Comment on Vibe coding has turned senior devs into ‘AI babysitters,’ but they say it’s worth it | TechCrunch

BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

• Technus@lemmy.zip ⁨23⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  I’m a senior dev and I want nothing to do with AI. By the time I understand what I want well enough to describe it in a complete sentence or paragraph, I can just write the fucking code myself. I figure it out as I go.

  The whole point of having devs under you that is to be able to trust them to get the job done and do it right. You want to be able to delegate tasks to them and not have to peek over their shoulder every five fucking minutes to be certain they’re not making a mess of things.

  I seriously doubt AI will ever be able to replace that. Not until they figure out how to make it afraid of fucking up.

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  • slevinkelevra@sh.itjust.works ⁨22⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    As a senior dev I have found AI useful for auto completion and code analysis as it does find some bugs. I would never trust it with anything even remotely complex though.

    It kinda scares me that people trust it enough for “agent mode”, as giving it direct access to change stuff directly has simply put never worked.

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    • kiku@feddit.org ⁨18⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Yes. It’s extremely helpful when I’m doing a refactor and can just go TAB TAB TAB TAB Oops not that TAB TAB done. Saves me a lot of time with the boilerplate, but is very bad at the logic portions.

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      • slevinkelevra@sh.itjust.works ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        You do refactoring with auto complete?

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• rozodru@piefed.social ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  As someone right there in the trenches getting hired specifically to clean the slop up, I don't buy this survey at all and I'd be very suspicious of any "senior dev" that participated in it cause...where are they? I'm not seeing them when I go in to my clients offices because they all got axed. I do see a lot of junior prompt monkeys though.

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• BrianTheeBiscuiteer@lemmy.world ⁨21⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  If I try to get it to do more than predict the next two lines of code it’s gonna fuck something up. A nervously laughable thing I saw at work was someone using a long spec file to generate a series of other files and getting high praise for it. It was the equivalent of mustache templates but slower and with a 30% chance of spitting out garbage. There was also no way to verify if you were in that 30% zone without looking through the dozens of files it made.

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• hisao@ani.social ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  senior developers were twice as likely to put AI-generated code into production compared to junior developers, saying that the technology helped them work faster

  Perhaps senior devs are more likely to use more granular, step-by-step, controlled prompting. Asking it do write specific functions in specific ways and following specific approaches and conventions instead of just “do me an app, robot bro”.

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  • Bababasti@feddit.org ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    That’s actually how I am using AI for my work (web dev, pls don’t hate me). If I am stuck or have some tiny function missing for a task I ask AI, check their output - if it’s garbage I continue on my own again or if it’s usable I review the output and continue from there. Also, I think AI can be neat for „rubberducking“ when I am debugging some stupid shit and point me in directions I haven’t looked before.

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    • fuzzzerd@programming.dev ⁨19⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      Similar to how I have found success with it. Is it revolutionary? No, not at all. But it’s a variable sized (big for some use and nonexistent for other use) incremental tool that requires a new skill set to use effectively.

      Mix in all of the hype and its easy to see why people are confused and why some get different results.

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• victorz@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  But surely you test the code and review it, right? That’s how you reinstate trust in what it outputs?

  Disclaimer: I’ve never used AI to code, not even copilot.

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  • Serinus@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    It’ll sometimes do dumb and/or redundant or too complicated shit. Pile up a couple of those and your codebase can get unmaintainable fast.

    I find if you give it small chunks and keep an eye on it, it’s great.

    I think one of my recent prompts was “Create a procedure that creates an example configuration file with placeholder values. If a config file doesn’t exist on start, give a warning and create the example config.”

    It also works great as a replacement for an ORM.

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  • BlameTheAntifa@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    You mean rewrite it all from scratch? If you have any kind of standards that is what you end up doing. If you know what you’re doing you do it right the first time and move on. Using AI for coding it like trying to train the most inept, inexperienced intern to ever walk the earth.

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    • victorz@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      That’s what I’m afraid of, and it doesn’t seem like employers are aware of this in general. Irks me especially as a consultant.

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• gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.de ⁨11⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  The research shows that - while engineers think AI makes them more about 20% more productive - it actually causes an approximate 20% slow-down.

  AI cannot use logic or reason. Everything it outputs is a hallucination, even if it’s sometimes accurate. You cannot trust anything it outputs.

  Research shows that - while people think having more people in the household gets the housework done faster - babies actually cause an approximate 100% increase in time spent on housework.

  Children cannot use logic or reason. Everything they output is brabbling, even if it sometimes resembles actual works. You cannot trust anything they say. Parents are stupid for having them. (/s)

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  Developers see AI as a “child” that might need many years to grow up, but it’s still worth all the trouble they go through. It’s an emotional choice, not a rational one.

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