6 ms·
I hear you. And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but: when I look at my skilled colleagues who vibecode, I can't understand how this is sustainabl
by gspr 8mo ago
I hear you. And maybe you're right. Maybe I'm deluding myself, but: when I look at my skilled colleagues who vibecode, I can't understand how this is sustainable. They're smart people, but they've clearly turned off. They can't answer non-trivial questions about the details of the stuff they (vibe-)delivered without asking the LLM that wrote it. Whoever uses the code downstream aren't gonna stand (or pay!) for this long-term! And the skills of the (vibe-)authors will rapidly disappear.
Maybe I'm just as naive as those who said that photographs lack the soul of paintings. But I'm not 100% convinced we're done for yet, if what you're actually selling is thinking, reasoning and understanding.
- shinycode 8mo agoThe difference with a purely still photograph is that code is a functional encoding of an intention. Code of an LLM could be perfect and still not encode the perfect intention of the product. I’ve seen that in many occasions. Many people don’t understand what code really is about and think they have a printer toy now and we don’t have to use pencils. That’s not at all the same thing. Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc. Some will have to crash and burn their company before they realize that no human at all in the loop is a non sense. Let them touch fire and make up their mind I guess.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo ago> Code is intention, logic, specific use case all at once. With a non deterministic system and vague prompting there will be misinterpreted intentions from LLM because the model makes decisions to move forward. The problem is the scale of it, we’re not talking about 1000 loc. In a month you can generate millions of loc, in a year hundreds of millions of loc. People are also non deterministic. When I delegate work to team of five or six mid level developers or God forbid outsourced developers, I’m going to have to check and review their work too. It’s been over a decade that my vision/responsibility could be carried out by just my own two hands and be done on time within 40 hours a week - until LLMs
- gspr 8mo agoPeople are indeed not deterministic. But they are accountable. In the legal sense, of course, but more importantly, in an interpersonal sense. Perhaps outsourcing is a good analogy. But in that case I'd call it outsourcing without accountability. LLMs feel more like an infinite chain of outsourcing.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoAs a former tech lead and now staff consultant who leads cloud implementations + app dev, I am ultimately responsible for making sure that projects are done on time, on budget and meets requirements. My manager nor the customer would allow me to say it’s one of my team members fault that something wasn’t done correctly any more than I could say don’t blame me blame Codex. I’ve said repeatedly over the past couple of days that if a web component was done by someone else, it might as well have been created by Claude, I haven’t done web development in a decade. If something isn’t right or I need modifications I’m going to either have to Slack the web developer or type a message to Claude.
- shinycode 8mo agoOfc people are non deterministic. But usually we expect machines to be. That’s why we trust them blindly and don’t check the calculations. We review people’s work all the time though. Here people will stop review machine LLM code as it’s kind of a source of truth like in other areas. That’s my point, reviewing code takes time and even more time when no human wrote it. It’s a dangerous path to stop reviews because of trust in the machine now that the machine is just kind of like humans, non deterministic.
- raw_anon_1111 8mo agoNo one who has any knowledge or who has ever used an LLM expects determinism. And there are no computer professionals who haven’t heard about hallucinations. Reviewing whether the code meets requirements through manual and automated tests - and that’s all I cared about when I had a team of 8 under me - is the same regardless. I wasn’t checking whether John used a for loop or while loop in between my customer meetings and meetings with the CTO. I definitely wasn’t checking the SOQL (not a typo) of the Salesforce consultants we hired. I was testing inputs and outputs and UX.
- andhuman 8mo agoI have this nagging feeling I’m more and more skimming text, not just what the LLMs output, but all type of texts. I’m afraid people will get too lazy to read, when the LLM is almost always right. Maybe it’s a silly thought. I hope!
- gspr 8mo agoThis is my fear too. People will say "oh, it's the same as when the printing press came, people were afraid we'd get lazy from not copying text by hand", or any of a myriad of other innovations that made our lives easier. I think this time it's different though, because we're talking about offloading the very essence of humanity – thinking. Sure, getting too lazy to walk after cars became widespread was detrimental to our health, but if we get too lazy to think, what are we?
- agumonkey 8mo agothere are some youtube videos about the topic, be it pupil in high school addicted to llms, or adults losing skills, and not dev only, society is starting to see strange effects