7 ms·

That is very well put and summarizes what distinguishes real software development from vibe coding.

by zsoltkacsandi 25d ago

Dlemlo 25d ago
I have seen so much production code with garbage code and massive bugs, the industry doesn't care for 'real'.
- danbruc 25d ago
  They care in principle, for the most part bad code makes changes and extensions slow to implement and causes unnecessary production issues which costs time and money. But there is always the tension between implementing something quickly now and being able to implement things quickly in the future and unfortunately the preference is almost always quickly now despite everyone knowing that this is the way more expensive choice in the long run.
  - Dlemlo 25d ago
    Not even in principle. Like how often you had to fight a product manager to do this or that. "Does that code work?" "yes" "so lets ship it" "but its not good" "but it works right?"
    - danbruc 24d ago
      But they also ask why the next feature is taking so long, because of the mess we created with the last feature, and I would consider this caring in principle. Unfortunately this almost always filed as unavoidable.
  - hax0ron3 24d ago
    It isn't necessarily the more expensive choice in the long run. Let's say that companies A and B are direct competitors who start from the same point. Company A quickly codes a bunch of buggy software and ships it in a month. Company B takes its time and ships good, clean, well-organized, mostly bug-free code in five months. Company A makes money. Company B goes out of business and its code is useless, its nice qualities irrelevant. This is just a hypothetical example, I'm not saying that this is how it would necessarily go in all cases.
ahalay-mahalay 25d ago
I’m pretty sure that same discourse was seen every mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics. Yet here we are, hand-crafted high quality things are rare and expensive.
- Terr_ 24d ago
  > mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics I see this comparison a lot, and I think it's a trap, because it invites us to confuse scaling duplicates with scaling design changes. Duplicative mass-production was always core to software from the moment it first became "soft". A factory churning out 10,000 copies of the same book maps to 10,000 downloads of a single software release. The paper and bindings of the book may be below hand-crafted standards, but the words are largely unaffected. In contrast, LLM-coding is the design and prototyping stage. So if we want to learn from textiles/electronics, we shouldn't be thinking of acres of looms, but instead about fashion-design, custom tailoring, determining patterns for clothes, designing new appliances, choosing circuit layouts, etc.

That is very well put and summarizes what distinguishes real software development from vibe coding.

Dlemlo 25d ago

I have seen so much production code with garbage code and massive bugs, the industry doesn't care for 'real'.

danbruc 25d ago
They care in principle, for the most part bad code makes changes and extensions slow to implement and causes unnecessary production issues which costs time and money. But there is always the tension between implementing something quickly now and being able to implement things quickly in the future and unfortunately the preference is almost always quickly now despite everyone knowing that this is the way more expensive choice in the long run.
- Dlemlo 25d ago
  Not even in principle. Like how often you had to fight a product manager to do this or that. "Does that code work?" "yes" "so lets ship it" "but its not good" "but it works right?"
  - danbruc 24d ago
    But they also ask why the next feature is taking so long, because of the mess we created with the last feature, and I would consider this caring in principle. Unfortunately this almost always filed as unavoidable.
- hax0ron3 24d ago
  It isn't necessarily the more expensive choice in the long run. Let's say that companies A and B are direct competitors who start from the same point. Company A quickly codes a bunch of buggy software and ships it in a month. Company B takes its time and ships good, clean, well-organized, mostly bug-free code in five months. Company A makes money. Company B goes out of business and its code is useless, its nice qualities irrelevant. This is just a hypothetical example, I'm not saying that this is how it would necessarily go in all cases.

ahalay-mahalay 25d ago

I’m pretty sure that same discourse was seen every mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics. Yet here we are, hand-crafted high quality things are rare and expensive.

Terr_ 24d ago
> mass production epoch, from textiles to electronics I see this comparison a lot, and I think it's a trap, because it invites us to confuse scaling duplicates with scaling design changes. Duplicative mass-production was always core to software from the moment it first became "soft". A factory churning out 10,000 copies of the same book maps to 10,000 downloads of a single software release. The paper and bindings of the book may be below hand-crafted standards, but the words are largely unaffected. In contrast, LLM-coding is the design and prototyping stage. So if we want to learn from textiles/electronics, we shouldn't be thinking of acres of looms, but instead about fashion-design, custom tailoring, determining patterns for clothes, designing new appliances, choosing circuit layouts, etc.