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Comment by K0balt

1 month ago

Tbh, getting good results from ai requires senior level intuition. You can be rusty as hell and not even middling in the language being used, but you have to understand data structures and architecture more than ever to get non-shit results. If you just vibe it, you’ll eventually end up with a mountain of crap that works sort of, and since you’re not doing the coding, you can’t really figure it out as you go along. Sometimes it can work to naively make a thing and then have it rewritten from scratch properly though, so that might be the path.

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K0balt

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neya  1 month ago

100% accurate. The architect matters so much more than people think. The most common counter argument to this I've seen on reddit are the vibe coders (particularly inside v0 and lovable subreddits) claiming they built an app that makes $x0,000 over a weekend, so who needs (senior) software engineers and the like? A few weeks later, there's almost always a listing for a technical co-founder or a CTO with experience on their careers page or LinkedIn :)))

  • kenforthewin  1 month ago

    If that's true, it sounds like the vibe coders are winning - they're creating products people want, and pull in technical folks as needed to scale.

    • neya  1 month ago

      But the argument is not about market validation, the argument is about software quality. Vibe coders love shitting on experienced software folks until their code starts falling apart the moment there is any real world usage.

      And about the pulling in devs - you can actually go to indeed.com and filter out listings for co-founders and CTOs. Usually equity only, or barely any pay. Since they're used to getting code for free. No real CTO/Senior dev will touch anything like that.

      For every vibe coded product, there's a 100 clones more. It's just a red ocean.

Ancalagon  1 month ago

This mirrors my experience exactly. Vibe coding straight up does not work for any serious code.

  • fragmede  1 month ago

    Todo web apps aren't serious code, I can buy that, but in your mind, what is? Are compilers "serious code"?

    https://www.anthropic.com/engineering/building-c-compiler

    Like, I'm sure it's just laundering gcc's source at some level, but if Claude can handle making a compiler, either we have to reframe a compiler as "not serious", or, well, come up with a different definition for what entails "serious" code.

    • K0balt  1 month ago

      Vibe coding doesn’t work for the imbedded system code that I am working on, which includes layered state machines, hardware drivers, and wire level protocol stacks. But supervised AI code generation definitely does work.

      You need a highly refined sense of “smell” and intuition about architecture and data design, but if you give good specifications and clear design goals and architectural guidance, it’s like managing a small team but 12x faster iteration.

      I sometimes am surprised with feature scope or minor execution details but usually whenever I drill down I’m seeing what I expected to see, even more so than with humans.

      If I didn’t have the 4 decades of engineering and management experience I wouldn’t be able to get anything near the quality or productivity.

      It’s an ideal tool for seasoned devs with experience shipping with a team. I can do the work of a team of 5 in this type of highly technical greenfield engineering, and I’m shipping better code with stellar documentation… and it’s also a lot less stressful because of the lack of interpersonal dynamics.

      But… there’s no way I would give this to a person without technical management experience and expect the same results, because the specification and architectural work is critical, and the ability to see the code you know someone else is writing and understand the mistakes they will probably make if you don’t warn them away from it is the most important skillset here.

      In a lot of ways I do fear that we could be pulling up the ladder, but if we completely rethink what it means to be a developer we could teach with an emphasis on architecture, data structures, and code/architecture intuition we might be able to prepare people to step into the role.

      Otherwise we will end up with a lot of garbage code that mostly works most of the time and breaks in diabolically sinister ways.

    • vidarh  1 month ago

      Well, Claude is fixing code generation bugs in my Ruby AOT compiler written in Ruby, and it certainly can't launder any source for that.