Comment by pegasus
2 hours ago
I had in mind living systems, as most software systems of interest are: a perpetually moving target, continuously modified, expanded and refactored. Many of these systems are apparently now being polluted via careless and massive vibe-coding.
One thing to keep in mind is the logic of technological evolution and market competition will ensure that we always push the complexity of our systems to the edge of what is possible using current tools.
I don't deny that coding agents can be (and are) very useful for software engineering, as you say they have a lot going for them, and I'm pretty sure that once the dust has settled, they will be seen as an intrinsic part of the process, but I also am convinced that skilled humans will still very much be needed to direct and supervise them.
Vibe coding may produce a lot of code, but I'd say LLMs can already find more than 99% of bugs, and I extrapolate that they therefore won't add them to living systems.
But even if new code gets bugs, we run a bug finding pass on the delta. So the vulnporalypse will end.
And in my prompts I've seen LLMs find complex interaction bugs that a human would basically never find (and the bug was added by a human).
You say polluted by vibe coding. But in terms of bugs, especially in the last like 6 months, you could argue that humans are the polluters.
E.g. while I've seen "ai deleted our database", but if what you're saying is true, we should be seeing "AI added this buffer overflow". But we don't, because humans are the polluters of that.
Yes, there have been "ai coded up client side password checking", but I've not seen that recently. Only like 6 generations and three years ago.
At some point it's like telling the cab driver to just follow Google maps directions. Like... sorry, cabbie (Black Cabs in London with their "the Knowledge" is what I'm thinking), your memorization, while impressive, is worse than the app.
The painter, while impressively skilled, is a worse documentarian than the camera.
And that point is probably behind us. At least for typing. And it's climbing up in abstractions.