Comment by ben_w
3 hours ago
"anymore"? Over a decade ago, a coworker had a path for updating some app's files to a database, and it was taking something like 10 minutes on certain test inputs.
Swore blind it couldn't be improved.
By next morning's stand-up, I'd found it was doing something pointless, confirmed with the CTO that the thing it was doing was genuinely pointless and I'd not missed anything surprising, removed the pointless thing, and gotten the 10 minutes down to 200 milliseconds.
I'm not sure if you're right or wrong about the correlation with vibe-coding here, but I will say that co-workers's code was significantly worse than Claude on the one hand, and that on the other I have managed to convince Codex to recompute an Isochrone map of Berlin at 13 fps in a web browser.
I do feel like the industry has taken a nosedive quality wise over covid in particular. Lots of new people only in tech for the money, no deep idea about computers.
But I know stories like yours from a decade past as well. A tale old as time, but compounding in recent years - IMHO.
Could be, but I think the rot I see now predates the pandemic, possibly with reactive, possibly even before then: https://benwheatley.github.io/blog/2024/04/07-21.31.19.html