Comment by gspr

20 days ago

I hear you. And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but: when I look at my skilled colleagues who vibecode, I can't understand how this is sustainable. They're smart people, but they've clearly turned off. They can't answer non-trivial questions about the details of the stuff they (vibe-)delivered without asking the LLM that wrote it. Whoever uses the code downstream aren't gonna stand (or pay!) for this long-term! And the skills of the (vibe-)authors will rapidly disappear.

Maybe I'm just as naive as those who said that photographs lack the soul of paintings. But I'm not 100% convinced we're done for yet, if what you're actually selling is thinking, reasoning and understanding.

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gspr

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shinycode  20 days ago

The difference with a purely still photograph is that code is a functional encoding of an intention. Code of an LLM could be perfect and still not encode the perfect intention of the product. I’ve seen that in many occasions. Many people don’t understand what code really is about and think they have a printer toy now and we don’t have to use pencils. That’s not at all the same thing. Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc.

Some will have to crash and burn their company before they realize that no human at all in the loop is a non sense. Let them touch fire and make up their mind I guess.

  • raw_anon_1111  20 days ago

    > Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc.

    People are also non deterministic. When I delegate work to team of five or six mid level developers or God forbid outsourced developers, I’m going to have to check and review their work too.

    It’s been over a decade that my vision/responsibility could be carried out by just my own two hands and be done on time within 40 hours a week - until LLMs

    • gspr  20 days ago

      People are indeed not deterministic. But they are accountable. In the legal sense, of course, but more importantly, in an interpersonal sense.

      Perhaps outsourcing is a good analogy. But in that case I'd call it outsourcing without accountability. LLMs feel more like an infinite chain of outsourcing.

      1 reply →

    • shinycode  20 days ago

      Ofc people are non deterministic. But usually we expect machines to be. That’s why we trust them blindly and don’t check the calculations. We review people’s work all the time though. Here people will stop review machine LLM code as it’s kind of a source of truth like in other areas. That’s my point, reviewing code takes time and even more time when no human wrote it. It’s a dangerous path to stop reviews because of trust in the machine now that the machine is just kind of like humans, non deterministic.

      5 replies →

andhuman  20 days ago

I have this nagging feeling I’m more and more skimming text, not just what the LLMs output, but all type of texts. I’m afraid people will get too lazy to read, when the LLM is almost always right. Maybe it’s a silly thought. I hope!

  • gspr  20 days ago

    This is my fear too.

    People will say "oh, it's the same as when the printing press came, people were afraid we'd get lazy from not copying text by hand", or any of a myriad of other innovations that made our lives easier. I think this time it's different though, because we're talking about offloading the very essence of humanity – thinking. Sure, getting too lazy to walk after cars became widespread was detrimental to our health, but if we get too lazy to think, what are we?