Comment by aturek
2 days ago
> You are the owner of a recovered alien spacecraft with tech you have no hope of understanding.
I love this phrase, and I think it captures the difference between the "60 years of legacy code" mentioned elsewhere here, and the vibe-coded monstrosity that we all know we're going to be encountering in the next 5 years. The fact that there were human brains with intent making all the little (short-sighted, myopic, ignorant, etc) changes in the legacy code means that you DO have at least some shot of gaining enough context to make safer changes.
There is no real intent in LLMs and particularly in blind vibe coding, so you'll end up reading stuff that works, or appears to work, but there was no human brain behind the change for you to model and thus predict.
This just means we can't take the (often bad) shortcut of guessing what the code does because we feel we can predict what the author was thinking. Instead, we have to treat existing code as a natural sciences exercise - use the same methods we apply to the world around us, which has its logic and structure, but no human intent behind it.
GP is saying that "the search space" of "the natural world" is much bigger than the search space of "stuff created on purpose by humans". In both cases, there will be guesswork, but in one case less.
I think there is something to this, but am even more concerned by the pure scale. Consider 100k, 1M, and 10M LOC human legacy projects (already a big problem, usually!), and now compare to the likely outcome of 100M, 1B, 10B, etc LOC llm projects. That's where you may start to see the outcomes I reference in my OP.
> GP is saying that "the search space" of "the natural world" is much bigger than the search space of "stuff created on purpose by humans". In both cases, there will be guesswork, but in one case less.
I agree. What I am saying is, we have effective tools and processes for each of these search spaces, so code no longer being "created on purpose by humans" is not the end of the world.
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