Comment by 0xbadcafebee
1 day ago
Do you understand at a molecular level how cooking works? Or do you just do some rote actions according to instructions? How do you know if your cooking worked properly without understanding chemistry? Without looking at its components under a microscope?
Simple: you follow the directions, eat the food, and if it tastes good, it worked.
If cooks don't understand physics, chemistry, biology, etc, how do all the cooks in the world ensure they don't get people sick? They follow a set of practices and guidelines developed to ensure the food comes out okay. At scale, businesses develop even more practices (pasteurization, sanitization, refrigeration, etc) to ensure more food safety. None of the people involved understand it at a base level. There are no scientists directly involved in building the machines or day-to-day operations. Yet the entire world's food supply works just fine.
It's all just abstractions. You don't need to see the code for the code to work.
That's a terrible analogy lol.
1. Chefs do learn the chemistry, at least enough to know why their techniques work.
2. Food scientist is a real job
3. The supply chain absolutely does have scientists involved in day to day operations lol.
A better analogy is just shoving the entire contents of the fridge into a pot, plastic containers and all, and assuming it'll be fine.
> Chefs do learn the chemistry, at least enough to know why their techniques work
Cooks are idiots (most are either illegal immigrants with no formal education, or substance-abusing degenerates who failed at everything else) who repeat what they're told. They think ridiculous things, like that searing a stake "seals in the juices", or that adding oil to pasta water "prevents sticking", that alcohol completely "cooks off", that salt "makes water boil faster", etc. They are the auto mechanics of food. A few may be formally educated but the vast majority are not. They're just doing what they were shown to do.
> A better analogy is just shoving the entire contents of the fridge into a pot, plastic containers and all, and assuming it'll be fine.
That would never result in a good meal. On the other hand, vibe coding is curently churning out not just working software, but working businesses. You're sleeping on the real effect this is having. And it's getting better every 6 months.
Back to the topic: most programmers actually suck at programming. Their code is full of bugs, and occasionally the code paths run into those bugs and make them noticeable, but they are always there. AI does the same thing, just faster, and it's getting better at it. If you still write code by hand in a few years you will be considered a dinosaur.
Cooks also repeatedly cook the exact same recipe designed by someone else over and over again. In our industry cooks are closest to the CPU executing machine code.
1 reply →
> Cooks are idiots (most are either illegal immigrants with no formal education, or substance-abusing degenerates who failed at everything else) who repeat what they're told
Jesus Christ, dude. Just because someone works with their hands doesn't mean they're stupid. Good lord. Working in a professional kitchen is an incredibly demanding and difficult job. Don't be elitist to people who work way harder than you.
Especially since some of the dumbest and most intellectually coddled failsons I know went to, like, Yale lol. Or Harvard. A lot of YC startups are like Failson Continuation School. Plenty of people are smart, but a lot of them are just rich.
> On the other hand, vibe coding is curently churning out not just working software, but working businesses
Funny story, I'm evaluating SaaS ETL products and I found one that looked great. So I spent a couple hours testing out some tinkertoy examples with the idea to ask for budget if it worked.
I kept running into small stupid documentation problems and some incredibly stupid behavior in really basic shit (like, screwing up .env files) that no developer would do and then I realized it was all AI generated.
Did it work? Kinda! Mostly! Did it immediately make me put it in the "absolutely not" pile? Sure did.
If the code I can see is that sloppy and poorly reviewed, how bad is the code I can't see? I'm for sure not giving them our sensitive data.
If you think human code is bad, you should just work with better humans. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯