Comment by svara

The FOMO nonsense is really uncalled for. If everything is going to be vibecoded in the future then either theres going to be a million code-unfucking jobs or no jobs at all.

Attitudes like that, where you believe that the richeous AI pushers will be saved from the coming rapture meanwhile everyone else will be out on the streets, really make people hate the AI crowd

After I have wrote a feature and I’m in the ironing out bug stage this is where I like the agents do a lot of the grunt work, I don’t want to write jsdocs, or fix this lint issue.

I have also started it in writing tests.

I will write the first test the “good path” it can copy this and tweak the inputs to trigger all the branches far faster than I can.

It's a bit like the argument with self driving cars though. They may be safer overall, but there's a big difference in how responsibility for errors is attributed. If a human is not a decision maker in the production of the code, where does responsibility for errors propagate to?

I feel like software engineers are taking a lot of license with the idea that if something bad happens, they will just be able to say "oh the AI did it" and no personal responsibility or liability will attribute. But if they personally looked at the code and their name is underneath it signing off the merge request acknowledging responsibility for it - we have a very different dynamic.

Just like artists have to re-conceptualise the value of what they do around the creative part of the process, software engineers have to rethink what their value proposition is. And I'm seeing a large part of it is, you are going to take responsibility for the AI output. It won't surprise me if after the first few disasters happen, we see liability legislation that mandates human responsibility for AI errors. At that point I feel many of the people all in on agent driven workflows that are explicitly designed to minimise human oversight are going to find themselves with a big problem.

My personal approach is I'm building up a tool set that maximises productivity while ensuring human oversight. Not just that it occurs and is easy to do, but that documentation of it is recorded (inherently, in git).

It will be interesting to see how this all evolves.

I've commented on this before, but issuing a prompt like "Fix X" makes so many assumptions (like a "behaviorism" approach to coding) including that the bug manifests in both an externally and consistently detectable way, and that you notice it in the first place. TDD can reduce this but not eliminate it.

I do a fair amount of agentic coding, but always periodically review the code even if it's just through the internal diff tool in my IDE.

Approximately 4 months ago Sonnet 4.5 wrote this buried deep in the code while setting up a state machine for a 2d sprite in a relatively simple game:

  // Pick exit direction (prefer current direction)
  const exitLeft = this.data.direction === Direction.LEFT || Math.random() < 0.5;

I might never have even noticed the logical error but for Claude Code attaching the above misleading comment. 99.99% of true "vibe coders" would NEVER have caught this.