Comment by bluejay2387
11 hours ago
I agree, the whole 'developers don't code' AI defense was pretty ridiculous. I also concur that development is going to get a lot harder. Anyone that has successfully used AI coding tools knows that you can get massive productivity increases but now I have to figure out how to get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements. If you can do it, yeah you can get 10x results. But now I am engineering harnesses, architecture specifications, agent structures, statistically sampling, and formal verification systems to guide the code instead of writing the code.
No one seems to mind the quality drop though. The buyers of this stuff could never discern.
I'm definitely noticing, I imagine the populace at large will soon too. I'm not even talking about random software either, the company I work for has more and more fired that need to be put out because people are spamming out ai-generated code that was at best rubber stamped.
Not even just the customer-facing stuff either, the internal tooling is on fire more and more often. It's not sustainable in the slightest
Are you the buyer of the stuff?
It took a while before the MBA hivemind woke up to this happening because of outsourcing two decades ago.
I suspect the massive shitshow of Windows 11 and all of its failings is a result of large quantities of vibe code being merged into the OS. People are noticing.
And when exactly did Windows 11 release?
Windows 11 was released before vibe coding was viable. And the shit show seems to be that they push ads and bloatware on people, not that it doesn't work reliably. Windows 11 IoT LTSC has been absolutely rock solid for me on both machines I have it on. Waaay more stable and reliable than Linux, and even a bit better than Mac (which is also way better than Linux).
If they are vibe coding anything, it hasn't had any bad consequences yet. The ads and bloat are human decisions!
They do. Most economically viable software already exists today, most people's job is to make .1% improvements, and features on top. For this work it's obviously pivotal that any change should not worsen the existing software, as that instantly nullifies the value of improvements.
Another kind of highly valuable software is a new design which digitizes some process, like the ticket management of a rail company. If you don't follow the internal processes and workings of the firm exactly, or you do not interface with existing systems 100% accurately, your software very soon becomes worthless.
Figuring out how to create a piece of code that solves the exact problem the customer has, while not breaking anything, and fitting into existing operations seems to be a big head scratcher still, and something humans still need to do, at least that was my experience so far with LLMs.
You forgot "as long as"
... as long as the buyers could never discern
The sad reality is that the vast majority of customers (whoever you are writing software for: clients, management, or end users) simply don't care as much about quality. If you give them the "time, cost, and quality" pick-two choice, 99.9% of customers are going to ask for fast+cheap. It's not the world I wish we were living in.
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Code is the written representation of your idea how to solve a problem.
Now you tell someone else your idea and have to hope they get it. Otherwise you have to argue, rephrase, start all over again.
We are back to the tree-swing project management, but we added another layer
>get a bunch of hyper active child like coding entities with memory deficiencies to build stuff without going off the rail and introducing massive security problems or building something completely mismatched to the requirements
Development is essentially becoming management.
I see this comparison a lot, but I’m not sure I agree. At least not semantically. The list of what an engineer using agents is responsible for, largely hasn’t changed. Engineering managers haven’t changed responsibilities either.
Even with wrangling agents, you’re really just making them right the “correct code”. Something EMs don’t do, or at least the good ones don’t do with their ICs.
It is quite similar to architecture work when others in the team do the actual coding, and lead devs / architects only have time to try out prototypes.
Only now instead of local or offshore devs, it is agents.
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This is all the stuff that the frontier labs are going to ship by default next year. Except for the architecture specifications, which agents can already do adequately for most system today.
Do you have a source for that claim?
Why wouldn't they be working on better harnesses? Every feature that has gotten popular has gotten integrated so far, and their product managers aren't stupid.