Comment by jedberg
9 hours ago
You can be a super productive Python coder without any clue how assembly works. Vibe coding is just one more level of abstraction.
Just like how we still need assembly and C programmers for the most critical use cases, we'll still need Python and Golang programmers for things that need to be more efficient than what was vibe coded.
But do you really need your $whatever to be super efficient, or is it good enough if it just works?
One is deterministic the other is not. I leave it to you to determine which is which in this scenario.
Humans writing code are also non deterministic. When you vibe code you're basically a product owner / manager. Vibe coding isn't a higher level programming language, it's an abstraction over a software engineer / engineering team.
> Humans writing code are also non deterministic
That's not what determinism means though. A human coding something, irrespective of whether the code is right or wrong, is deterministic. We have a well defined cause and effect pathway. If I write bad code, I will have a bug - deterministic. If I write good code, my code compiles - still deterministic. If the coder is sick, he can't write code - deterministic again. You can determine the cause from the effect.
Every behavior in the physical World has a cause and effect chain.
On the other hand, you cannot determine why a LLM hallucinated. There is no way to retrace the path taken from input parameters to generated output. At least as of now. Maybe it will change in the future where we have tools that can retrace the path taken.
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This is true. What are the implications of that?
Perhaps there is no need to actually understand assembly, but if you don't understand certain basic concepts actually deploying any software you wrote to production would be a lottery with some rather poor prizes. Regardless of how "productive" you were.
Somebody needs to understand, to the standard of "well enough".
The investors who paid for the CEO who hired your project manager to hire you to figure that out, didn't.
I think in this analogy, vibe coders are project managers, who may indeed still benefit from understanding computers, but when they don't the odds aren't anywhere near as poor as a lottery. Ignorance still blows up in people's faces. I'd say the analogy here with humans would be a stereotypical PHB who can't tell what support the dev needs to do their job and then puts them on a PIP the moment any unclear requirement blows up in anyone's face.