Comment by wavemode

8 hours ago

Eh, I definitely do think that it has become a mainstream take. Not necessarily that we want lower-quality code, but simply that humans shouldn't be reviewing AI code for quality at all - that is, that code quality doesn't really matter and what matters is that the software works.

This is the entire premise of the concept of "vibe coding", and the concept of non-programmers using coding agents. The idea that there aren't large amounts of people and companies doing these things and/or who consider it "the future" is hard to argue.

1 comment

wavemode

customguy 5 hours ago

But how do I know if something works if I don't know how it works? By testing (literally) all use cases, every single permutation of of variables? For complex programs there might not be enough time and energy in the universe to do that.

If I know what addition is, I can look at at a line that does addition and reason about it. If I just check "if it works", for all I know, the actual code is something like

    if (thing == 17)
    {
      shit_the_bed();
    }
    else
    {
      thing += other_thing;
    }

Sure, I can use an LLM to check on the first LLM, and then a third LLM to check on the second, and so on ad infinitum, but none of that, at no point, can give me what "knowing what addition is" gives me.

It's kinda like cheap/fake concrete: If you know something about concrete and what concrete is being used, you can roughly tell if it will last, what it will withstand. If you just go by "seems to work", "looks good", you get collapsing bridges and buildings after a few years, during heavy rainfall etc.