the discussions was of course much deeper and substantial much more consistently.
I have not tried to generate Elixir vs Erlang code but maybe it'd be a neat experiment to see if the quality seems better with Erlang