8 ms·

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things thi

by rglover 9mo ago

A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. You can build things this way, and they may work for a time, but you don't know what you don't know (and experience teaches you that you only find most stuff by building/struggling; not sipping a soda while the AI blurts out potentially secure/stable code). The hubris around AI is going to be hard to watch unwind. What the moment is I can't predict (nor do I care to), but there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that's closer to existential than benign. Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function (hint: you won't have much competition soon as most people won't care until it's too late and will "price themselves out of the market").

nojito 9mo ago
>A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. Correct. Those who wave away coding agents and refuse to engrain them into their workflows are going to be left behind in the dust.
- htuibxtuhidb 9mo ago
  [dead]
- otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
  Doubt on that. AI usually only wastes time and produces bugs. > bbut you're holding it wrong, just two more prompts and three more agents and it will be a real boy So, you invented an IDE, except more opaque and expensive? Welcome to the club.
  - verdverm 9mo ago
    You both are likely incorrect, the answer lies in the middle rather than the extremes
    - redleggedfrog 9mo ago
      This is not just software development wisdom, it's life wisdom.
    - kaydub 9mo ago
      I think a lot of the people pro-llm are already in the middle. It's the naysays that are sticking to a strict definition of "vibe coding" as if it's random people typing in "make me $app but make no bugs" and getting a 100% working $app with no bugs. You have the gastown folks trying to do that, but nobody serious putting in good work with llm agents is "vibe coding" in that way.
      - otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
        > as if it's random people typing in "make me $app but make no bugs" and getting a 100% working $app with no bugs Yes, that's literally how LLMs are sold to management.
- HighGoldstein 9mo ago
  > Correct. Those who wave away AI and refuse to engrain it into their workflows are going to be left behind in the dust. Similar to those who waved away crypto and are now left behind in the dust, yes?
  - pawelduda 9mo ago
    I think Bitcoin and major cryptos outperformed a lot of assets over the last decade, so you could say it left some people behind in the dust, yes
    - LunaSea 9mo ago
      Like being ratioed with a 50% price crash?
      - literalAardvark 9mo ago
        You mean just like META, NFLX, AMZN, TSLA, NVDA, CSCO, MSFT, GE, BAC ?
      - pawelduda 9mo ago
        I can tell you what a decade is but I'll have to leave the reading comprehension to you
  - superze 9mo ago
    You forgot NFTs
    - FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
      Remember when the geniuses at Andreessen Horowitz were dumping hundreds of millions into the "metaverse?"
  - literalAardvark 9mo ago
    Might not be the best counter example since everyone who has bought BTC before Jan 2024 is now in massive profit.
bdcravens 9mo ago
You still "find most stuff by building/struggling". You just move up stack. > there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that's closer to existential than benign For those who are "vibe code only", perhaps. But it's no different than the "coding bootcamp only" developers who never really learned to think holistically. Or the folks who learned the bare minimum to get those sweet dotcom boom dollars back in the day, and then had to return to selling cars when it call came crashing down. The winners have been, and will always be, those who can think bigger. The ones today who already know how to build from scratch but then find the superpower is in architecture, not syntax, and suddenly find themselves 10x more productive.
FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
I don't think there's going to be any catastrophic collapse but I predict de-slopping will grow to occupy more and more developer time. Who knows, maybe soon enough we'll have specially trained de-slopper bots, too.
- HighGoldstein 9mo ago
  > Who knows, maybe soon enough we'll have specially trained de-slopper bots, too. Fire, meet oil.
  - woeirua 9mo ago
    The naysayers said we’d never even get to this point. It’s far more plausible to me that AI will advance enough to de-slopify our code than it is to me that there will be some karmic reckoning in which the graybeards emerge on top again.
    - omnicognate 9mo ago
      What point have we reached? All I see is HN drowning in insufferable, identical-sounding posts about how everything has changed forever. Meanwhile at work, in a high stakes environment where software not working as intended has actual consequences, there are... a few new tools some people like using and think they may be a bit more productive with. And the jury's still out even on that. The initial excitement of LLMs has significantly cooled off, the model releases show rapidly diminishing returns if not outright equilibrium and the only vibe-coded software project I've seen get any actual public use is Claude Code, which is riddled with embarrassing bugs its own developers have publicly given up on fixing. The only thing I see approaching any kind of singularity is the hype. I think I'm done with HN at this point. It's turned into something resembling moltbook. I'll try back in a couple of years when maybe things will have changed a bit around here.
      - pengaru 9mo ago
        It's no coincidence HN is hosted by a VC. VC-backed tech is all about boom-bust hype cycles analogous to the lever pull of a giant slot machine.
giancarlostoro 9mo ago
I find that instructing AI to use frameworks yields better results and sets you up for a better outcome. I use Claude Code with both Django and React which its surprisingly good with. I rather use software thats tried and tested. The only time I let it write its own is when I want ultra minimal CSS.
- kenjackson 9mo ago
  This. For area where you can use tested and tried libraries (or tools in general) LLMs will generate better code when they use them. In fact, LLMs will be better than humans in learning new frameworks. It could end up being the opposite that frameworks and libraries become more important with LLMs.
  - eqvinox 9mo ago
    > LLMs will be better than humans in learning new frameworks. I don't see a base for that assumption. They're good at things like Django because there is a metric fuckton of existing open-source code out there that they can be trained on. They're already not great at less popular or even fringe frameworks and programming languages. What makes you think they'll be good at a new thing that there are almost no open resources for yet?
  - lenkite 9mo ago
    How will LLM's become better than humans in learning new frameworks when automated/vibe coders never manually code how to use those new frameworks ?
    - deleted 8mo ago
      [deleted]
  - nottorp 9mo ago
    > In fact, LLMs will be better than humans in learning new frameworks. LLMs don't learn? The neural networks are trained just once before release and it's a -ing expensive process. Have you tried using one on your existing code base, which is basically a framework for whatever business problem you're solving? Did it figure it out automagically? They know react.js and nest.js and next.js and whatever.js because they had humans correct them and billions of lines of public code to train on.
geophile 9mo ago
The article gets at this briefly and moves on: "I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time." I think this dynamic applies to any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing. You can outsource a task effectively if you understand the complete task and its implementation very deeply. But if you don't, then you don't know if what you are getting back is correct, maintainable, scalable.
- SoftTalker 9mo ago
  > instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time. This works up to a point, but eventually your "setup" gets complicated, some of your demands conflict, or have different priorities, and you're relying on the AI to sort it out the way you expect.
  - tsycho 9mo ago
    But setups get equally complicated, even with human software engineers. The approach that the OP is talking about applies only to experienced, good architect-level SWEs, and I suspect that the code quality and its problems are going to be the same whether they are directing LLMs vs a set of junior SWEs to write the code. There is an inherent level of complexity in projects that solve some real world problem, due to all the code handling edge cases that were added incrementally over time.
- eqvinox 9mo ago
  > any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing Oh that's a good analogy/categorization, I hadn't thought about it in those terms yet. AI is just the next cheaper thing down from the current southeast asian sweatshop labor. (And you generally get what you pay for.)
- zmmmmm 9mo ago
  It does beg, the question , whether any of this applies to less experienced people. I have a hunch that the open-ended nature of what can be achieved with AI will actually lead right back to needing frameworks, just as much as we do now, if not more, when it comes to less experienced people.
MrDarcy 9mo ago
This comment ignores the key insight of the article. Design is what matters most now. Design is the difference between vibe coding and software engineering. Given a good design, software engineers today are 100x more productive. What they produce is high quality due to the design. Production is fast and cheap due to the agents. You are correct, there will be a reckoning for large scale systems which are vibe coded. They author is also correct, well designed systems no longer need frameworks or vendors, and they are unlikely to fail because they were well designed from the start.
- goostavos 9mo ago
  >software engineers today are 100x more productive Somebody needs to explain to my lying eyes where these 100xers are hiding. They seem to live in comments on the internet, but I'm not seeing the teams around me increase their output by two orders of magnitude.
  - MrDarcy 9mo ago
    They are the people who have the design sense of someone like Rob Pike but lack his coding skill. These people are now 100x more capable than they were previously.
    - vips7L 9mo ago
      No they’re not.
    - devsda 9mo ago
      This is how you get managers saying "we have taken latest AI subscription. We expect you to be able to increase productivity and complete 5/10/100 stories per sprint from now on instead of one per sprint that we planned previously".
    - seabrookmx 9mo ago
      Citation needed. For both the existence of said people (how do you develop said design sense without a ton of coding experience?) and that they are 100x more productive.
drcode 9mo ago
I'm no fan of AI in terms of its long term consequences, but being able to "just do things" with the aid of AI tools, diving head first into the most difficult programming projects, is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable
- pragmatic 9mo ago
  How would it improve skills? Does driving a car improve your running speed?
  - FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
    I've found AI handy as a sort of tutor sometimes, like "I want to do X in Y programming language, what are some tools / libraries I could use for that?" And it will give multiple suggestions, often along with examples, that are pretty close to what I need.
  - drcode 9mo ago
    I have to stretch your analogy in weird ways to make it function within this discussion: Imagine two people who have only sat in a chair their whole lives. Then, you have one of them learn how to drive a car, whereas the other one never leaves the chair. The one who learned how to drive a car would then find it easier to learn how to run, compared to the person who had to continue sitting in the chair the whole time.
    - leptons 9mo ago
      You made the analogy worse. It's nonsense. The original analogy is far better.
  - literalAardvark 9mo ago
    No, but it does improve your ability to get to classes after work
- kgeist 9mo ago
  >is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand" https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...
redleggedfrog 9mo ago
The future is already here. Been working a few years at a subsidiary of a large corporation where the entire hierarchy of companies is pushing AI hard, at different levels of complexity, from office work up through software development. Regular company meetings across companies and divisions to discuss methods and progress. Overall not a bad strategy and it's paying dividends. A experiment was tried on a large and very intractable code-base of C++, Visual Basic, classic .asp, and SQL Server, with three different reporting systems attached to it. The reporting systems were crazy being controlled by giant XML files with complex namespaces and no-nos like the order of the nodes mattering. It had been maintained by offshore developers for maybe 10 years or more. The application was originally created over 25 years ago. They wanted to replace it with modern technology, but they estimated it'd take 7 years(!). So they just threw a team at it and said, "Just use prompts to AI and hand code minimally and see how far you get." And they did wonderfully (and this is before the latest Claude improvements and agents) and they managed to create a minimal replacement in just two months (two or maybe three developers full time I think was the level of effort). This was touted at a meeting and given the approval for further development. At the meeting I specifically asked, "You only maintain this with prompts?" "Yes," they said, "we just iterate through repeated prompts to refine the code." It has all mostly been abandoned a few months later. Parts of it are being reused, attempting a kind of "work in from the edges" approach to replacing parts of the system, but mostly it's dead. We are yet to have a postmortem on this whole thing, but I've talked to the developers, and they essentially made a different intractable problem of repeated prompting breaking existing features when attempting to apply fixes or add features. And breaking in really subtle and hard to discern ways. The AI created unit tests didn't often find these bugs, either. They really tried a lot of angles trying to sort it out - complex .md files, breaking up the monolith to make the AI have less context to track, gross simplification of existing features, and so on. These are smarty-pants developers, too, people who know their stuff, got better than BS's, and they themselves were at first surprised at their success, then not so surprised later at the eventual result. There was also a cost angle that became intractable. Coding like that was expensive. There was a lot of hand-wringing from managers over how much it was costing in "tokens" and whatever else. I pointed out if it's less cost than 7 years of development you're ahead of the game, which they pointed out it would be a cost spread over 7 years, not in 1 year. I'm not an accountant, but apparently that makes a difference. I don't necessarily consider it a failed experiment, because we all learned a lot about how to better do our software development with AI. They swung for the fences but just got a double. Of course this will all get better, but I wonder if it'll ever get there like we envision, with the Star Trek, "Computer, made me a sandwich," method of software development. The takeaway from all this is you still have to "know your code" for things that are non-trivial, and really, you can go a few steps above non-trivial. You can go a long way not looking to close at the LLM output, but there is a point at which it starts to be friction. As a side note, not really related to the OP, but the UI cooked up by the LLMs was an interesting "card" looking kind of thing, actually pretty nice to look at and use. Then, when searching for a wiki for the Ball x Pit game, I noticed that some of the wikis very closely resembled the UI for the application. Now I see variations of it all over the internet. I wonder if the LLMs "converge" on a particular UI if not given specific instructions?
mark242 9mo ago
I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo. Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug in your browser. You'd see the failure happen in browser, and looking at Cloudwatch logs you'd see the error get logged. Two minutes later, the SRE agents had the bug fixed and ready to be merged. "understand how these systems actually function" isn't incompatible with "I didn't write most of this code". Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write". What we have seen over the past few months is a gigantic leap in output quality, such that re-prompting happens less and less. Additionally, "after you've written this, document the logic within this markdown file" is extremely useful for your own reference and for future LLM sessions. AWS is making a huge, huge bet on this being the future of software engineering, and even though they have their weird AWS-ish lock-in for some of the LLM-adjacent practices, it is an extremely compelling vision, and as these nondeterministic tools get more deterministic supporting functions to help their work, the quality is going to approach and probably exceed human coding quality.
- pphysch 9mo ago
  Automatically solving software application bugs is one thing, recovering stateful business process disasters and data corruption is entirely another thing. Customer A is in an totally unknown database state due to a vibe-coded bug. Great, the bug is fixed now, but you're still f-ed.
  - andrekandre 9mo ago
    > Automatically solving software application bugs the other issue is "fixing" false-positives; i've seen it before with some ai tools: they convince you its a bug and it looks legit and passes the tests but later on something doesn't quite work right anymore and you have to triage and revert it... it can be real time sink.
- pragmatic 9mo ago
markus_zhang 9mo ago
But by then many of us are already starved. That’s why I always said that engineers should NOT integrate AI with internal data.
simianuuords 9mo ago
[dead]
bthornbury 9mo ago
Why does there seem to be such a divide in opinions on AI in coding? Meanwhile those who "get it" have been improving their productivity for literally years now.
- paulhebert 9mo ago
  I think there are a number of elements: - What you are working on. AI is better at solving already solved problems with lots of examples. - How fast/skilled you were before. If you were slow before then you got a bigger speed up. If AI can solve problems you can’t you unlock new abilities - How much quality is prioritized. You can write quality, bug free code with AI but it takes longer and you get less of a boost. - How much time you spend coding. If a lot of your job is design/architecture/planning/research then speeding up code generation matters less - How much you like coding. If you like coding then using AI is less fun. If you didn’t like coding then you get to skip a chore - How much you care about deeply understanding systems - How much you care about externalities: power usage, data theft, job loss, etc. - How much boilerplate you were writing before I’m sure that’s not a complete list but they are a few things I’ve seen as dividers
  - paulhebert 9mo ago
    A few more: - How much do you prioritize speed? - Do you have a big backlog of dev tasks ready to go? - What are the risks if your software doesn’t work? - Are you working on a green field or legacy project? Prototypes or MVPs?
    - paulhebert 9mo ago
      - Do you prefer working as a manager or an individual contributor? Are you used to owning the code or managing others who write codd? - How does your brain work? Do you rely on flow states? Do you get distracted waiting for the LLM response? How do you handle context switching?
  - ggregoire 9mo ago
    > How much you like coding. If you like coding then using AI is less fun. I'm surprised this is never brought up here on "Hacker" News. I've been reading HN for 14 years and all this time I thought people here enjoyed programming. Turns out the majority hates it apparently.
straydusk 9mo ago
Have you considered that betting against the models and ecosystem improving might be a bad bet, and you might be the one who is in for a rude awakening?
- squidbeak 9mo ago
  I agree. We've been assured by these skeptics that models are stochastic parrots, that progress in developing them was stalling, and that skills parity with senior developers was impossible - as well as having to listen to a type of self-indulgent daydreaming relish about the eventual catastrophes companies adopting them would face. And perhaps eventually these skeptics will turn out to be right. Who knows at this stage. But at this stage, what we're seeing is just the opposite: significant progress in model development last year, patterns for use being explored by almost every development team without widespread calamity and the first well-functioning automated workflows appearing for replacing entire teams. At this stage, I'd bet on the skeptics being the camp to eventually be forced to make the hard adjustments.
  - imiric 9mo ago
    Pray tell, how has the world benefited from a flood of all these superhuman developers? Where is the groundbreaking software that is making our lives better?
    - squidbeak 8mo ago
      Is this reply meant to me? Because what I wrote was: > But at this stage, what we're seeing is just the opposite: significant progress in model development last year, patterns for use being explored by almost every development team without widespread calamity and the first well-functioning automated workflows appearing for replacing entire teams.
- rglover 9mo ago
  I'm not betting against them, I use them every day (but I don't "vibe code"—there's more intent). I'm just not treating them as a deity or other prayer-candle worthy entity. They're business tools. It's just a chat bot bro.
cookiengineer 9mo ago
Come to the redteam / purpleteam side. We're having fun times right now. The definition of "every software has bugs" is now on a next level, because people don't even care about sql injection anymore. It's right built into every vibecoded codebase. Authentication and authorization is as simple as POST /api/create/admin with zero checks. Pretty much every API ever slop coded looks like this. And if it doesn't, it will forget about security checks two prompts later and reverse the previously working checks.
- rglover 8mo ago
  Good lord. That's a level of carelessness that's just chef's kiss.
tenthirtyam 9mo ago
My expectation is that there'll never be a single bust-up moment, no line-in-the-sand beyond which we'll be able to say "it doesn't work anymore." Instead agent written code will get more and more complex, requiring more and more tokens (& NPU/GPU/RAM) to create/review/debug/modify, and will rapidly pass beyond any hope of a human understanding even for relatively simple projects (e.g. such as a banking app on your phone). I wonder, however, whether the complexity will grow slower or faster than Moore's law and our collective ability to feed the AIs.
- layer8 9mo ago
  Maybe software systems will become more like biological organisms. Huge complexity with parts bordering on chaos, but still working reasonably well most of the time, until entropy takes its course.
  - leptons 9mo ago
    It's already like that, for a long time. Humans are quite capable of creating complex systems that become unwieldy the bigger they get. No one person can understand all of it. I will offer the AT&T billing system as an example that I'm all too familiar with as a customer, due to the pain it causes me. So many ridiculous problems with that system, it's been around a long time, and it is just so screwball.
    - layer8 9mo ago
      Biological systems are vastly more complex, and less brittle, in the sense that killing a single cell doesn't cause system failure like for example removing an object file from a program often would. Just look at the complexity of a single sell, and try to imagine what an analog of similar complexity would be in software.
      - leptons 9mo ago
        You're kind of jumping around in scope here, and I think you got it a little wrong. >Biological systems are vastly more complex, and less brittle, in the sense that killing a single cell doesn't cause system failure like for example removing an object file from a program often would. Removing a single node from a massively parallel system doesn't kill the system either, it only removes one node, another node will spin up and replace it, just like a failing cell would in a biological system. One liver cell doesn't do anything for the host on its own, it's part of a massively parallel system. > Just look at the complexity of a single sell, and try to imagine what an analog of similar complexity would be in software. Removing some "parts" from a cell certainly could kill it, or a million other things that lead to apoptosis, or turn it cancerous. But "parts" isn't analogous to software, DNA is. The same goes for a single node in a system - remove part of the code and you're going to have big problems - for that node. But probably won't kill the other nodes in the system (though a virus could). There are 3 Billion base pairs in Human DNA. I could imagine that there's more than 3 billion lines of code running important things throughout the world right now. Maybe even in one system, or likely soon there will be. With "AI" doing the coding that number is going to explode, without anyone able to understand all of it. And so I could imagine that "AI" will probably lead to some kind of "digital cancer", the same way there are viruses and other analogues to biological systems.
wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago
Yeah I completely disagree with the author actually, but also with you. The frameworks are what make the AI write easily understandable code. I let it run nextjs with an ORM, and it almost always creates very well defined api routes, classes & data models. etter then I would do often, I also ask it be way more correct on the validation & error handling then I would ever do. It makes mistakes, I shout at it and corrects quickly. So the project I've been "vibe coding" have a much better codebase then I used to have on my solo projects.
rugPool 9mo ago
Back in the 00s people like you were saying "no one will put their private data in the cloud!" "I am sick of articles about the cloud!" "Anyone know of message boards where discussing cloud compute is banned?" "Businesses will not trust the cloud!" Aside from logistics of food and medicine, most economic activity is ephemeral wank. It's memes. It's a myth. Allegory. These systems are electrical state in machines and they can be optimized at the hardware layer. Your Python or Ruby or whatever you ship 9,000 layers of state and abstraction above the OS running in the data center has little influence on how these systems actually function. To borrow from poker; software engineers were being handed their hat years ago. It's already too late.
harrisi 9mo ago
The aspect of "potentially secure/stable code" is very interesting to me. There's an enormous amount of code that aren't secure or stable already (I'd argue virtually all of the code in existence). This has already been a problem. There's no real ramifications for it. Even for something like Cloudflare stopping a significant amount of Internet traffic for any amount of time is not (as far as I know) investigated in an independent way. There's nobody that is potentially facing charges. However, with other civil engineering endeavors, there absolutely is. Regular checks, government agencies to audit systems, penalties for causing harm, etc. are expected in those areas. LLM-generated code is the continuation of the bastardization of software "engineering." Now the situation is not only that nobody is accountable, but a black box cluster of computers is not even reasonably accountable. If someone makes a tragic mistake today, it can be understood who caused it. If "Cloudflare2" comes about which is all (or significantly) generated, whoever is in charge can just throw their hands up and say "hey, I don't know why it did this, and the people that made the system that made this mistake don't know why it did this." It has been and will continue to be very concerning.
- feastingonslop 9mo ago
  Nobody is saying to skip testing the software. Testing is still important. What the code itself looks like, isn’t.
  - JackSlateur 9mo ago
    Knowing the inner working of a complex system is a hard requirement of its testing.
  - harrisi 8mo ago
    Testing is not a proof a software system is correct. Also, if tests are generated as well, there's no trust in how anything works or if the tests are covering important aspects.
fennecbutt 9mo ago
Business has been operating on a management/executive culture for many decades now. These people get paid millions a year to fly around and shake hands with people aka shit fuck all. At times in the past I have worked on projects that were rushed out and didn't do a single thing that they were intended to do. And you know what management's response was? They loved that shit. Ooooh it looks do good, that's so cool, well done. Management circle jerking each other, as if using everyone else's shafts as handles to climb the rungs of the ladder. It's just...like it kills me that this thing I love, technology/engineering/programming...things that are responsible for many of the best things present in our modern lives, have both been twisted to create some of the worst things in our modern lives in the pursuit of profit. And the people in charge? They don't even care if it works or not, they just want that undeserved promotion for a job that a Simpsons-esque fucking drinking bird is capable of. I just want to go back to the mid 2000s. ;~;
divbzero 9mo ago
An HN post earlier this week declared that “AI is killing B2B SaaS”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441 Developers and businesses with that attitude could experience a similarly rude awakening.
- rglover 9mo ago
  If you've ever been responsible for large systems, you'll know why that is an incredibly naive position to take.
kaydub 9mo ago
The hubris is with the devs that think like you actually.
- rglover 9mo ago
  Carefully, patiently, and intentionally in the direction of stability and good user experience?
  - kaydub 9mo ago
    The arrogance to think this isn't possible using llm tools and that the opposite didn't already exist at plenty of software shops pre-llm tools...
aogaili 9mo ago
What's makes you so sure of your statement? I have be building systems for 20 years and I think the author is right.
- leptons 9mo ago
  I've been building systems for 40 years, and I think... you know what, nevermind, it doesn't really matter what either of us thinks.
- rglover 8mo ago
  Observation.
manuelabeledo 9mo ago
There are people out there who truly believe that they can outsource the building of highly complex systems by politely asking a machine, and ultimately will end up tasking the same machine to tell them how these systems should be built. Now, if I were in business with any of these people, why would I be paying them hundreds of thousands, plus the hundreds of thousands in LLM subscriptions they need to barely function, when they cannot produce a single valuable thought?
karmasimida 9mo ago
I give a year, the realization would be brutal.
farseer 9mo ago
I think it would be the opposite and we are all in for a rude awakening. If you have tried playing with Opus 4.6 you would know what I am talking about.
- nomel 9mo ago
  I tell my colleagues we're in the instantaneous peak of the AI developer relationship, especially for code monkeys. We're still valued, still paid really well, and our jobs will get easier and easier probably for the next 5-10 years! After that, maybe not so great for many of us, with the developers that use software as a means of their actual profession continuing to do just fine (hard math/science/optimization/business planning/project planners/etc). I think it's going to be an amazing shift from those that know intricate details of software to enabling those that have the best ideas that can be implemented with software (a shift from tool makers to tool users). I think many developers misunderstand the quality of software that people outside of software are willing to live with, if it does exactly what they want when they need it. For a user, it's all black box "do something I want or not" regardless of what's under the hood. Mostly "academic", things like "elegant" and "clean" and "maintainable" almost never practically matter for most practical solutions to actual problems. This is something I learned far too late in my professional career, where the lazy dev with shite code would get the same recognition as the guy that had beautiful code: does it solve the real world problem or not? Safety critical, secure, etc, sure, but most is not. And, even with those, the libraries/APIs/etc are separate components.
igleria 9mo ago
> A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. I pray (?) for times like the ones you predict. But companies can stay irrational longer than the average employee can afford.
killerstorm 9mo ago
Software engineers have been confidently wrong about a lot of things. E.g. OOP and "patterns" in 90s. What was the last time you implemented a "visitor"? P. Norvig mentioned most of the patterns are transparent in Common Lisp: e.g. you can just use a `lambda` instead of "visitor". But OOP people kept doing class diagrams for a simple map or fold-like operation. AI producing a flawed code and "not understanding" are completely different issues. Yes, AI can make mistakes, we know. But are you certain your understanding is really superior?
- joshribakoff 9mo ago
  Last time I used a visitor, it was probably last week when I created a lint rule. Visiting every node in a tree (ast or otherwise) with lambda is doing the pattern regardless of what you call the pattern. Tools like eslint still literally use the visitor pattern. I would point to software engineers dismissing tried and true ideas as the better generalization.
  - killerstorm 8mo ago
    That means you don't understand visitor pattern: it's specifically an OOP pattern using OOP dispatch. A tree traversal is a tree traversal.
deleted 9mo ago
[deleted]
thephyber 9mo ago
This sounds entirely too doomer. There will obviously be companies that build a vibe coded app which too many people depend on. There will be some iteration (maybe feature addition, maybe bug fix) which will cause a catastrophic breakage and users will know. But there will also be companies who add a better mix of incantations to the prompts, who use version control and CI, who ensure the code is matched with tests, who maintain the prompts and requirements documents. The former will likely follow your projected path. The latter will do fine and may even thrive better than either traditional software houses of cheap vibe coding shops. Then again, there are famous instances of companies who have tolerated terribly low investment in IT, including SouthWest Airlines.
- rglover 9mo ago
  I'd say you're absolutely right. The problem is...what is the distribution of companies who do it "right" to companies that don't?
  - nekitamo 9mo ago
    The same as the distribution of companies which are profitable over time and grow steadily, vs the others which clumsily flail around to somehow stay alive. To the winner go the spoils, and the winners will be a tiny fraction of companies, same as it ever was. A way I look at it is that all net wealth creation in public companies has come from just 4% of businesses: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447 https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/rk4udc/only_4_of_us_stocks_from_19262016_outperformed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/rk4udc/only_4_of... It'll be similar with software companies. 4% of them will hit on a unique cultural and organizational track which will let them thrive, probably using AI in one form or another. The other 96% will be lucky to stay alive. Same as it ever was.
bodge5000 9mo ago
> Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function You missed out the most crucial and least likely requirement (assuming you're not self employed); management also need to be able to see through the bs.
arathis 9mo ago
The hard thing to watch is developers grapple with the idea that what makes them special isn’t so special anymore.
johannes1234321 9mo ago
The interesting aspect is: that allows people who couldn't do it before to build tools for their department needs. Where in the past they would have needed a budget for going to the IT department and then do complex processes to transfer the requirements from business needs into a form the developers understand. Now they can quickly build simple tools. Yes, they are bad from software quality pov, but they solve problems.
- xtiansimon 8mo ago
  > "Now they can quickly build simple tools. Yes, they are bad from software quality pov, but they solve problems." Simple tools can make big mistakes. I've done it. It was an outlier case. A small mistake of logic giving out money already paid once in a neglected corner (so to speak) of the logic tree. One bad script can overshadow tens of good ones.
xnx 9mo ago
Possible, but this sounds like motivated reasoning.
coldtea 9mo ago
Most systems are not needed anyway. They are built to be built, by companies not caring for how good, secure, or fast they are, or even how usable they are, as long as users are lured or forced to use them. Nothing speciail will happen when things are built "this way". People will just be used to lower quality, like they've been used to enshittified software for the past two decades. No "artisans" will be employed to fix any mess. The mess will be our software baseline going forward.
habinero 9mo ago
Clearing out the digital asbestos is going to make a lot of consultants a lot of money.
ineedasername 8mo ago
coding agents are an order of magnitude better than they were less than a year ago: Claude code, arguable the best, didn't exist a year ago and nonetheless, is an order better than when it did in late February. It's really not a great sense of things for someone working in tech to make such a strong statement as the above given these circumstances. There is no reason to expect improvement will not continue, that agents' ability to review code-- drastically improved even since May/June, won't improve and, to the extend your concerns are valid about current agents, be able to manage the review and surfacing of issues for review and remediation. This also ignores the growing awareness within the community of professional developers that, yes, blind trust-- as naively but minimally understandable given lack of knowledge on capabilities-- that blind trust cannot be given, and reasonable review of generated code at the end of a session is good practice. Developers are quite often already changing their habits with agents, if they were even avoiding such review before. As for companies that may fire developers, rely near completely on agentic coding? I agree with the sentiment, but I really have not seen that happen to any great degree. I won't assume this is the case for you, you may very well have dug in depth and worked with agents like claude code, understanding how best to scaffold by creating skills and agents, and still come to your conclusions. I would hope so. For the most part though, a large number of the people making comments of this sort seem to betray directly or indirectly that they-- nearly by definition of distrusting these agents and therefore avoiding them-- have little idea of what they are dismissing precisely because they have not taken the time to do more than dismiss them after little more than cursory review. At the same time, many notable developers of significant accomplished near daily comment in pages here sharing experiences of true capability and assistance by these agents.
- marscopter 8mo ago
  > the growing awareness within the community of professional developers that ... blind trust cannot be given, and reasonable review of generated code at the end of a session is good practice. This saddens me. It saddens me that this is a trend among professional developers. It's an old lesson. We've known it for decades. Running arbitrary code is probably not the best idea.
GorbachevyChase 8mo ago
Every single CVE at least prior to the last couple years was written by a human. Azure and AWS have failed or have been compromised in embarrassing ways. I don’t take this human good, machine bad argument seriously. On the bright side, high integrity software may finally be an expectation for customers paying for software as “barely works” is becoming practically free.
tempodox 8mo ago
We’ve seen so many instances of Worse Is Better™ materialize around software development (and other areas) that I don’t dare to be as optimistic as you.
selfmodruntime 8mo ago
This article is a prime example. You‘re not foregoing frameworks. You‘re building your own. Except this time it‘s not „yours“, you let an AI build an unholy fusion of all frameworks in its dataset.
radium3d 8mo ago
Nah, do you honestly think the thousands of sub-packages in your project are actually being maintained? False sense of security there.

by rglover 9mo ago

nojito 9mo ago

>A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. Correct. Those who wave away coding agents and refuse to engrain them into their workflows are going to be left behind in the dust.

htuibxtuhidb 9mo ago
[dead]
otabdeveloper4 9mo ago
Doubt on that. AI usually only wastes time and produces bugs. > bbut you're holding it wrong, just two more prompts and three more agents and it will be a real boy So, you invented an IDE, except more opaque and expensive? Welcome to the club.
- verdverm 9mo ago
  You both are likely incorrect, the answer lies in the middle rather than the extremes
  - redleggedfrog 9mo ago
    This is not just software development wisdom, it's life wisdom.
  - kaydub 9mo ago
    I think a lot of the people pro-llm are already in the middle. It's the naysays that are sticking to a strict definition of "vibe coding" as if it's random people typing in "make me $app but make no bugs" and getting a 100% working $app with no bugs. You have the gastown folks trying to do that, but nobody serious putting in good work with llm agents is "vibe coding" in that way.
    - otabdeveloper4 8mo ago
      > as if it's random people typing in "make me $app but make no bugs" and getting a 100% working $app with no bugs Yes, that's literally how LLMs are sold to management.
HighGoldstein 9mo ago
> Correct. Those who wave away AI and refuse to engrain it into their workflows are going to be left behind in the dust. Similar to those who waved away crypto and are now left behind in the dust, yes?
- pawelduda 9mo ago
  I think Bitcoin and major cryptos outperformed a lot of assets over the last decade, so you could say it left some people behind in the dust, yes
  - LunaSea 9mo ago
    Like being ratioed with a 50% price crash?
    - literalAardvark 9mo ago
      You mean just like META, NFLX, AMZN, TSLA, NVDA, CSCO, MSFT, GE, BAC ?
    - pawelduda 9mo ago
      I can tell you what a decade is but I'll have to leave the reading comprehension to you
- superze 9mo ago
  You forgot NFTs
  - FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
    Remember when the geniuses at Andreessen Horowitz were dumping hundreds of millions into the "metaverse?"
- literalAardvark 9mo ago
  Might not be the best counter example since everyone who has bought BTC before Jan 2024 is now in massive profit.

bdcravens 9mo ago

You still "find most stuff by building/struggling". You just move up stack. > there will be a shift when all of these vibe code only folks get cooked in a way that's closer to existential than benign For those who are "vibe code only", perhaps. But it's no different than the "coding bootcamp only" developers who never really learned to think holistically. Or the folks who learned the bare minimum to get those sweet dotcom boom dollars back in the day, and then had to return to selling cars when it call came crashing down. The winners have been, and will always be, those who can think bigger. The ones today who already know how to build from scratch but then find the superpower is in architecture, not syntax, and suddenly find themselves 10x more productive.

FeteCommuniste 9mo ago

I don't think there's going to be any catastrophic collapse but I predict de-slopping will grow to occupy more and more developer time. Who knows, maybe soon enough we'll have specially trained de-slopper bots, too.

HighGoldstein 9mo ago
> Who knows, maybe soon enough we'll have specially trained de-slopper bots, too. Fire, meet oil.
- woeirua 9mo ago
  The naysayers said we’d never even get to this point. It’s far more plausible to me that AI will advance enough to de-slopify our code than it is to me that there will be some karmic reckoning in which the graybeards emerge on top again.
  - omnicognate 9mo ago
    What point have we reached? All I see is HN drowning in insufferable, identical-sounding posts about how everything has changed forever. Meanwhile at work, in a high stakes environment where software not working as intended has actual consequences, there are... a few new tools some people like using and think they may be a bit more productive with. And the jury's still out even on that. The initial excitement of LLMs has significantly cooled off, the model releases show rapidly diminishing returns if not outright equilibrium and the only vibe-coded software project I've seen get any actual public use is Claude Code, which is riddled with embarrassing bugs its own developers have publicly given up on fixing. The only thing I see approaching any kind of singularity is the hype. I think I'm done with HN at this point. It's turned into something resembling moltbook. I'll try back in a couple of years when maybe things will have changed a bit around here.
    - pengaru 9mo ago
      It's no coincidence HN is hosted by a VC. VC-backed tech is all about boom-bust hype cycles analogous to the lever pull of a giant slot machine.

giancarlostoro 9mo ago

I find that instructing AI to use frameworks yields better results and sets you up for a better outcome. I use Claude Code with both Django and React which its surprisingly good with. I rather use software thats tried and tested. The only time I let it write its own is when I want ultra minimal CSS.

kenjackson 9mo ago
This. For area where you can use tested and tried libraries (or tools in general) LLMs will generate better code when they use them. In fact, LLMs will be better than humans in learning new frameworks. It could end up being the opposite that frameworks and libraries become more important with LLMs.
- eqvinox 9mo ago
  > LLMs will be better than humans in learning new frameworks. I don't see a base for that assumption. They're good at things like Django because there is a metric fuckton of existing open-source code out there that they can be trained on. They're already not great at less popular or even fringe frameworks and programming languages. What makes you think they'll be good at a new thing that there are almost no open resources for yet?
- lenkite 9mo ago
  How will LLM's become better than humans in learning new frameworks when automated/vibe coders never manually code how to use those new frameworks ?
  - deleted 8mo ago
    [deleted]
- nottorp 9mo ago
  > In fact, LLMs will be better than humans in learning new frameworks. LLMs don't learn? The neural networks are trained just once before release and it's a -ing expensive process. Have you tried using one on your existing code base, which is basically a framework for whatever business problem you're solving? Did it figure it out automagically? They know react.js and nest.js and next.js and whatever.js because they had humans correct them and billions of lines of public code to train on.

geophile 9mo ago

The article gets at this briefly and moves on: "I can do all of this with the experience on my back of having laid the bricks, spread the mortar, cut and sewn for twenty years. If I don’t like something, I can go in, understand it and fix it as I please, instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time." I think this dynamic applies to any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing. You can outsource a task effectively if you understand the complete task and its implementation very deeply. But if you don't, then you don't know if what you are getting back is correct, maintainable, scalable.

SoftTalker 9mo ago
> instructing once and for all my setup to do what I want next time. This works up to a point, but eventually your "setup" gets complicated, some of your demands conflict, or have different priorities, and you're relying on the AI to sort it out the way you expect.
- tsycho 9mo ago
  But setups get equally complicated, even with human software engineers. The approach that the OP is talking about applies only to experienced, good architect-level SWEs, and I suspect that the code quality and its problems are going to be the same whether they are directing LLMs vs a set of junior SWEs to write the code. There is an inherent level of complexity in projects that solve some real world problem, due to all the code handling edge cases that were added incrementally over time.
eqvinox 9mo ago
> any use of AI, or indeed, any form of outsourcing Oh that's a good analogy/categorization, I hadn't thought about it in those terms yet. AI is just the next cheaper thing down from the current southeast asian sweatshop labor. (And you generally get what you pay for.)
zmmmmm 9mo ago
It does beg, the question , whether any of this applies to less experienced people. I have a hunch that the open-ended nature of what can be achieved with AI will actually lead right back to needing frameworks, just as much as we do now, if not more, when it comes to less experienced people.

MrDarcy 9mo ago

This comment ignores the key insight of the article. Design is what matters most now. Design is the difference between vibe coding and software engineering. Given a good design, software engineers today are 100x more productive. What they produce is high quality due to the design. Production is fast and cheap due to the agents. You are correct, there will be a reckoning for large scale systems which are vibe coded. They author is also correct, well designed systems no longer need frameworks or vendors, and they are unlikely to fail because they were well designed from the start.

goostavos 9mo ago
>software engineers today are 100x more productive Somebody needs to explain to my lying eyes where these 100xers are hiding. They seem to live in comments on the internet, but I'm not seeing the teams around me increase their output by two orders of magnitude.
- MrDarcy 9mo ago
  They are the people who have the design sense of someone like Rob Pike but lack his coding skill. These people are now 100x more capable than they were previously.
  - vips7L 9mo ago
    No they’re not.
  - devsda 9mo ago
    This is how you get managers saying "we have taken latest AI subscription. We expect you to be able to increase productivity and complete 5/10/100 stories per sprint from now on instead of one per sprint that we planned previously".
  - seabrookmx 9mo ago
    Citation needed. For both the existence of said people (how do you develop said design sense without a ton of coding experience?) and that they are 100x more productive.

drcode 9mo ago

I'm no fan of AI in terms of its long term consequences, but being able to "just do things" with the aid of AI tools, diving head first into the most difficult programming projects, is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable

pragmatic 9mo ago
How would it improve skills? Does driving a car improve your running speed?
- FeteCommuniste 9mo ago
  I've found AI handy as a sort of tutor sometimes, like "I want to do X in Y programming language, what are some tools / libraries I could use for that?" And it will give multiple suggestions, often along with examples, that are pretty close to what I need.
- drcode 9mo ago
  I have to stretch your analogy in weird ways to make it function within this discussion: Imagine two people who have only sat in a chair their whole lives. Then, you have one of them learn how to drive a car, whereas the other one never leaves the chair. The one who learned how to drive a car would then find it easier to learn how to run, compared to the person who had to continue sitting in the chair the whole time.
  - leptons 9mo ago
    You made the analogy worse. It's nonsense. The original analogy is far better.
- literalAardvark 9mo ago
  No, but it does improve your ability to get to classes after work
kgeist 9mo ago
>is going to improve the human programming skills worldwide to levels never before imaginable "We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery. On a quiz that covered concepts they’d used just a few minutes before, participants in the AI group scored 17% lower than those who coded by hand" https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skills https://www.anthropic.com/research/AI-assistance-coding-skil...

redleggedfrog 9mo ago

The future is already here. Been working a few years at a subsidiary of a large corporation where the entire hierarchy of companies is pushing AI hard, at different levels of complexity, from office work up through software development. Regular company meetings across companies and divisions to discuss methods and progress. Overall not a bad strategy and it's paying dividends. A experiment was tried on a large and very intractable code-base of C++, Visual Basic, classic .asp, and SQL Server, with three different reporting systems attached to it. The reporting systems were crazy being controlled by giant XML files with complex namespaces and no-nos like the order of the nodes mattering. It had been maintained by offshore developers for maybe 10 years or more. The application was originally created over 25 years ago. They wanted to replace it with modern technology, but they estimated it'd take 7 years(!). So they just threw a team at it and said, "Just use prompts to AI and hand code minimally and see how far you get." And they did wonderfully (and this is before the latest Claude improvements and agents) and they managed to create a minimal replacement in just two months (two or maybe three developers full time I think was the level of effort). This was touted at a meeting and given the approval for further development. At the meeting I specifically asked, "You only maintain this with prompts?" "Yes," they said, "we just iterate through repeated prompts to refine the code." It has all mostly been abandoned a few months later. Parts of it are being reused, attempting a kind of "work in from the edges" approach to replacing parts of the system, but mostly it's dead. We are yet to have a postmortem on this whole thing, but I've talked to the developers, and they essentially made a different intractable problem of repeated prompting breaking existing features when attempting to apply fixes or add features. And breaking in really subtle and hard to discern ways. The AI created unit tests didn't often find these bugs, either. They really tried a lot of angles trying to sort it out - complex .md files, breaking up the monolith to make the AI have less context to track, gross simplification of existing features, and so on. These are smarty-pants developers, too, people who know their stuff, got better than BS's, and they themselves were at first surprised at their success, then not so surprised later at the eventual result. There was also a cost angle that became intractable. Coding like that was expensive. There was a lot of hand-wringing from managers over how much it was costing in "tokens" and whatever else. I pointed out if it's less cost than 7 years of development you're ahead of the game, which they pointed out it would be a cost spread over 7 years, not in 1 year. I'm not an accountant, but apparently that makes a difference. I don't necessarily consider it a failed experiment, because we all learned a lot about how to better do our software development with AI. They swung for the fences but just got a double. Of course this will all get better, but I wonder if it'll ever get there like we envision, with the Star Trek, "Computer, made me a sandwich," method of software development. The takeaway from all this is you still have to "know your code" for things that are non-trivial, and really, you can go a few steps above non-trivial. You can go a long way not looking to close at the LLM output, but there is a point at which it starts to be friction. As a side note, not really related to the OP, but the UI cooked up by the LLMs was an interesting "card" looking kind of thing, actually pretty nice to look at and use. Then, when searching for a wiki for the Ball x Pit game, I noticed that some of the wikis very closely resembled the UI for the application. Now I see variations of it all over the internet. I wonder if the LLMs "converge" on a particular UI if not given specific instructions?

mark242 9mo ago

I would argue that it's going to be the opposite. At re:Invent, one of the popular sessions was in creating a trio of SRE agents, one of which did nothing but read logs and report errors, one of which did analysis of the errors and triaged and proposed fixes, and one to do the work and submit PRs to your repo. Then, as part of the session, you would artificially introduce a bug into the system, then run into the bug in your browser. You'd see the failure happen in browser, and looking at Cloudwatch logs you'd see the error get logged. Two minutes later, the SRE agents had the bug fixed and ready to be merged. "understand how these systems actually function" isn't incompatible with "I didn't write most of this code". Unless you are only ever a single engineer, your career is filled with "I need to debug code I didn't write". What we have seen over the past few months is a gigantic leap in output quality, such that re-prompting happens less and less. Additionally, "after you've written this, document the logic within this markdown file" is extremely useful for your own reference and for future LLM sessions. AWS is making a huge, huge bet on this being the future of software engineering, and even though they have their weird AWS-ish lock-in for some of the LLM-adjacent practices, it is an extremely compelling vision, and as these nondeterministic tools get more deterministic supporting functions to help their work, the quality is going to approach and probably exceed human coding quality.

pphysch 9mo ago
Automatically solving software application bugs is one thing, recovering stateful business process disasters and data corruption is entirely another thing. Customer A is in an totally unknown database state due to a vibe-coded bug. Great, the bug is fixed now, but you're still f-ed.
- andrekandre 9mo ago
  > Automatically solving software application bugs the other issue is "fixing" false-positives; i've seen it before with some ai tools: they convince you its a bug and it looks legit and passes the tests but later on something doesn't quite work right anymore and you have to triage and revert it... it can be real time sink.
pragmatic 9mo ago

markus_zhang 9mo ago

But by then many of us are already starved. That’s why I always said that engineers should NOT integrate AI with internal data.

simianuuords 9mo ago

[dead]

bthornbury 9mo ago

Why does there seem to be such a divide in opinions on AI in coding? Meanwhile those who "get it" have been improving their productivity for literally years now.

paulhebert 9mo ago
I think there are a number of elements: - What you are working on. AI is better at solving already solved problems with lots of examples. - How fast/skilled you were before. If you were slow before then you got a bigger speed up. If AI can solve problems you can’t you unlock new abilities - How much quality is prioritized. You can write quality, bug free code with AI but it takes longer and you get less of a boost. - How much time you spend coding. If a lot of your job is design/architecture/planning/research then speeding up code generation matters less - How much you like coding. If you like coding then using AI is less fun. If you didn’t like coding then you get to skip a chore - How much you care about deeply understanding systems - How much you care about externalities: power usage, data theft, job loss, etc. - How much boilerplate you were writing before I’m sure that’s not a complete list but they are a few things I’ve seen as dividers
- paulhebert 9mo ago
  A few more: - How much do you prioritize speed? - Do you have a big backlog of dev tasks ready to go? - What are the risks if your software doesn’t work? - Are you working on a green field or legacy project? Prototypes or MVPs?
  - paulhebert 9mo ago
    - Do you prefer working as a manager or an individual contributor? Are you used to owning the code or managing others who write codd? - How does your brain work? Do you rely on flow states? Do you get distracted waiting for the LLM response? How do you handle context switching?
- ggregoire 9mo ago
  > How much you like coding. If you like coding then using AI is less fun. I'm surprised this is never brought up here on "Hacker" News. I've been reading HN for 14 years and all this time I thought people here enjoyed programming. Turns out the majority hates it apparently.

straydusk 9mo ago

Have you considered that betting against the models and ecosystem improving might be a bad bet, and you might be the one who is in for a rude awakening?

squidbeak 9mo ago
I agree. We've been assured by these skeptics that models are stochastic parrots, that progress in developing them was stalling, and that skills parity with senior developers was impossible - as well as having to listen to a type of self-indulgent daydreaming relish about the eventual catastrophes companies adopting them would face. And perhaps eventually these skeptics will turn out to be right. Who knows at this stage. But at this stage, what we're seeing is just the opposite: significant progress in model development last year, patterns for use being explored by almost every development team without widespread calamity and the first well-functioning automated workflows appearing for replacing entire teams. At this stage, I'd bet on the skeptics being the camp to eventually be forced to make the hard adjustments.
- imiric 9mo ago
  Pray tell, how has the world benefited from a flood of all these superhuman developers? Where is the groundbreaking software that is making our lives better?
  - squidbeak 8mo ago
    Is this reply meant to me? Because what I wrote was: > But at this stage, what we're seeing is just the opposite: significant progress in model development last year, patterns for use being explored by almost every development team without widespread calamity and the first well-functioning automated workflows appearing for replacing entire teams.
rglover 9mo ago
I'm not betting against them, I use them every day (but I don't "vibe code"—there's more intent). I'm just not treating them as a deity or other prayer-candle worthy entity. They're business tools. It's just a chat bot bro.

cookiengineer 9mo ago

Come to the redteam / purpleteam side. We're having fun times right now. The definition of "every software has bugs" is now on a next level, because people don't even care about sql injection anymore. It's right built into every vibecoded codebase. Authentication and authorization is as simple as POST /api/create/admin with zero checks. Pretty much every API ever slop coded looks like this. And if it doesn't, it will forget about security checks two prompts later and reverse the previously working checks.

rglover 8mo ago
Good lord. That's a level of carelessness that's just chef's kiss.

tenthirtyam 9mo ago

My expectation is that there'll never be a single bust-up moment, no line-in-the-sand beyond which we'll be able to say "it doesn't work anymore." Instead agent written code will get more and more complex, requiring more and more tokens (& NPU/GPU/RAM) to create/review/debug/modify, and will rapidly pass beyond any hope of a human understanding even for relatively simple projects (e.g. such as a banking app on your phone). I wonder, however, whether the complexity will grow slower or faster than Moore's law and our collective ability to feed the AIs.

layer8 9mo ago
Maybe software systems will become more like biological organisms. Huge complexity with parts bordering on chaos, but still working reasonably well most of the time, until entropy takes its course.
- leptons 9mo ago
  It's already like that, for a long time. Humans are quite capable of creating complex systems that become unwieldy the bigger they get. No one person can understand all of it. I will offer the AT&T billing system as an example that I'm all too familiar with as a customer, due to the pain it causes me. So many ridiculous problems with that system, it's been around a long time, and it is just so screwball.
  - layer8 9mo ago
    Biological systems are vastly more complex, and less brittle, in the sense that killing a single cell doesn't cause system failure like for example removing an object file from a program often would. Just look at the complexity of a single sell, and try to imagine what an analog of similar complexity would be in software.
    - leptons 9mo ago
      You're kind of jumping around in scope here, and I think you got it a little wrong. >Biological systems are vastly more complex, and less brittle, in the sense that killing a single cell doesn't cause system failure like for example removing an object file from a program often would. Removing a single node from a massively parallel system doesn't kill the system either, it only removes one node, another node will spin up and replace it, just like a failing cell would in a biological system. One liver cell doesn't do anything for the host on its own, it's part of a massively parallel system. > Just look at the complexity of a single sell, and try to imagine what an analog of similar complexity would be in software. Removing some "parts" from a cell certainly could kill it, or a million other things that lead to apoptosis, or turn it cancerous. But "parts" isn't analogous to software, DNA is. The same goes for a single node in a system - remove part of the code and you're going to have big problems - for that node. But probably won't kill the other nodes in the system (though a virus could). There are 3 Billion base pairs in Human DNA. I could imagine that there's more than 3 billion lines of code running important things throughout the world right now. Maybe even in one system, or likely soon there will be. With "AI" doing the coding that number is going to explode, without anyone able to understand all of it. And so I could imagine that "AI" will probably lead to some kind of "digital cancer", the same way there are viruses and other analogues to biological systems.

wouldbecouldbe 9mo ago

Yeah I completely disagree with the author actually, but also with you. The frameworks are what make the AI write easily understandable code. I let it run nextjs with an ORM, and it almost always creates very well defined api routes, classes & data models. etter then I would do often, I also ask it be way more correct on the validation & error handling then I would ever do. It makes mistakes, I shout at it and corrects quickly. So the project I've been "vibe coding" have a much better codebase then I used to have on my solo projects.

rugPool 9mo ago

Back in the 00s people like you were saying "no one will put their private data in the cloud!" "I am sick of articles about the cloud!" "Anyone know of message boards where discussing cloud compute is banned?" "Businesses will not trust the cloud!" Aside from logistics of food and medicine, most economic activity is ephemeral wank. It's memes. It's a myth. Allegory. These systems are electrical state in machines and they can be optimized at the hardware layer. Your Python or Ruby or whatever you ship 9,000 layers of state and abstraction above the OS running in the data center has little influence on how these systems actually function. To borrow from poker; software engineers were being handed their hat years ago. It's already too late.

harrisi 9mo ago

The aspect of "potentially secure/stable code" is very interesting to me. There's an enormous amount of code that aren't secure or stable already (I'd argue virtually all of the code in existence). This has already been a problem. There's no real ramifications for it. Even for something like Cloudflare stopping a significant amount of Internet traffic for any amount of time is not (as far as I know) investigated in an independent way. There's nobody that is potentially facing charges. However, with other civil engineering endeavors, there absolutely is. Regular checks, government agencies to audit systems, penalties for causing harm, etc. are expected in those areas. LLM-generated code is the continuation of the bastardization of software "engineering." Now the situation is not only that nobody is accountable, but a black box cluster of computers is not even reasonably accountable. If someone makes a tragic mistake today, it can be understood who caused it. If "Cloudflare2" comes about which is all (or significantly) generated, whoever is in charge can just throw their hands up and say "hey, I don't know why it did this, and the people that made the system that made this mistake don't know why it did this." It has been and will continue to be very concerning.

feastingonslop 9mo ago
Nobody is saying to skip testing the software. Testing is still important. What the code itself looks like, isn’t.
- JackSlateur 9mo ago
  Knowing the inner working of a complex system is a hard requirement of its testing.
- harrisi 8mo ago
  Testing is not a proof a software system is correct. Also, if tests are generated as well, there's no trust in how anything works or if the tests are covering important aspects.

fennecbutt 9mo ago

Business has been operating on a management/executive culture for many decades now. These people get paid millions a year to fly around and shake hands with people aka shit fuck all. At times in the past I have worked on projects that were rushed out and didn't do a single thing that they were intended to do. And you know what management's response was? They loved that shit. Ooooh it looks do good, that's so cool, well done. Management circle jerking each other, as if using everyone else's shafts as handles to climb the rungs of the ladder. It's just...like it kills me that this thing I love, technology/engineering/programming...things that are responsible for many of the best things present in our modern lives, have both been twisted to create some of the worst things in our modern lives in the pursuit of profit. And the people in charge? They don't even care if it works or not, they just want that undeserved promotion for a job that a Simpsons-esque fucking drinking bird is capable of. I just want to go back to the mid 2000s. ;~;

divbzero 9mo ago

An HN post earlier this week declared that “AI is killing B2B SaaS”: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46888441 Developers and businesses with that attitude could experience a similarly rude awakening.

rglover 9mo ago
If you've ever been responsible for large systems, you'll know why that is an incredibly naive position to take.

kaydub 9mo ago

The hubris is with the devs that think like you actually.

rglover 9mo ago
Carefully, patiently, and intentionally in the direction of stability and good user experience?
- kaydub 9mo ago
  The arrogance to think this isn't possible using llm tools and that the opposite didn't already exist at plenty of software shops pre-llm tools...

aogaili 9mo ago

What's makes you so sure of your statement? I have be building systems for 20 years and I think the author is right.

leptons 9mo ago
I've been building systems for 40 years, and I think... you know what, nevermind, it doesn't really matter what either of us thinks.
rglover 8mo ago
Observation.

manuelabeledo 9mo ago

There are people out there who truly believe that they can outsource the building of highly complex systems by politely asking a machine, and ultimately will end up tasking the same machine to tell them how these systems should be built. Now, if I were in business with any of these people, why would I be paying them hundreds of thousands, plus the hundreds of thousands in LLM subscriptions they need to barely function, when they cannot produce a single valuable thought?

karmasimida 9mo ago

I give a year, the realization would be brutal.

farseer 9mo ago

I think it would be the opposite and we are all in for a rude awakening. If you have tried playing with Opus 4.6 you would know what I am talking about.

nomel 9mo ago
I tell my colleagues we're in the instantaneous peak of the AI developer relationship, especially for code monkeys. We're still valued, still paid really well, and our jobs will get easier and easier probably for the next 5-10 years! After that, maybe not so great for many of us, with the developers that use software as a means of their actual profession continuing to do just fine (hard math/science/optimization/business planning/project planners/etc). I think it's going to be an amazing shift from those that know intricate details of software to enabling those that have the best ideas that can be implemented with software (a shift from tool makers to tool users). I think many developers misunderstand the quality of software that people outside of software are willing to live with, if it does exactly what they want when they need it. For a user, it's all black box "do something I want or not" regardless of what's under the hood. Mostly "academic", things like "elegant" and "clean" and "maintainable" almost never practically matter for most practical solutions to actual problems. This is something I learned far too late in my professional career, where the lazy dev with shite code would get the same recognition as the guy that had beautiful code: does it solve the real world problem or not? Safety critical, secure, etc, sure, but most is not. And, even with those, the libraries/APIs/etc are separate components.

igleria 9mo ago

> A significant number of developers and businesses are going to have an absolutely brutal rude awakening in the not too distant future. I pray (?) for times like the ones you predict. But companies can stay irrational longer than the average employee can afford.

killerstorm 9mo ago

Software engineers have been confidently wrong about a lot of things. E.g. OOP and "patterns" in 90s. What was the last time you implemented a "visitor"? P. Norvig mentioned most of the patterns are transparent in Common Lisp: e.g. you can just use a `lambda` instead of "visitor". But OOP people kept doing class diagrams for a simple map or fold-like operation. AI producing a flawed code and "not understanding" are completely different issues. Yes, AI can make mistakes, we know. But are you certain your understanding is really superior?

joshribakoff 9mo ago
Last time I used a visitor, it was probably last week when I created a lint rule. Visiting every node in a tree (ast or otherwise) with lambda is doing the pattern regardless of what you call the pattern. Tools like eslint still literally use the visitor pattern. I would point to software engineers dismissing tried and true ideas as the better generalization.
- killerstorm 8mo ago
  That means you don't understand visitor pattern: it's specifically an OOP pattern using OOP dispatch. A tree traversal is a tree traversal.

deleted 9mo ago

[deleted]

thephyber 9mo ago

This sounds entirely too doomer. There will obviously be companies that build a vibe coded app which too many people depend on. There will be some iteration (maybe feature addition, maybe bug fix) which will cause a catastrophic breakage and users will know. But there will also be companies who add a better mix of incantations to the prompts, who use version control and CI, who ensure the code is matched with tests, who maintain the prompts and requirements documents. The former will likely follow your projected path. The latter will do fine and may even thrive better than either traditional software houses of cheap vibe coding shops. Then again, there are famous instances of companies who have tolerated terribly low investment in IT, including SouthWest Airlines.

rglover 9mo ago
I'd say you're absolutely right. The problem is...what is the distribution of companies who do it "right" to companies that don't?
- nekitamo 9mo ago
  The same as the distribution of companies which are profitable over time and grow steadily, vs the others which clumsily flail around to somehow stay alive. To the winner go the spoils, and the winners will be a tiny fraction of companies, same as it ever was. A way I look at it is that all net wealth creation in public companies has come from just 4% of businesses: https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447 https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=2900447 https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/rk4udc/only_4_of_us_stocks_from_19262016_outperformed/ https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/rk4udc/only_4_of... It'll be similar with software companies. 4% of them will hit on a unique cultural and organizational track which will let them thrive, probably using AI in one form or another. The other 96% will be lucky to stay alive. Same as it ever was.

bodge5000 9mo ago

> Good time to be in business if you can see through the bs and understand how these systems actually function You missed out the most crucial and least likely requirement (assuming you're not self employed); management also need to be able to see through the bs.

arathis 9mo ago

The hard thing to watch is developers grapple with the idea that what makes them special isn’t so special anymore.

johannes1234321 9mo ago

The interesting aspect is: that allows people who couldn't do it before to build tools for their department needs. Where in the past they would have needed a budget for going to the IT department and then do complex processes to transfer the requirements from business needs into a form the developers understand. Now they can quickly build simple tools. Yes, they are bad from software quality pov, but they solve problems.

xtiansimon 8mo ago
> "Now they can quickly build simple tools. Yes, they are bad from software quality pov, but they solve problems." Simple tools can make big mistakes. I've done it. It was an outlier case. A small mistake of logic giving out money already paid once in a neglected corner (so to speak) of the logic tree. One bad script can overshadow tens of good ones.

xnx 9mo ago

Possible, but this sounds like motivated reasoning.

coldtea 9mo ago

Most systems are not needed anyway. They are built to be built, by companies not caring for how good, secure, or fast they are, or even how usable they are, as long as users are lured or forced to use them. Nothing speciail will happen when things are built "this way". People will just be used to lower quality, like they've been used to enshittified software for the past two decades. No "artisans" will be employed to fix any mess. The mess will be our software baseline going forward.

habinero 9mo ago

Clearing out the digital asbestos is going to make a lot of consultants a lot of money.

ineedasername 8mo ago

coding agents are an order of magnitude better than they were less than a year ago: Claude code, arguable the best, didn't exist a year ago and nonetheless, is an order better than when it did in late February. It's really not a great sense of things for someone working in tech to make such a strong statement as the above given these circumstances. There is no reason to expect improvement will not continue, that agents' ability to review code-- drastically improved even since May/June, won't improve and, to the extend your concerns are valid about current agents, be able to manage the review and surfacing of issues for review and remediation. This also ignores the growing awareness within the community of professional developers that, yes, blind trust-- as naively but minimally understandable given lack of knowledge on capabilities-- that blind trust cannot be given, and reasonable review of generated code at the end of a session is good practice. Developers are quite often already changing their habits with agents, if they were even avoiding such review before. As for companies that may fire developers, rely near completely on agentic coding? I agree with the sentiment, but I really have not seen that happen to any great degree. I won't assume this is the case for you, you may very well have dug in depth and worked with agents like claude code, understanding how best to scaffold by creating skills and agents, and still come to your conclusions. I would hope so. For the most part though, a large number of the people making comments of this sort seem to betray directly or indirectly that they-- nearly by definition of distrusting these agents and therefore avoiding them-- have little idea of what they are dismissing precisely because they have not taken the time to do more than dismiss them after little more than cursory review. At the same time, many notable developers of significant accomplished near daily comment in pages here sharing experiences of true capability and assistance by these agents.

marscopter 8mo ago
> the growing awareness within the community of professional developers that ... blind trust cannot be given, and reasonable review of generated code at the end of a session is good practice. This saddens me. It saddens me that this is a trend among professional developers. It's an old lesson. We've known it for decades. Running arbitrary code is probably not the best idea.

GorbachevyChase 8mo ago

Every single CVE at least prior to the last couple years was written by a human. Azure and AWS have failed or have been compromised in embarrassing ways. I don’t take this human good, machine bad argument seriously. On the bright side, high integrity software may finally be an expectation for customers paying for software as “barely works” is becoming practically free.

tempodox 8mo ago

We’ve seen so many instances of Worse Is Better™ materialize around software development (and other areas) that I don’t dare to be as optimistic as you.

selfmodruntime 8mo ago

This article is a prime example. You‘re not foregoing frameworks. You‘re building your own. Except this time it‘s not „yours“, you let an AI build an unholy fusion of all frameworks in its dataset.

radium3d 8mo ago

Nah, do you honestly think the thousands of sub-packages in your project are actually being maintained? False sense of security there.