Comment by tokioyoyo
1 day ago
“AI coding is a fad” is not just one big camp of similar-minded people. Different groups have to give up on their pre-existing beliefs in order to be ok with AI coding.
Think of people who were very strict with variable names. People who pushed for multiple-levels deep of abstractions for a single API logic that’s not going to be reused. People who believed that coding is craft, rather than just a process to get to the end during work hours. This makes most of these people’s points more-or-less moot.
I was in some of those camps, but I’ve seen coding evolve in the last 15 years. So I understand that these priors need to be updated, as most arguments don’t apply to today’s world.
"as most arguments don't apply to today's world" makes me want to roll my eyes so hard at you. The vast majority of problems we had with building complicated systems are all still just sitting there. People are speedrunning relearning things we've known about software engineering for decades.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
Between AI and the stock market (which of course relates directly to AI), I’ve lost count of the number of times I’ve heard lately another variation of “this time is different.” Sometimes so close to those words that I wonder why the person speaking them doesn’t feel a bit tingly. Great big warning signs all around.
The examples I gave, and the arguments that usually support them don’t really translate into “building complicated systems”. I was talking about the arguments in support of variable naming flamewars, etc.
I’m not proponent of AI generating everything without any supervision as of now. But willing to change my mind when it gets better.
Most software engineering jobs are not cutting-edge tech, or research, or solving unsolved problems. Integrations, APIs, figma-to-react pipelines, devops and etc. is what people get hired for. All those can be done much faster in the same-or-better quality by an experienced person with the supplement of AI. It’s hard to imagine any company would go against the grain and slow things down on purpose.
So I accept that “nonsense arguments are nonsense”, but with some minor differences of opinion. Naming of things matters insofar as you care as a human to actually conceptualize the system you’re building. You can call all of this stuff minutiae, and on some level I kind of agree, except for the general vibe of _caring about the quality of the stuff you produce_. That is something that still matters whether it “works”. Like, yes you can get an LLM to gen some junk, but _is it any good_ is still something you are in charge of.
As far as “boring systems are boring”, I can tell you from experience that I work on a pretty boring system, and AI is not all that meaningful in terms of its impact, and it’s not for a lack of trying.
Can it help me create a migration and add an endpoint and such? Sure. But those aren’t the hard problems. They never were.
It’s funny that you think the idea of slowing down is such a bad one, but it is another well-established truth. Slow is smooth, and smooth is fast. This notion of break/fixing your way to prosperity by way of 10,000 ill-conceived PRs is a fool’s game.
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What's an int vs a float vs a boolean? What's a function? What's a class? What's a variable? You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code. That's a lot of priors to update!
Just to go on record, as of today, I’m a big believer that a person that knows all that stuff is much more productive with AI-coding than a person who doesn’t.
I have no idea how we can get people motivated to learn these through trial-and-error when AI coding exists though. I remember the days of spending hours on stupid bugs that AI can resolve within a minute. But I recall learning heavily from those experiences. Oh well…
yes, but a person who doesn't know any of this stuff is infinitely more productive with ai than someone who isn't when it comes to many things.
we've got product folks vibing out prototypes (not shippable but clickable) in our main front end in a few minutes to an hour. This would previously have involved 3 people and several weeks, or a ton of figma and documents to fill in the gaps. This saves weeks to months and lets them really experience the items.
Then they hand it off to someone who knows all that stuff who is also using AI and the impl also gets done faster.
The PMs are either moving infinitely faster, or at least 30x faster and not blocked constantly by others.
basically you're not comparing people who don't know much (tech) with those who do, you're comparing them before and after access to AI.
I like the presentation I heard from a Principal, that AI tools amplify your competence. If you start out incompetent, it'll just allow you to be incompetent with greater scope and (negative) impact.
I honestly feel like my own learning has accelerated after using AI. Simply because now it's so easy to write the same thing in so many different languages, I can e.g. learn pros and cons of each language, which otherwise would have been I think unfathomable to me. I have now created so much stuff I wouldn't have had time to create.
I setup k3s, and tons of what would be otherwise unnecessarily complicated stuff on my laptop for my side projects with additional home servers, smart house stuff. Otherwise k8s and things like that would have been daunting to learn and in theory and without constant professional exposure, etc...
Microservices in Go, Rust, which I didn't have any previous experience with, games in C and other languages. Didn't know anything about low level memory management before. Was just mainly TypeScript person. Just constantly building random fun stuff.
2 replies →
When I started I learnt something about coding from VBA macros to automate excel.
Often that started with the macro recorder. Then you worked out what that "recorded" code/sludge did, removed the crud you didn't need or want, improved the logic and so on. I bought books to understand it better. Now you can ask a (different) LLM "what is this? why is it used? How would I?" etc which is probably a faster learning curve than books, newsgroups and old school personal home pages with good info.
I would have been quite surprised when I first used a VBA macro in anger just how far I would go down the rabbit hole. C, asm, verilog, Linux were no part of what I originally signed up for!
Some people will specialise in the equivalent of recording macros and go no further. And this will be fine for code that gets it done but doesn't matter too much in the other dimensions (security, reliability, usefulness without the authors' support, etc.) Much like VBA utilities inside companies that were useful way back when. Other people will want what they produce to be better, even good, and they will learn about floating point [1] and all the rest, much as I did. Probably learn pretty fast too. [2]
[1] https://docs.oracle.com/cd/E19957-01/806-3568/ncg_goldberg.h...
[2] Working out how to write an excel vba webserver and using it to collect and and collate summary data from various divisions into reports was seedy as hell, solved the actual business problem (given ridiculous but intractable constraints) and isn't something you can record. We all have stories from a misspent youth that we're simultaneously ashamed and yet somehow proud of.
And, you don't have to vibe code. A competent developer can make great use of AI. I think a developer that can develop the system themselves is the most accelerated user.
> You don't actually need to know the answer to those questions in order to vibe code
No, but you do need to know the answer to respond to that 3AM page about prod being down.