Comment by SequoiaHope

I’ve come to appreciate that there is a new totally valid (imo) kind of software development one can do now where you simply do not read the code at all. I do this when prototyping things with vibe coding for example for personal use, and I’ve posted at least one such project on GitHub for others who may want to run the code.

Of course as a developer you still have to take responsibility for your code, minimally including a disclaimer, and not dumping this code in to someone else’s code base. For example at work when submitting MRs I do generally read the code and keep MRs concise.

I’ve found that there is a certain kind of coder that hears of someone not reading the code and this sounds like some kind of moral violation to them. It’s not. It’s some weird new kind of coding where I’m more creating a detailed description of the functionality I want and incrementally refining it and iterating on it by describing in text how I want it to change. For example I use it to write GUI programs for Ubuntu using GTK and python. I’m not familiar with python-gtk library syntax or GTK GUI methods so there’s not really much of a point in reading the code - I ask the machine to write that precisely because I’m unfamiliar with it. When I need to verify things I have to come up with ways for the machine to test the code on its own.

Point is I think it’s honestly one new legitimate way of using these tools, with a lot of caveats around how such generated code can be responsibly used. If someone vibe coded something and didn’t read it and I’m worried it contains something dangerous, I can ask Claude to analyze it and then run it in a docker container. I treat the code the same way the author does - as a slightly unknown pile of functions which seem to perform a function but may need further verification.

I’m not sure what this means for the software world. On the face of it it seems like it’s probably some kind of problem, but I think at the same time we will find durable use cases for this new mode of interacting with code. Much the same as when compilers abstracted away the assembly code.