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Comment by lelanthran

4 days ago

> I’d put money on the average developer being significantly worse at writing code with bugs than an AI.

I'd put money on the average AI-coded project being of a worse quality, simply because the number of vibe-coders with no experience now outnumbers actual coders using AI-assist around 10 to 1.

I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!

AI on average might write better code, but there's no way AI prompted by a shoe salesman is going to be better than code written by a person with even 2x years of experience.

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lelanthran

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YeGoblynQueenne  3 days ago

>> I'm literally seeing companies being pitched with B2B products written by people who had never written a program before, even as a hobby!

Can you post some links to examples of such companies? It sounds really bad but I don't want to really believe it until I can see it with mine own eyes.

therealpygon  4 days ago

If that were the comparison I made — that a non-developer vibe-coding is better than a developer — sure, I’d see your point.

  • lelanthran  4 days ago

    I think, perhaps, my point is that at this rate, pretty soon there won't be any non-vibed projects.

    Even those devs that are currently overseeing are gradually atrophying their critical thinking skills in this space.

    • therealpygon  4 days ago

      Definitely agree, though not sure I agree on the why (I’ve also disagreed with the conclusions of similar studies as well).

      Programming is high-function job that requires knowledge in a million areas. I know I certainly can’t keep all of them in my head and frequently had to go back to documentation, or look up parameters, or how to implement that one pattern I used that one time that worked well in this situation or… The conclusion they draw is basically that “programming also made me dumber” because I didn’t remember them after working on a completely different project in a different language. I wholeheartedly agree thinking skills can atrophy with AI, but my view is that they are likely replaced by different thinking skills in other areas (e.g. improved prompting, improved structure, understanding harnesses, and so on. I used to write batch scripts often; I stopped, now I suck at it. If I paid someone else to write a batch script, I won’t suddenly remember everything I’ve forgotten but plenty people condemn AI for the equivalent result of paying someone else to do the programming.