Comment by godelski

Honestly, in many ways it feels like quality is decreasing.

I'm also not convinced it's a function of model quality. The model isn't going to do something if the prompter doesn't even know. It does what the programmer asked.

I'll give a basic example. Most people suck at writing bash scripts. It's also a common claim as to LLMs utility. Yet they never write functions unless I explicitly ask. Here try this command

  curl -fsSL https://claude.ai/install.sh | less

(You don't need to pipe into less but it helps for reading) Can you spot a fatal error in the code where when running curl-pipe-bash the program might cause major issues? Funny enough I asked Claude and it asked me this

  Is this script currently in production? If so, I’d strongly recommend adding the function wrapper before anyone uses it via curl-pipe-bash.                

The errors made here are quite common in curl-pipe-bash scripts. I'm pretty certain Claude would write a program with the same mistakes despite being able to tell you about the problems and their trivial corrections.

The problem with vibe coding is you get code that is close. But close only matters in horseshoes and hand grenades. You get a bunch of unknown unknowns. The classic problem of programming still exists: the computer does what you tell it to do, not what you want it to do. LLMs just might also do things you don't tell it to...