Comment by jazzyjackson
3 days ago
I guess they’re just saying “you’re holding it wrong”
Last time I chose to vibe code, I did it in a language I didn’t know so that I wasn’t tempted to try and comprehend the choices the robot made. I ended up with the application I wanted.
Caveat: it was code I would never have to touch again, I ran a script to generate the 140,000 static html pages that the rails app provided and then just uploaded them all to R2 buckets (million reads per month on free tier)
> I guess they’re just saying “you’re holding it wrong”
No, they are saying "who cares if all those issues with code are true, just don't review it"
> Caveat:
It's not really a caveat. I also have throw-away code. But we're not talking about throw--away code. We're talking about the systemic issues in LLM-produced code, which are completely ignored and the answer is always "who cares, close your eyes and don't review the code".
Right. You don’t review the machine code or the interaction with registers and branch prediction. If the behavior matches the desired outcome what does it matter?
The classic consideration is, this code will need to be maintained, built on top of… but it’s not like that was ever a solved problem, big projects remain fragile and corporate turnover means no one knows the entire stack. So I see the vibe code out there as just another imperfect way to build barely good enough software.
I’ve also written code I built slowly and intentionally as a piece of art, beautiful code I was proud of. Didn’t make me any money :)
Ah yeah, the good old "you don't check compiler output" argument.
LLM output isn't compiler output. It's a lot of shitty code that contains duplication, subpar algorithms, bad data access patterns etc. We were complaining about awful software before LLMs. Why is it now absolutely okay to write shitty software just because it's LLMs?
Also: literally no one is talking about "writing software as art". We 're talking about this: "many things (redundant code, duplicate code, overly complex architecture, etc.)"
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