I feel like I just need somewhere to run right now and I don’t have anywhere really. I’ve started this new job about a month ago and the whole schtick was that we’d be rewriting this old app to meet a tight deadline and immediately putting it on a code freeze to make something better to replace it.
fine, I get it, tight deadlines and lots to do of course you going to tempted to use AI. when youre architecting a complex application on top of APIs that you’ve not worked with before you’re going to miss stuff anyway. But honestly, out of the four of us, two of the mobile devs are some of the biggest pig shits I’ve ever had to work with. fundamentally having to explain that this guy can’t just merge his changes into the main branch, or not to leave file spanning comments spat out by Gemini to explain the code that he’s not even bothered to read, A shit that goes beyond being in a rush to not being competent to do the job you’ve been given.
again, fine, I can get around some of this with the promise of slowing down and picking up The new projects and enforcing some higher quality standards which everyone supposedly wishes for. fine.
nope. whilst me and the other competent dev are trying to sort out the slop that has been dumped on the app in question over the last month, the deadline has passed us (something which I said was going to happen but was ignored), and the two vibe coders have complained that they “don’t have any work to do” And on now architecting the next fucking project with senior team members whilst I’m getting grilled over “why is XYZ taking so long?” because the fucking vibe code is vibe coded that you fucking hacks and you rewarded them with this new project.
it’s disheartening, because I said all of this upfront, but because I wasn’t the first person in the team out of the gate my opinions are basically worth as much as this rant will (understandably) be worth to most of you: pittance.
I’m not the best programmer on earth, not even the most experienced, but it does my fucking head in to have imposter syndrome every time I log into work every morning because there are two sodding imposters in front of me getting the credit!!! absolute dog shit.
I don’t know. round time. free Palestine and free Iran and death 2 America xxx
IDK this industry is going down the tubes. I know it feels damn good when a piece of code I’m working on finally “clicks” but I’m afraid no one values that anymore. The machines are just good enough to let your less experienced/lazy coworkers wing it and let the machine get it 90% right. That 10% will cause a very funny meltdown someday but who cares? All that matters is line go up!
But seriously, this generative AI slop is putting us out of work. Might as well use it and take the easy route because your job isn’t going to value actual quality anymore. Watch “Office Space”
Might as well use it and take the easy route because your job isn’t going to value actual quality anymore
If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em, eh?
I give 0 leeway to AI assisted coders. I get that it’s used all the time in business now and there are legitimate uses for it, but I don’t care to spend the time to try and differentiate. I regularly use /r/SelfHosted because I have my own server running two dozen different things, but if a project even hints at AI usage, it’s not touching my server.
There was recently an app, Huntarr, that showed the consequences of this garbage. I’d rather 0 solutions to a problem exist than 5 vibe coded ones these hacks think they are “helping” the community with.
There’s even a rule on that subreddit now that those projects can only be posted on Fridays (though recently dialed down/changed). It’s not enough. There needs to be anti-AI witch hunts in those spaces or else it’s akin to the Nazi Bar problem. If you allow it even a little bit, they will take and take and argue endlessly that it’s fine because they’re a professional programmer of 12 years, they just don’t know C#, blah, blah, I literally don’t care.
I’ve even used AI myself to “code” stuff like scripts that do something I will need to do once ever on my desktop. But keep that stuff on your own computer.
CPython has commits by Claude. Clang allows LLM contributions. Linux Kernel allows LLM contributions. It’s all over the place already.
CPython has commits by Claude. Clang allows LLM contributions. Linux Kernel allows LLM contributions.
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
It’s definitely impossible to avoid entirely, but I’ll minimize it as much as possible. Especially with self hosted projects, it’s pretty apparent that those most friendly to AI contributions care less about scope creep and efficient resource usage.
oh one thing, whilst the media perception of vibe coders is someone who explicitly chooses not to pay attention to the fact they are completely alienated from every technology that they are interacting with, most vibe coders are simply the dipshits who have brought themselves into a state of learned helplessness And still think they’re putting out high quality work. that’s the scary shit. enjoy
I’m not a coder can you explain what vibe coding means? Is it just using AI to code or is there more to the definition
Well, I think you could have applied it to people just using AI for assistance, but now it’s basically people straight up submitting 100% generated code. Often without even looking at, let alone understanding, what the bot spat out.
wtf. That’s just. A disaster waiting to happen surely
It really is, from both a security perspective and an efficiency one. When you write code, each line is an instruction to the computer to do something specific. Basically “Add X and Y together and give me back the result as A” would be one line, then “Show A on the screen to the user” is another for simple addition. Part of a programmer’s job is reducing the number of instructions to as few lines as possible because each line is another piece of memory stored as part of the program’s file size and another instruction sent to the processor.
The more lines of code, the more instructions you give, and the more variables you have (X, Y, and A in the above example), the more memory and processor power the computer uses. The reason something like Doom runs on pregnancy tests is because it was made in an era where the programmers were trying to slim it down as much as possible to run on a bunch of different PCs. Meanwhile, modern shooters are strangled by capitalist deadlines and crunch, so they aren’t given the time to trim down code.
I would push back a bit on “as few lines as possible” for two reasons:
- Modern compilers coupled with extended instruction sets have gotten so good that premature optimization can often make things less performant than just writing straightforward code and letting the compiler do its thing—empirical testing is a must. However, what you said is absolutely true when talking about programming in assembly and much more true when talking about old compilers (which is what programmers were dealing with in the time period you’re talking about).
- Readability is important for maintainability, so even if some convoluted one-liner is more performant, it may not be worth the maintenance headache unless it makes a significant impact on performance (certainly the case for something like Quake III’s famous fast square root!).
That said, I totally agree with the overall thrust of your comment—I love reading old assembly code and seeing how the programmers of yore were able to do so much with so little, and that spirit seems to have been completely lost in the quest for More Product. It’ll be interesting to see if the coming DRAM shortage will have any impact on that; my guess is no, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.
You might be interested in a talk I posted a while back that traces the history of object-oriented programming and how it all went wrong as well as this post about eschewing game engines. And I’m guessing you might be familiar, but Kaze Emanuar does some fascinating videos about squeezing every last bit of performance out of the N64, sparing no technical details. Oh, also this blog post from Dan Luu about web bloat. Okay, I’ll stop with the links, but it’s a topic near and dear to my heart.
I mass deleted all of my vibed code recently, it’s really good at making you feel like you’re accomplishing something but as I learned once my big project got past a certain point of complexity it just became completely unable to add new features to it without breaking everything in ways I couldn’t understand because I had offloaded all of my thinking during the dev process. I kept seeing the same bugs regress over and over again, which I realized was because the LLM was changing bits of the code that it wasn’t supposed to be working on to what it thought was correct, repeating the same mistakes over and over.
These days I think the only decent use case for LLMs is as a suped up Google search, and even then the only reason they’re good at that is because using Google manually has been enshittified by generative content.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m not a crack software guru by any means. And, I was impressed the first time I asked cline to spin up a web server with a few features and it fucking did (on http://localhost:8080/, of course). But it took me about two more iterations to come to the same conclusion you did.
AI is good at writing code that it has seen. It cannot solve new problems or make decisions based on complex criteria. There are probably vibers out there who would say, “lol, get gud at prompts, noob” but I call bullshit. And the fact that these hacks are getting recognized is infuriating and I am only consoled by the fact that, in time, the truth will become evident.
I’m a vibe scientist. If I want to do a study, I will have ChatGPT summarise every article about the topic ever written. Then I give it a blank spreadsheet with the prompt “fill in data that confirms a discovery, then summarise the discovery in a study and summarise the study for me”. During this I pause for a break and push a button that injects cat food into a feeding port in my abdomen, something ChatGPT said would make me more efficient in our world-changing scientific pursuit. I have published 200k studies today.
I just asked my chatbot to summarize all your studies in 1000 words or less. You wouldn’t believe how much concentrated knowledge I’m ingesting!
That’s the power of AI. Just this morning it told me I could become a paradigm-shifting physicist if I eat enough cat food to remove the neurotoxins from my body that make me pathetic. I’ve seen the one paragraph summary of the data- it’s legit.
It’s so annoying to review vibe coded changes. Those LLMs are really good at making superficially good looking code. Than you bother to actually dig into it, find something questionable, ask for details and find out they don’t know. Now you can either be the reason the dead line fly by or you accept code that not a single person understands.
It’s so difficult to give a shit about anything when that’s just the working environment. It’s so appealing to just put in the prompt and not even bother to even read the output since you are already checked out mentally. And in the end of the day, I’m getting asked like once a week by my boss to use the agent more.
I wonder if this is the proletarianization of software development. (I know it’s a work relationship but in some ways it didn’t feel like just “any other job” before)
Proletarianization of software development would be from computer courses being a standard part of education equivalent to language, math , etc.
LLMs is more like the mystification of it because it’s taking it from an inexact science to mystical guesswork.
