Comment on Does vibe coding sort of work at all?

supakaity@piefed.blahaj.zone ⁨4⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

You know those movies where the guy gets 3 wishes from a Genie who takes malicious delight in giving them exactly what they asked for even when they're super careful like "I want a million dollars, and no I don't want it stolen from a bank, or anywhere that someone's going to come after me for having it and oh, it needs to be actual real US dollars in circulation today, and without any tax obligations, the IRS can't come after me. The SEC can't come after me." And when you think finally that you've specified everything you possibly can, the Genie summons the money and a big gust of wind blows it all out the window and down the street... Then they need to use their second wish to summon it all back in and shut the window. But then the genie summons it back into the fireplace and it all catches fire, so they have to use their third wish to bring it all out of the fireplace, so the Genie brings it all out, but it's just ashes...

Well, okay, there's probably no movie like that, but that's what programming with AI is like.

"Vibe coding" purists define it as "If you know how it works then it isn't vibe coded". And those type of coders kinda keep going at it more and more refined until they eventually get some spaghetti code that kinda does what they wanted it to do and heck, It's close enough, ship it! Then they end up being exploited by some random internet hacker.

Most of the companies that use "Agentic coding" are using it to perform rapid prototyping or templating, performing repetitive tasks quickly or generally using it like a really dumb junior programmer, that the engineer then takes their code and does the code review / testing (often again using AI tools), followed by a whole heap of fixing up, to make sure it does what it says on the box.

As stated on other comments, the amounts of money they pay for this kind of AI tooling could easily cost many thousands of dollars a month (in addition to the engineer(s) salary/salaries), but the order of magnitudes of productivity increase for that engineer make it worthwhile. But you need that experienced engineer to make it all work.

I'm not aware of any companies that are solely using coding agents in isolation to replace engineers completely. I'm sure it'll happen one day and I'll probably be forced into retirement at that point.

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