4 ms·

> The code may work, but there’s no guarantee about its behavior (including error handling and edge cases). But the painful reality is that we never had any su

> The code may work, but there’s no guarantee about its behavior (including error handling and edge cases). But the painful reality is that we never had any such guarantees in industry code to begin with; despite decades of writing on software engineering best practices, software from the biggest companies is often bug ridden. My experience might not be representative, but when I do my "old man yells at clouds" routine (which I do multiple times a day), it's a lot more often targeted at Microsoft and Google software than at "vibe coded slop".

trey-jones 17d ago
This is exactly true in my experience. I find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work. Just like you would managing a team of junior developers, you have to keep an eye on the output, but I think the agent is more transparent about that than your team would be. And it works faster, and you don't have to deal with emotional meltdown or active sabotage if you criticize in the wrong way. The trick for the guy controlling the agent is to know about the gotchas that one would normally encounter when doing the work. Asking the right questions and mentioning the right things to pay extra attention to can make all the difference. I think that's why it will be much more difficult for people to learn how to make software now. Those of us who have been doing it for years and years have experience that is valuable in steering the LLM. It will be hard for people new to software to get that same experience. But then things are changing so quickly right now, everything I just wrote my be irrelevant in a week.
- skydhash 17d ago
  > find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work That’s the main issue. You’re talking about the development side guarante, while the most important is the user side guarantee. There’s a lot of talk about liking LLM interaction, but no comments about the software quality, which for a lot of SaaS has gone downhill. It’s why they emphasized LoC and number of PRs but hide the number of bug tickets. Which is why the most enthusiastic comments are about projects not released yet. Greenfield and released projects are different.
  - Izkata 17d ago
    > but no comments about the software quality, which for a lot of SaaS has gone downhill. It’s why they emphasized LoC and number of PRs but hide the number of bug tickets. And here's some numbers (gathered from telemetry over time) showing that: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways Here's someone's breakdown (with some things from the full report that aren't in the Faros blog post), showing how it's even worse than first impressions: https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap
Tanjreeve 17d ago
>My experience might not be representative, but when I do my "old man yells at clouds" routine (which I do multiple times a day), it's a lot more often targeted at Microsoft and Google software than at "vibe coded slop". As in you get more mad at software you actually use being broken than software that you aren't using and just exists in blogposts?
- falcor84 17d ago
  I personally work a lot with vibe coded software, both my own and of others. And I do encounter a lot of issues, but in general they annoy me less than the enterprise engineered ones.
NateEag 17d ago
> it's a lot more often targeted at Microsoft and Google software than at "vibe coded slop". What makes you confident the Microsoft and Google software isn't vibecoded slop? Certainly Microsoft has made a lot of noise about all their software being LLMgen these years, and also gotten into hot water with their users for Windows 11's crappiness.
- falcor84 17d ago
  Very good point. I would respond that I saw the deterioration several years before vibe coding became a thing, but maybe they did have a head start on the tech.
  - Tostino 16d ago
    That was them killing the QA team that really kicked off the apparent to end users lack of quality.

trey-jones 17d ago

This is exactly true in my experience. I find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work. Just like you would managing a team of junior developers, you have to keep an eye on the output, but I think the agent is more transparent about that than your team would be. And it works faster, and you don't have to deal with emotional meltdown or active sabotage if you criticize in the wrong way. The trick for the guy controlling the agent is to know about the gotchas that one would normally encounter when doing the work. Asking the right questions and mentioning the right things to pay extra attention to can make all the difference. I think that's why it will be much more difficult for people to learn how to make software now. Those of us who have been doing it for years and years have experience that is valuable in steering the LLM. It will be hard for people new to software to get that same experience. But then things are changing so quickly right now, everything I just wrote my be irrelevant in a week.

skydhash 17d ago
> find myself trusting the LLM better than I ever trusted a development team to deliver accurate work That’s the main issue. You’re talking about the development side guarante, while the most important is the user side guarantee. There’s a lot of talk about liking LLM interaction, but no comments about the software quality, which for a lot of SaaS has gone downhill. It’s why they emphasized LoC and number of PRs but hide the number of bug tickets. Which is why the most enthusiastic comments are about projects not released yet. Greenfield and released projects are different.
- Izkata 17d ago
  > but no comments about the software quality, which for a lot of SaaS has gone downhill. It’s why they emphasized LoC and number of PRs but hide the number of bug tickets. And here's some numbers (gathered from telemetry over time) showing that: https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways https://www.faros.ai/blog/ai-acceleration-whiplash-takeaways Here's someone's breakdown (with some things from the full report that aren't in the Faros blog post), showing how it's even worse than first impressions: https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap https://unessays.substack.com/p/talk-is-cheap

Tanjreeve 17d ago

>My experience might not be representative, but when I do my "old man yells at clouds" routine (which I do multiple times a day), it's a lot more often targeted at Microsoft and Google software than at "vibe coded slop". As in you get more mad at software you actually use being broken than software that you aren't using and just exists in blogposts?

falcor84 17d ago
I personally work a lot with vibe coded software, both my own and of others. And I do encounter a lot of issues, but in general they annoy me less than the enterprise engineered ones.

NateEag 17d ago

> it's a lot more often targeted at Microsoft and Google software than at "vibe coded slop". What makes you confident the Microsoft and Google software isn't vibecoded slop? Certainly Microsoft has made a lot of noise about all their software being LLMgen these years, and also gotten into hot water with their users for Windows 11's crappiness.

falcor84 17d ago
Very good point. I would respond that I saw the deterioration several years before vibe coding became a thing, but maybe they did have a head start on the tech.
- Tostino 16d ago
  That was them killing the QA team that really kicked off the apparent to end users lack of quality.