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The real takeaway here is that programs you whip up for your own use, by any means, are not the same things as maintainable products you can deliver to customer

The real takeaway here is that programs you whip up for your own use, by any means, are not the same things as maintainable products you can deliver to customers. Vibe coding, or VB tricks and hacks 25 years ago, or whatever, sure, do it if that works for you, but that's not a product you can maintain for a customer base. It's a program, not a product.

cess11 2y ago
I think "maintainable" is carrying a lot of weight in there. A lot of profitable or otherwise successful software has been built by people who reasonably couldn't be called software engineers or computer scientists or whatever academic title. With Excel, Access, VB, Delphi, Wordpress. I'm sure there's an astrologer somewhere that made OK money from a hack in Delphi or VB for divining the stars on a computer. It shouldn't be called "vibe" coding, it seems more like glue coding, which some people have been doing and sometimes made careers out of for a very long time. Wordpress was for a long time the big thing in this area, it allowed (probably) millions of people to call themselves web designers and web developers without actually becoming competent in software design. Many corporations selling software have developers that aren't much better than that. People that might do 'SELECT * FROM table WHERE foreign_id = ?' to check whether there exists any such row, or create full copies of data to add versioning to some product instead of keeping it as metadata, or generate and store hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of dumb data representing business processes (like bookings and such) for the coming century instead of inferring it from rules on the fly. The corporations where I've seen this are generally considered fine and good software companies by customers and competitors alike. A new RAD, a new Wordpress, a new MICROS~1 Access or a new LotusNotes isn't particularly revolutionary. I suspect the 'hype' is more about getting people in IT to accept the technology as such and not revolt against the broader applications against other, non-technical, people; for control, disciplining, harassment, surveillance, war or whatever nefarious, tyrannical purpose.
- kikimora 2y ago
  The difference with VB or any RAD is AI generates so much code that a human won’t be able to maintain it manually. Like, 3 months into the vibe-coded project you discover there is a concurrency issue. But it is now all over the place in hundreds variations. How do you even fix it?

cess11 2y ago

I think "maintainable" is carrying a lot of weight in there. A lot of profitable or otherwise successful software has been built by people who reasonably couldn't be called software engineers or computer scientists or whatever academic title. With Excel, Access, VB, Delphi, Wordpress. I'm sure there's an astrologer somewhere that made OK money from a hack in Delphi or VB for divining the stars on a computer. It shouldn't be called "vibe" coding, it seems more like glue coding, which some people have been doing and sometimes made careers out of for a very long time. Wordpress was for a long time the big thing in this area, it allowed (probably) millions of people to call themselves web designers and web developers without actually becoming competent in software design. Many corporations selling software have developers that aren't much better than that. People that might do 'SELECT * FROM table WHERE foreign_id = ?' to check whether there exists any such row, or create full copies of data to add versioning to some product instead of keeping it as metadata, or generate and store hundreds or thousands of gigabytes of dumb data representing business processes (like bookings and such) for the coming century instead of inferring it from rules on the fly. The corporations where I've seen this are generally considered fine and good software companies by customers and competitors alike. A new RAD, a new Wordpress, a new MICROS~1 Access or a new LotusNotes isn't particularly revolutionary. I suspect the 'hype' is more about getting people in IT to accept the technology as such and not revolt against the broader applications against other, non-technical, people; for control, disciplining, harassment, surveillance, war or whatever nefarious, tyrannical purpose.

kikimora 2y ago
The difference with VB or any RAD is AI generates so much code that a human won’t be able to maintain it manually. Like, 3 months into the vibe-coded project you discover there is a concurrency issue. But it is now all over the place in hundreds variations. How do you even fix it?