7 ms·

> I am going to state a bet: In 5 to 10 years, once all the vibe coders get hooked into LLMs, there's going to be so much unmaintainable, wrongly architectured

> I am going to state a bet: In 5 to 10 years, once all the vibe coders get hooked into LLMs, there's going to be so much unmaintainable, wrongly architectured crap code in every codebase they touch, that by then they are unable to get any work done without consulting their LLM. And if that heap of collected technical debt becomes so large that even the LLM fails In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than even the best human coder that this is a moot point. If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding. I can understand hating AI, but it seems like many who are against genAI have a strange delusional disbelief of how good the models are, and the trend-line we are on. They think that their special skills will never be eclipsed by an AI model. If you are going on a crusade against genAI and LLM’s at least be honest about what you’re up against.

daishi55 5mo ago
In my opinion by Opus 4.7 Claude was better at coding than most programmers. While there is certainly more slop being produced now overall, I believe the quality of important projects like Linux and proprietary software created by large companies, where advanced AI will be piloted by skilled engineers, will improve in quality, maybe dramatically, over the next decade.
- atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  I am still 100% willing to concede that Opus 4.8 or even how good Mythos is supposed to be is not yet at the general reasoning ability of top 5% coders or any smart human with a few years of domain experience. However the rate of improvement is so consistent and unrelenting that it seems silly to assume that it will just stop short of human level. Even if algorithmic, research and data quality improvements suddenly stopped, we still have years of better GPU’s and scaling
  - kelseyfrog 5mo ago
    Programming requires thinking and LLMs can't think. Therefore LLMs cannot be better than humans at programming.
    - llbbdd 5mo ago
      Programming is just telling a computer what to do. LLMs gave turned out to be pretty good at that. What is thinking, anyway?
    - king_zee 5mo ago
      >Programming requires thinking The issue about AI is that it's gobbling so much information that at some point you couldn't tell the difference. Programming specifically is something that inherently documents itself, meaning while human communication and context and memes and culture is something that evolves and exists many times outside of textual mediums, as soon as any new piece of code is born it is now part of the AI's dataset. And it doesn't help that a vast majority of our code is pretty damn repetitive, especially if you insert code written in the span of two decades and more into the future. Tldr : The better we get at coding, the more code we write, the better AI gets at coding.
    - supern0va 5mo ago
      Your statement seems to be implying (correctly) that LLMs can program, but just not as well as humans. If they're able to program presumably without "thinking" as you seem to be (implicitly) narrowly defining it, then why do you think that limits them to always being sub-par? It seems like if they can do it, that there's no reason they can't eventually be trained to do it better up to and beyond human performance. It seems strange to suggest that thinking unlocks some nominal margin of "better" specifically that can't be overcome. All of that aside, even if they can't outperform the top human programmers...what if they get to within a margin where they're still better than most? Isn't a 95th percentile programmer that can run 24/7 and continuously refine its work still going to ultimately come out on top?
      - kelseyfrog 5mo ago
        I'm more interested in the conclusion that programming doesn't require thinking. And that's where the argument breaks. It seems so obvious, but sometimes the most obvious things are the least true.
supern0va 5mo ago
>If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding. In my organization, this is already happening. We've been using LLMs to boost our test coverage without touching our human code, then use that as a scaffold to let it go through and refactor, clean up, and optimize, and then validating against both our tests and gold standard test datasets. In our case, it's made a legacy codebase far more readable to our junior engineers, and the performance improvements (from using an autoresearch-style approach) has resulted in a six figure decrease in our compute spend for the production service we trialed this on.
fzeroracer 5mo ago
> If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding. What funny nonsense. This is like saying AI will replace artists because it's better than your average artist. Software engineering is as much an artform as it is infrastructure. AI cannot approximate even a poor engineer because it cannot capture the full context of a problem to be solved.
- atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  There is an artistic element to coding but claiming it is some sort of unquantifiable abstract mystical thing is silly. There are many metrics, objective and easily measured, that AI can match humans on in code generation.
  - fzeroracer 5mo ago
    None of those 'objective' metrics matter as long as the outcomes is incredibly visible and damaging. You say that AI is matching humans, but what people see is apps getting worse with more bugs than ever, an inability to reach anyone that actually gives a shit and second order effects on things like general computing. It doesn't help that most of these 'metrics' are literally invented by and ran by the companies that benefit the most from said metrics. I've seen this shit at major companies before, because the c-suite loves to invent metrics that make their product look good even if it ignores reality.
    - atleastoptimal 5mo ago
      The median != the frontier. When looking at all the crappy vibe coded apps and saying they’re worse than the normal expectations of pre-AI applications, you’re comparing some default app-generator model (Gemini flash or worse) with the security integrity of enterprise apps (which still have security flaws). This is very different from comparing Opus 4.8 to the median coder, given the same context, parameters, access to tools, time, and feedback loops.
thefz 5mo ago
> In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than even the best human coder How, if it learns from humans?
- atleastoptimal 5mo ago
  How did alphago become better than any human Go player?
  - thefz 5mo ago
    Because it can Monte Carlo his ass out of problems, humans can't

daishi55 5mo ago

In my opinion by Opus 4.7 Claude was better at coding than most programmers. While there is certainly more slop being produced now overall, I believe the quality of important projects like Linux and proprietary software created by large companies, where advanced AI will be piloted by skilled engineers, will improve in quality, maybe dramatically, over the next decade.

atleastoptimal 5mo ago
I am still 100% willing to concede that Opus 4.8 or even how good Mythos is supposed to be is not yet at the general reasoning ability of top 5% coders or any smart human with a few years of domain experience. However the rate of improvement is so consistent and unrelenting that it seems silly to assume that it will just stop short of human level. Even if algorithmic, research and data quality improvements suddenly stopped, we still have years of better GPU’s and scaling
- kelseyfrog 5mo ago
  Programming requires thinking and LLMs can't think. Therefore LLMs cannot be better than humans at programming.
  - llbbdd 5mo ago
    Programming is just telling a computer what to do. LLMs gave turned out to be pretty good at that. What is thinking, anyway?
  - king_zee 5mo ago
    >Programming requires thinking The issue about AI is that it's gobbling so much information that at some point you couldn't tell the difference. Programming specifically is something that inherently documents itself, meaning while human communication and context and memes and culture is something that evolves and exists many times outside of textual mediums, as soon as any new piece of code is born it is now part of the AI's dataset. And it doesn't help that a vast majority of our code is pretty damn repetitive, especially if you insert code written in the span of two decades and more into the future. Tldr : The better we get at coding, the more code we write, the better AI gets at coding.
  - supern0va 5mo ago
    Your statement seems to be implying (correctly) that LLMs can program, but just not as well as humans. If they're able to program presumably without "thinking" as you seem to be (implicitly) narrowly defining it, then why do you think that limits them to always being sub-par? It seems like if they can do it, that there's no reason they can't eventually be trained to do it better up to and beyond human performance. It seems strange to suggest that thinking unlocks some nominal margin of "better" specifically that can't be overcome. All of that aside, even if they can't outperform the top human programmers...what if they get to within a margin where they're still better than most? Isn't a 95th percentile programmer that can run 24/7 and continuously refine its work still going to ultimately come out on top?
    - kelseyfrog 5mo ago
      I'm more interested in the conclusion that programming doesn't require thinking. And that's where the argument breaks. It seems so obvious, but sometimes the most obvious things are the least true.

supern0va 5mo ago

>If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding. In my organization, this is already happening. We've been using LLMs to boost our test coverage without touching our human code, then use that as a scaffold to let it go through and refactor, clean up, and optimize, and then validating against both our tests and gold standard test datasets. In our case, it's made a legacy codebase far more readable to our junior engineers, and the performance improvements (from using an autoresearch-style approach) has resulted in a six figure decrease in our compute spend for the production service we trialed this on.

fzeroracer 5mo ago

> If anything AI will be used to correct all the crappy human made code that is still being pushed due to the vanity of coders still pretending that they are better than AI at coding. What funny nonsense. This is like saying AI will replace artists because it's better than your average artist. Software engineering is as much an artform as it is infrastructure. AI cannot approximate even a poor engineer because it cannot capture the full context of a problem to be solved.

atleastoptimal 5mo ago
There is an artistic element to coding but claiming it is some sort of unquantifiable abstract mystical thing is silly. There are many metrics, objective and easily measured, that AI can match humans on in code generation.
- fzeroracer 5mo ago
  None of those 'objective' metrics matter as long as the outcomes is incredibly visible and damaging. You say that AI is matching humans, but what people see is apps getting worse with more bugs than ever, an inability to reach anyone that actually gives a shit and second order effects on things like general computing. It doesn't help that most of these 'metrics' are literally invented by and ran by the companies that benefit the most from said metrics. I've seen this shit at major companies before, because the c-suite loves to invent metrics that make their product look good even if it ignores reality.
  - atleastoptimal 5mo ago
    The median != the frontier. When looking at all the crappy vibe coded apps and saying they’re worse than the normal expectations of pre-AI applications, you’re comparing some default app-generator model (Gemini flash or worse) with the security integrity of enterprise apps (which still have security flaws). This is very different from comparing Opus 4.8 to the median coder, given the same context, parameters, access to tools, time, and feedback loops.

thefz 5mo ago

> In 5-10 years AI is going to be so much better than even the best human coder How, if it learns from humans?

atleastoptimal 5mo ago
How did alphago become better than any human Go player?
- thefz 5mo ago
  Because it can Monte Carlo his ass out of problems, humans can't