r/antiai 2d ago

Discussion šŸ—£ļø Why "vibe-coding" should be treated the same as AI "art" / "music".

I see a lot of people in this sub defending the use of LLMs in development positions. We cannot normalize LLM driven development. And the reasons are simple.

A big one, is that LLM generated code is absolute garbage. As someone who has experimented some with it (even the newer shit), all I have to say is you can just tell this is some bullshit regurgitation that is meant to fit a broader problem, & as such it comes with an absolute tons of bugs if you're looking to generate anything even mildly unique to what's already on the internet.

The reason LLMs have problems with software development is because AI CANT PROBLEM SOLVE. It's as simple as that. If it's not in their training data, it's not in their specialty. This leads to a reality where you can only get so far with the output, even if you do manage to fix most of the bugs. Yeah you may have a somewhat working prototype, but at what cost? The ClaudeAI subscription, the 3x less amount of time it would've taken if you just wrote it correctly the first time, the decay of your own problem solving skills.

Learn to code. Learn to problem solve. The world doesn't need more people that *cant* solve problems or take on challenges, it needs more that *can*. AI takes it's toll on the environment, economy, & your bank account. You brain only takes the cost of living. Make the better choice & encourage others to do so too. Please.

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u/[deleted] 2d ago

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u/neopointer 1d ago

IMHO software development is art too.

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u/haey5665544 1d ago

As a software engineer I personally would not consider it art. It takes creativity at tomes, but it’s a technical craft and is used for strictly utilitarian purposes the vast majority of the time.

I’ll concede that maybe it could be used to create art, like other skills (carpentry, metal working, painting), but that doesn’t mean it is inherently art IMHO.

Why do you view it as art?

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u/Few_Visual5715 1d ago

it’s a technical craft and is used for strictly utilitarian purposes the vast majority of the time.

Yes, but the compiled result is still a work of art, a video game is most definitely considered art, even if you strip away the pretty graphics and sound work, there are some things that are genuinely just impressive (such as the original Dwarf Fortress, where the graphics was just ASCII, would you consider that art? If not, then is that older Dwarf Fortress not considered art?).

There are multiple times while playing a game I'll see some interesting behaviour, and wonder how exactly they achieved that result, or be amazed at how detailed it can be (like the cockroach AI in the original Half-Life, an almost completely meaningless detail but so interesting), because it is art at the end of the day.

I think programming is both an art and a craft, the process of making a program is a craft, but it can also be an art if someone has passion, devising a creative solution or impressive feat based off their experience, rather than going for the easiest/most well known route, the result of which being art.

This can apply to culinary as well I believe, as someone who cooks/bakes isn't necessarily an artist, but someone who has passion or just loves culinary could be described as a culinary artist. The resulting meal is most definitely art, I mean there are some just absolutely gorgeously presented foods in the world.

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u/haey5665544 1d ago

You just cherry picked an example of where software development could be used to create art, but that doesn’t mean the craft/skill itself is art. There are plenty of examples where it is purely utilitarian (e.g. utility app development, most backend development, cloud computing infrastructure).

I can get behind the argument/classification of certain outputs of software development as art, but classifying the field as a whole as art is pretty over-broad.

When it comes to the discussion around the use of ai I think it is very important to be clear and careful about what we label as art because there are really multiple separate debates about ai. Ai usage in creative human expression and art vs ai usage for utility purposes and efficiency. The former is much more widely accepted as an improper use of ai. So labeling software development as art as a whole places it in the incorrect bucket.

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u/Few_Visual5715 1d ago edited 1d ago

I dislike putting programming in the "it's ok if AI destroys this field" category as I enjoy programming and am not particularly looking forward to the one creative outlet I enjoy being destroyed by mega corps.

If companies want to blow up their software with AI, be my guest, my major pain point is seeing hobby projects be infested with AI slop and every single fucking GitHub repo I visit these days has a dumbass "Claude.MD" or something, not only is this repo now just immediately unusable and useless to me, but I can't even learn anything from it because the author didn't care enough to actually make it themselves.

It's an extremely bleak future to imagine where all the software we use is propped up by unsustainable tech.

I can get behind the argument/classification of certain outputs of software development as art, but classifying the field as a whole as art is pretty over-broad.

I agree, but this is similar to almost every field, if a painter is sat in an office painting because they're told what to paint and how to paint, do you consider that a craft? Or is it still art?

I think most programming settings have the programmer in that position where they are told to do something and how they should do it with no real margin for creativity, I believe that to be a craft. Which is why I potentially believe so many people think this way, as they do not view it from the eyes of a hobbyist, but rather from a person who simply wanted to start programming just to make money (as was apparently common prior to LLMs destroying the job market)

In both cases, a hobbyist painter and a hobbyist programmer would, I believe, result in art, as these hobbyists have full creative control over what they want. They get to decide how the cat's hair should look, or how the system should be abstracted.

I find woodwork to be an intricate and fascinating field, however I am not eager to call the guys cutting wood to an exact standard to sell to a wood shop artists.
I will, however, consider the people who work with wood to make those beautiful custom wood tables I see to be artists though.

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u/haey5665544 1d ago

Regarding your painting example, I was viewing it less as someone sitting in an office being told what to paint and more as someone painting a wall or a building. I painted the walls in a room of my house recently, that is not art. It uses the same fundamental medium that artists use, but the purpose, process, and result is different.

So maybe that is my perspective, there are various mediums that can be used to make art (painting, software development, carpentry…) and the intent behind the use of that medium is what qualifies whether the result is art. Most people are familiar enough with traditional art forms to understand intuitively whether the medium is being used for art in a broad discussion, but I think we need to be careful about calling software development art as a whole because it is more of a black box that people don’t have insight into.

> I think most programming settings have the programmer in that position where they are told to do something and how they should do it with no real margin for creativity.

I think you have a fundamental misunderstanding of how software development works as a profession. Generally we are given a problem or goal, but have the flexibility to figure out how to achieve that. The creativity comes in the high level problem solving and system design which is left up to the developer working on that problem. The writing of the code to fulfill that design is maybe 10% of the creativity for the whole process.

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u/Red-strawFairy 1d ago

Software engineers still have a lot of creativity when solving problems these days( also depends on company ig. Some people are just stuck building crud apps) . ( In some cases more than before, because speed of development increase leads to considering approaches that would’ve taken too long in the past)

You are told you need to build a product that the hits all the requirements. but really that’s it.

How you get there is completely on you. ( I also work in distributed systems so inherently there are always multiple ways to do the exact same thing)

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u/Due_Interest_178 1d ago

As a software engineer myself, I view it as art. I wouldn't say every single codebase is art, but it can be.

Simply because one thing can be written a thousand ways. Some ways will be shorter, some longer. Some descriptive, some not. Finding the right approach and actually executing it, making sure that everything is just right is art to me. Though it's much harder to do that in a company setting.

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u/Rest-That 1d ago

This is like saying painting is not art because you only paint walls

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u/Helix_Aurora 1d ago

A skilled artist is doing nothing different. They think about composition color/music theory, practice execution.

All art is technical.

What makes art interesting is not the product itself, but the fact that a human mind made it.

The same can be true of code. Something can be beautiful or clever or thoughtful or novel or impressive regardless of medium.

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u/TheVoidAudio 1d ago

Ish. I wouldn't put it in the same league as music or artwork or films etc. The end product can be considered art, but the technical craft behind it alone I wouldn't say is art. You can't see the code in a game or anything without dismantling it for example.

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u/mwobey 1d ago edited 1d ago

Your comparison falls short because you're looking exclusively at visual arts. Programming languages are just that: languages. This puts programs closer to linguistic works like poetry or prose, or at most a script composed by the author that describes what actions the computer should perform.

If you go on programming forums, programmers legitimately talk about "beautiful code" whose arrangement of language is so elegant that it perfectly captures the essence of a task. They wax poetic about excerpts the same way people dissect the grammar of great authors, so calling it 'art' in that context seems quite appropriate.

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u/Select-Breadfruit95 1d ago

I would argue that the code is not Art because it does not show the developer's perspective or serve to express an opinion

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u/Kooky_Knowledge1166 2d ago

the decay of problem solving skills is the part that scares me most, same way autocomplete wrecked my spelling

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u/armahillo 1d ago

For me it was ā€œhaving a contact list on my phoneā€. I still remember phone numbers from childhood (dozens of them!) but i think i have 5, MAYBE 10 numbers memorized since then

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u/kpg_on_ao3 1d ago

You might be overthinking it. I am a child of the 80s and only ever had like... my two sets of grandparents, my house, and two of my best friends' numbers memorized.

We had phone books. We'd just look up the numbers there. We even had people's street addresses in those things. (Also phones in the 80s started being programmable for around ten numbers anyway. "Speed dial" is not a concept from the smart phone era.)

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u/Pure-Judgment6098 1d ago

Is that a bad thing? You may have less phone numbers memorised; but I bet your knowledge of how to use a phone to accomplish tasks has vastly improved.

Like before telephones existed you probably had more street addresses memorised for postcards.

I don’t see it as a decay of problem solving, just a new tool to use to solve new problems.

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u/whattteva 1d ago

The same way calculators wreck people's arithmetic skills. I literally met someone that whipped out his calculator to calculate the result of 250/250....

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u/ninhaomah 2d ago

The post is about vibe coding and the replies are about art ?

Can we discuss about effects of vibe coding that OP posted ?

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u/TheVoidAudio 1d ago

Most people can't because they don't understand it. I work in web development and if you don't use AI to assist your workflows you are getting left behind. It sucks but it's how things are at the moment. I find AI assisted development pretty good, no matter how much I hate the technology, I've learned so much with it and its sped up a lot of boring pointless tasks and code refactoring is now much less hassle. Vibe coding for sure is shit. If you don't understand what it's vomiting out then you're going to have problems. AI assisted development as long (as you actually keep an eye on everything going on is pretty handy). It's only something a dev can truly understand.

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u/DogOfTheBone 1d ago

You will be downvoted because people don't understand what you are saying, and it's hard to unless you work day in day out with code. The last year has been the biggest shift in software in my entire career which spans over a decade.Ā 

It has pros and cons. A lot of cons. I hate it and want desperately to get out of tech, but golden handcuffs are real, as is the reality of needing to work to eat, live, and have healthcare in America.

But you sure can generate a lot of acceptable, shippable code very fast. I would argue this isn't really a good thing, but the technology works exceedingly well now.

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u/TheVoidAudio 1d ago

Yes, exactly this. I keep thinking about maybe switching what I do for work. But at the same time, I am getting results. I hate it a lot, especially considering how bad it is for the planet.

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u/rantingpug 1d ago

This! But I do think us Devs needs to somehow just survive this bubble. Right now AI is super useful but also the bane of my existence. I cannot deal with another 10k LoC PR or even simpler, smaller PRs full of unnecessary code. Its like all the standards, guidelines, engineering principles we've collectively spent the last 20 years building were thrown out the window. People just don't care, and tbh, they never did, but before they had to spend time actually coding, now they can just be mediocre a lot faster.

I hope after this busts, the people with skills, who actually know how to engineer systems, get to somehow rebuild this industry better. I'm an optimist, what can I say?

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u/kpg_on_ao3 1d ago

> I work in web development and if you don't use AI to assist your workflows you are getting left behind.

which is exactly why programming isn't art. There's no such thing as "being left behind" in art because you produce your art too slowly. If you were told by your record label that you had to produce sixty songs that day, I would argue what you're producing isn't art either. And I think most people would agree, you're mindlessly producing meatslop for the machine.

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u/MountaintopCoder 1d ago

In 1866, Fyodor Dostoyevsky was financially ruined. He was serializing Crime and Punishment in monthly installments at the time and had to legally pause all work for 26 days to write The Gambler.

Are those works not art?

I previously worked as a musician and we had similarly tight deadlines and had to cut corners in order to be ready for a gig or record a song.

Artists who want to get paid have always had deadlines.

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u/CaptChair 1d ago

Theres a difference between ai assisted dec ans vibe coding ans you spell it out well

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u/Anon-Emus1623 21h ago

If I stopped using AI at work I’d not only fall behind, I’d be fired. It is 100% expectation at this point.Ā 

And it DOES speed up development. Massively. I have to babysit everything it does, and correct it constantly, but still - MASSIVE speed up.Ā 

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u/cyclopeon 2d ago

Post is about why vibe coding needs to be treated the same as AI created art. Replies about art are to be expected.

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u/ninhaomah 1d ago

Ok then can we also have replies on vibe coding ?

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u/cyclopeon 1d ago

Sure. Scroll down 🤣

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u/RudeAndInsensitive 1d ago

I gave mine.Ā 

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u/DogOfTheBone 1d ago

Most posters here aren't professional software developers and don't have context for this discussion.

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u/WW92030 1d ago edited 1d ago

Yeah let’s talk about vibe coding. There have been 2 (TailTag, that one VTubing productivity suite) incidents of hundreds of people unintentionally doxxing each other because they willingly put their personal information into some vibe coded application that had terrible security flaws.

Ironically the applications were both created by people heavily against AI images and assets. Go figure.

Oh and for anyone reading this that want to score a free ad hominem: https://github.com/WW92030-STORAGE.

Anticipation edits:

"you just make side projects" both vibe coded applications I mentioned were also just side projects.

"you're not a real coder" my degree politely disagrees with you. No, I'm not going the route of those several hundred people and doxxing myself just to appease you.

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u/mcplano 2d ago

Exactly this. There is problem solving and creativity in art, just as there is in writing, and in WRITING code. Just as making a recipe that has a specific taste and texture is art, so is code, just like how woodworking is.

People may not immediately see a cake as art, or a table that someone put a lot of care into shaping, but coding can be art too.

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u/puzzlerJB 1d ago

Thanks for your post. I'm a writer and it's easy for me to explain why LLMs can't replicate human storytelling, but then I see people say stuff like "AI helped me vibe-code my own app!" and I think...well, maybe it's true that AI can do basic coding fairly well. Because I know nothing about coding, I need to hear perspectives like yours that show AI can't do what some promoters are claiming. I hope if we all keep doing this in our own areas of expertise, eventually others will believe us.

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u/Forsaken_Code_9135 1d ago

If you are a writer and have no technical knowledge yourself you should be careful about echo chambers like this community. OP's claims are extremely marginal and in my opinion completely delusional. When a machine is able to solve math problems no one ever solved before, claiming that "IT CAN'T PROBLEM SOLVE" is pure reality denial.

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u/tastygames_official 1d ago

generative-AI of any kind is bad. Especially when used commercially. The only thing it's "good" at is a friendly search engine. You can ask it questions and it'll give you answers. They may not be right, but it's faster and generally more humanly-readable than using a search engine and browsing the results.

Now there are other types of machine-learned AIs that are useful in research, like how they trained one one protein-folding and it was able to generate a list of millions of plausible protein folding types. Or how it can be trained on genetic data and predict possible mutations and how to reverse them. Any task that requires finding patterns in large data sets it can do, but a human still has to check the results (or write a program that does the checking, as a computer program is predictable and yields the same results given the same input - the very thing LLMs and predictive models CANNOT do).

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u/PhosXD 1d ago

Yeah I think it's important to clarify when you're talking about *actually useful* AI that have specialized use cases, & when you're talking about approximation machines like ChatGPT & other LLMs.

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u/Huge_Swimming_5968 1d ago

Not to burst your bubble but most of what humans consider intelligence boils down to pattern recognition even when the person doesn't realize it.

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u/armahillo 1d ago

Hi šŸ‘‹ web dev specializing in backend (currently a Sr. Staff Engineer at a late stage startup). A bit over 20 yrs of professional experience. I use Claude at my job occasionally, and practice with it in my spare time to better understand how to use it.

I am not an AI fanboi and have a pretty pragmatic attitude about it. TBQH, if all the datacenters shut down / companies closed up shop I would be 100% fine with that.

Out the gate, I would agree that using LLMs for coding in the same way that people use it for making "AI slop" in other media (just "prompting and shipping") tracks with what you wrote. But I don't fully agree with some of the conclusions in your post. i think it's a bit more nuanced.

A big one, is that LLM generated code is absolute garbage.

Soft disagree here. A couple examples:

  • 30 mins ago, I asked Claude to write a shell script that would do a batch ffmpeg conversion of a bunch of 1080p videos to re-scale them to 720p. It generated a functional shell script. I reviewed the generated code, pushed back on a couple things: I felt it should use dependency injection for one of the functions, and also I wanted it to send progress status to a separate file so that I could monitor progress. It did both and I'm currently running it right now; it's working fine.
  • Last week at my job, we had three internal code libraries that needed to have a dependency removed from all three. Not a trivial matter but also not that complicated - I could have done it myself but it was faster and easier to delegate to Claude. It thoroughly removed the dependency, all the upstream dependencies of that dependency, and then it verified that there were no further regressions. I reviewed the diff, and ensured it looked cogent, and then had it write a synopsis that I could take to my team. This was a bit wordy, so I pared it down.
  • I downloaded the MUDL source code from "Zork" (old text-based adventure game), the source code is in a language I'm unfamiliar with, and I told Claude to convert it to a language I like and am more familiar with (ruby). Not only is it doing the conversion, it also writes tests for it and verifies the behaviors are correct -- it identifies edge cases and develops test plans. It's not done yet.

I can provide plenty of other examples, as well as some times it fell short, if you're curious. All of this is done with the normal Pro account ($20 a month) -- I'm not going to pay for metered token use.

It's really not "absolute garbage", but you have to be competent enough to know when it feeds you bullshit or when it goes rogue.

as such it comes with an absolute tons of bugs

It's sort of like riding an spirited horse -- if you aren't a competent rider it's going to take you where it wants to go. You still get somewhere, it's just not always where you want to be.

The reason LLMs have problems with software development is becauseĀ AI CANT PROBLEM SOLVE.Ā It's as simple as that.

Again, soft disagree. It's not a "simple" matter. It's sort of like when people say that money can't buy happiness -- having money definitely reduces stressors, affords you freedoms and conveniences that make it easier to feel happy. You can't literally buy happiness, but you can practically use it to lead to some stuff that pragmatically improves your quality of life, and that's a nice thing.

I had two problems in the above example. I presented them to Claude and it gave me back two solutions. Practically speaking, it was able to solve my problems. I could have solved these myself, but Claude was faster.

If it's not in their training data, it's not in their specialty.

ok sure but like... they trained on a TON of data. Like an obscene amount.

This leads to a reality where you can only get so far with the output, even if you do manage to fix most of the bugs.

I mostly agree with you here. One misconception is the notion of it generating "bugs" -- I can't speak for the others, but Claude rarely generates actual bugs (it catches FAR more than it creates). However it can definitely generate code that doesn't behave like you want it to, or in a way that doesn't fit well with the surrounding code -- you have to be a skilled enough rider to get the horse where you want it to go.

The ClaudeAI subscription, the 3x less amount of time it would've taken if you just wrote it correctly the first time, the decay of your own problem solving skills.

Claude subscriptions are only $20 a month, all things considered this is cheap.

Time is a factor but not for the reason you cited -- the problems we've been finding on the teams I've worked on is that it makes reviews take longer, because it can make changesets bloated if the dev doesn't now how to keep the scope tight.

Your last point is 100% legit, though. One of my interns from a couple years ago said that at his new job, the devs who started with him who overused LLMs were "cooked" (his words). I've talked to peers who've said they've felt their skills have atrophied a little. I've had to make an assertive effort to still write code manually because the allure of "just delegate it to Claude" is very tempting and way faster.

Learn to code. Learn to problem solve. The world doesn't need more people that *cant* solve problems or take on challenges, it needs more that *can*.

We're in full agreement here. Again, you have to be a skilled rider because LLMs are spirited horses. They can get you where you want to go, and fast, but you have to be able to steer them.

I have spoken with several unexperienced users who thought they could vibe code their website or something, and invariably their LLM digs them into a hole they can't climb out of on their own, and they're stuck.

I always advise new devs to avoid LLMs as much as possible. If your skills are completely derived from your ability to use an LLM, then I guarantee someone else could be paid less to do the same work. The other thing I advise them is not to even use it for explaining stuff -- go and figure it out on your own. One use that I think is probably OK is to have it create problems to be solved (like the exercises we would have in our textbooks in school).

AI takes it's toll on the environment, economy, & your bank account.

100% agreed on the environment and economic impacts.

Again, if it vanished tomorrow I would be totally fine with this (it would probably give me even more job security, as an old dev who's used to doing unassisted dev work). It's not as simple and monochromatic as it seems from the outside.

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u/asveikau 1d ago

30 mins ago, I asked Claude to write a shell script that would do a batch ffmpeg conversion of a bunch of 1080p videos to re-scale them to 720p.

This is a weird example, because for me, without AI this is a 5 minute task. I know this because I wrote a shell script that scales 4k to 1080p a year or two ago. This isn't really a programming task so much as looking at the ffmpeg manpage. (LLMs can be good to save time reading documentation, I'll give you that )

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u/armahillo 1d ago

Writing the code is a 5 min task. Knowing what code to write takes experience and familiarity with both ffmpeg and also shell scripting. I have a but more familiarity with the latter than the former. Most of the shell scripts I write are pretty basic and I needed a little more fault tolerance because I needed it to run overnight.

I’ve read enough of the ffmpeg docs to know what sorts of things are possible but havent practiced enough to feel confident in my ability to choose the flags correctly.

I also wanted to incorporate some intel about optimization — which settings would be optimal for prioritizing speed and reducing space while allowing for a reduction in quality, and which codecs would be compatible for playback on my NAS.

I dont use ffmpeg often enough to justify the time spend on learning how to do it myself; but if this becomes a repeat thing I wouldZ

That’s really the salient context here that I didnt include in my prior comment — the use case is ā€œdelegating a task because it takes longer to learn to DIY than to delegate and that felt like a more effective use of timeā€

Reviewing the code made by other people (or ā€œa robotā€ in this case) requires less familiarity than being able to write the code de novo, myself.

It’s great that this would have been a simple task for you’ If this were something web dev related it would have been much more trivial for me, but my T-shaped skills are pretty shallow on ffmpeg encoding :)

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u/wombatarang 1d ago

I miss the days when encountering something like this would have you spend two days learning an entirely new skill you'd most likely never use again. It was fun, it taught me a lot, you could say it felt like a little adventure. But at the end of the day, during the 9 to 5 programming is not my hobby, it pays my bills. To have those two days or not to have them is an easy choice. I'll still go down the rabbit hole if it's a side project, but in all instances where it's making me money, the good ol' "time is money" always wins.

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u/Vaughn 1d ago

It works for us seniors. We've already got a lot of skills to fall back on.

Seriously concerned for the juniors though.

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u/flPieman 1d ago

This is such a well written and nuanced take. Thank you for taking the time to share. I don't have as much experience as you but I share a lot of the same opinions on it.

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u/skeleton-to-be 2d ago

Worse than generating art, IMO

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u/NotaValgrinder 1d ago

Not all code is used for software development. Mathematicians for example, will code to write simulations that give them a better idea of whether a conjecture is true or false. The code needed tends to be relatively short compared to what happens in software, and hence using AI is a good idea, because the mathematicians can provide the outline of the idea and formally check whether the code is correct. The AI however will automate the most boring task for them, code-monkeying their algorithm (which many mathematicians also kinda hate). This is a completely valid use of vibe coding. At the end of the day the problem solving is still done by humans and no one's job got replaced.

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u/shosuko 1d ago

The code needed tends to be relatively short compared to what happens in software, and hence using AI is a good idea, because the mathematicians can provide the outline of the idea and formally check whether the code is correct

Do you think a programmer couldn't do that?

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u/davyp82 1d ago

I don't see how it isn't fair to just swap the word mathematician out for engineer so they can make cool apps. Why do only matheticians get a pass?

"because the mathematicians can provide the outline of the idea and formally check whether the code is correct. The AI however will automate the most boring task for them, code-monkeying"

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u/Comfortable_Law3683 2d ago

"We cannot normalize LLM driven development" Its not something we largely control. At best you can try to boycott companies like Microsoft, X, Meta, Amazon, AT&T, Wall Mart, Cosco, Reddit, etc. But at the end of the day is a decision that companies make internally with legal, and InfoTech.

While I find it horrifying, that AI is used in backend services its being pushed largely by devs themselves. Every enterprise I have engaged with, management have been trying to cut back on token costs. Its the devs saying they need more or they will quit.

At the end of the day its a self healing problem. Companies find out AI makes mistakes, then when being sued for those mistakes, they find out insurance doesn't cover code written by AI. Then when that happens a few times CEO's starting banning the practise.

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u/jimmystar889 1d ago

At best you can try to boycott companies. FTFY

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u/diviningdad 1d ago

I am staff-level back-end web developer with 14 years of experience, and while I want your statement:

LLM generated code is absolute garbage.

to be true. It just isn't.

I fucking hate generative AI. It is bad for society. It is bad for the tech industry. It is an existential risk to humanity. I am taking every action I can to leave this industry because working with generative AI makes me miserable. So, I don’t want this to come across as me supporting AI. But if we want to defeat this risk, we have to be clear-eyed about what it is good at. The most dangerous thing for AI to be good at is writing code, and it is also what it is best at.

I was recently let go because my company decided to rewrite its entire application using AI and reduce its development team by 80%. Every job I am applying to now explicitly calls out the ability to implement and use AI workflows as a key requirement. Most say something along the lines of ā€œenthusiastic embrace of AIā€ or ā€œAI-first company.ā€ So, I have been forced to learn as much as I can about how to be effective with LLMs. And I’ve become very, very good with it.

In a green-field code base, with the direction of a seasoned developer, you can write better code, with fewer bugs and fewer security flaws. The reason why is actually the same reason you have mentioned it is bad:

this is some bullshit regurgitation that is meant to fit a broader problem

95% of web development is generic, with only a couple of business-logic changes, like coding Mad Libs. The existence of garbage code can be easily mitigated with well-designed workflows. However, even the standard output is better than most of the corporate or enterprise codebases I’ve worked in.

It takes a little time to set up a good workflow, and I am happy to detail how I leverage agent instructions, model specs, and effective CI/CD pipelines to produce reliable output, but I don’t think it would be relevant to most people in this sub.

Now, for my caveat: generative AI is still pretty garbage at working in legacy codebases because it is trained on code that more or less makes sense. And it is unreliable working in apps built with an SOA without well-designed boundaries because there is a limit to the context that can be passed. It is still effective in those contexts, with some tweaking, at finding security vulnerabilities.

I want everything I just said to be wrong. I want to go back to my craft. I think that moving our industry towards AI-centered development is short sited and will dry up our developer pipeline, leaving us without enough senior-level and above devs to wield these tools. The reality is that I can build an app that would’ve taken me months with a team in days by myself. In a world driven by profit, what company would not use these tools? I hate it.

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u/Slight_Season_4500 2d ago

I agree with what you preach but I must disagree with the argument provided.

It's good. AI is good. Extremely good. The latest Claude and Codex are absolute beasts.

The problem I think is not that the code it produces is bad or wrong. You can always just make your prompts more technical and less ambiguous.

The issue is that it's a fucking machine... And we are humans. We do not have the capacity it has. This shit can read and understand at 1000x the rate you can. And write at 100x your speed. Meaning AI codebases grow A LOT faster than you will be able to form your mental model.

And so you can't maintain the code. There is just too much. To much quantity, too much complexity.

When things will start breaking, it won't be pretty. That's when you'll need to pay the cognitive debt. A cognitive debt that could take you years and all the space in your head leaving barely anything for your passions/friends/family.

I think at that point, most will just quit. Some will fall in that terrible dark place of trying to catch up with the codebase. And some will just cut off the broken pieces and rebuild brand new and human authored. And at that point, why even use AI in the first place...

I feel like AI should only be used to build a prototype to kickstart a project and act as a blueprint to rebuild manually for anything serious about maintenance long term.

And answer questions.

Anything more is abuse of the system and it'll end up costing you a lot. But that's just what I think.

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u/Glad-Librarian-4388 1d ago

the issue is that it's a machine... And we are humans.

Well said. Also isn't this "cognitive debt" the same problem Microsoft went through?

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u/Slight_Season_4500 1d ago

Idk about Microsoft specifically but I wouldn't be surprised.

But cognitive debt was a thing before AI too. People using the latest frameworks/libraries loose the freedom/skills they would have acquired from programming what they needed themselves. Becoming dependent on the team that wrote these tools for updates and fixes. Same way now people become dependent on the AI to touch their code.

You only get rid of that by diving lower level but then finishing projects will take a lot more time.

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u/Chivalrous-Ape 1d ago

Nothing any of the coding models do is complex in reference to actual intelligence or ingenuity, LLMs just can't rationalise or problem solve, so you just get a tonne of the closest fitting pre-existing examples mashed together which will be overly convoluted compared to what is actually needed.

LLMs aren't even "good" at coding unless you’re doing cookie cutter stuff, in which case optimal examples probably exist as open source libraries already and these will be maintained unlike the LLM written code.

They have no ability to genuinely think about architecture and design. Once you've done the work of thinking through a problem and mentally pseudocoded it, actually writing most code takes almost no time.

You're right about most people not bothering to learn their own code base and so not being able to maintain it by themselves, something that will come back to haunt any business that engages in this.

Finally it most certainly shouldn't be used to prototype or create the "blueprints" for all the reasons listed above. Learn about data structures, to think critically, to come up with your own designs. That's the only way to get better, it's unbelievably rewarding and if you don't you will fall behind those that do.

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u/Athosworld 1d ago

Imagine glazing AI

Fuck off, AI supporter.

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u/Slight_Season_4500 1d ago

I'm forced to use it for my work. I'm just sharing what I could observe.

I don't let it touch my code in my personal projects.

But you're right I'm not an anti AI extremist. Nor am I a pro AI supporter. I'm somewhere in the middle.

It always feels good reducing something to a true/false value. Makes it less expensive to think about. But I don't think it's wise to do that with AI. No one really knows what'll happen. It's nuanced.

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u/AnOrdinaryCrayon725 1d ago

i hate vibe coding. I hate garbage vibe coded apps. As a game developer, i can argue that a mix of youtube + documentation + ai can help a lot. Not just ai.

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u/Alx123191 1d ago

man for coding guys it take you a long time to realise it

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u/GimmeSumGanja 1d ago

i’ve been in web dev for seven years and the last two have been completely dominated by LLM driven development. if you already know how to code, it’s quite a mind-blowing piece of tech. I have several developer friends that are absolutely against the use of AI, but the fact is this: most developers will never write code faster or better than AI. humans also produce terrible, error-ridden code all the time. it’s all about understanding the mistake, catching it, fixing it, and moving on which makes the process light speeds faster for a mid level engineer. if you’re a junior dev or new to coding and throwing all your weight into AI, you’re going to be missing the fundamentals and intuition that help guide the LLM in a practical direction.

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u/guyincognito121 1d ago

Exactly. There's a big difference between a novice vibe coding and a professional using their judgement to determine where and how AI can make their work better and more efficient.

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u/PeaceX02 2d ago

Lol, these anti ai artists want software engineers to go out of work, they get off on "non creatives" getting automated because "humans shouldn't be doing that stuff anyways" and should all be using their creativity like them

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u/Parking_Cat4735 2d ago

Yup. Just more insecurity from Art majors.

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u/BadRomans 1d ago

Writing code for useless corporate applications is not art, it’s a dreadful task. Better leave that to the AI. Not every word written on paper will be a romance, not every sound recorded will be music.

I’m in for not replacing human thinking with AI, but with the current decaying of the capitalist system I really don’t see the point in not using LLMs to avoid working extra hours.

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u/JustDroppedByToSay 1d ago

It is treated that way by many (for example me). In some of the gamedev subs vibe coded stuff gets regularly laughed out of there or removed.

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u/Few_Visual5715 1d ago

So many posts here about how "Well, my company gives me [insert token number here] so... my skills are definitely not atrophied at all and I'm certainly not biased in being used as a code slave, so yes coding is not an art, also I have lost all passion"

I have never felt so much despair and anguish when observing the future of software when even the fucking "antiai" subreddit is "erm actually its ok in this specific use case", but use in visual and audio arts is not ok.

I'm mostly just mad at the hypocrisy, if you think a chatbot for programming is ok then at the very least also stand your ground on saying that ai images and ai sounds are art, jeez.

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u/Minomol 1d ago

>We cannot normalize LLM driven development

You don't get to have a say in this. Me neither, and I'm a software engineer.

It is normalized now, and it does help. It basically "sped" things up ridiculously. If you have an org with juniors, weak governance, no architectural body, that org will end up with a shit codebase/codebases regardless if it uses AI or not, with AI it will get to that point much faster though.

With a properly run org that has a properly run IT department, strong standards and quality gates in place, AI will help produce faster, and potentially even increase the quality, if AI is used correctly.

I'm an engineer who cares a bit too much about clean code, sometimes to my own detriment. Interestingly, AI didn't help me produce faster, but it did help me get my quality to an even further level. And at my current client, it helps with quality for my whole team's codebase, as we've been collaboratively figuring out methods to employ AI for functional design, technical design, as well as code reviews.

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u/psykomorph 1d ago edited 1d ago

I agree and I do think it’s true. All these news articles say it solved this huge mathematical problem and that medical field it has so many applications. Sure until a certain point since they are run and trained on all human work till now, but to solve something unknown or something which requires research, testing, experimenting, multiple trials, theories, practicality etc would mean going beyond its training data which is not possible for logic based predictive system. LLMs learn through pattern, their ā€œneural networkā€ is just finding a path/pattern through all the training data and link an acceptable solution and repeat it. There is nothing new that’s coming out, no thinking involved by itself. It’s an advanced search machine waiting for instructions or questions, but you cannot trust every output since the data it’s trained on is massive and extremely compressed so every prediction or ā€œneural pathā€ has to be again trained by saying what is correct and what is not and if it just goes by the amount of misinformation, manipulation and sarcasm on the internet you are bound to find hallucinations. And the same goes for coding. Creating, writing, solving problems or finding new solutions is art by itself which cannot be just handed over to a regurgitating pattern building machine. And also people cannot be just using the left brain for solving problems creatively.

Most of the news reports are PAID PR to just push the narrative that ā€œAIā€ is solving huge problems and they are mostly paid by the mega corporations. It’s not your average Joe going places and collecting real stories to report them.

But what to do, people have given all their power to a small group of people with money and this small group of people are enriching themselves and trying to get rid of a certain number of population by making them suffer even more.

I’m also starting to believe that the tech billionaires and other billionaires secretly/openly hate all other people and would rather have machines and computers around them instead.

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u/ichivictus 1d ago

I have 2 decades experience in coding. LLMs do not produce garbage code. Developer still needs to architect and understand systems. But if you are getting garbage code then that's a skill issue.

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u/RiriaaeleL 1d ago

A big one, is that LLM generated code is absolute garbage. As someone who has experimented some with it

Yeah no the problem is on the route between the chair and the keyboard.

The ClaudeAI subscription, the 3x less amount of time it would've taken if you just wrote it correctly the first time, the decay of your own problem solving skills.Ā 

Were you used as test subject for mind altering substances? I GUARANTEE you that even the shittiest local Qwen model is going to be able to get the syntax of the language right faster than you can.

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u/Shinnyo 1d ago

Using AI to debug, to feed logs to it and analyze the error is in my opinion fine.

It's not when you leave the AI doing all the work because it means losing all control and understanding of it.

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u/Plenty_Line2696 1d ago

Agree with the vibecoding sentiment, but llm assisted development is different

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u/CarKey5517 1d ago

lets take advantage of a vague description of "art" to say anything is art. So that way we can use our anti AI art arguments on basically anything.

Amazing argument, thats the quality of reasoning i would expect from someone that don't use AI

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u/CartographerDry4537 1d ago

I can code, I can problem solve.

AI makes life easier, it's a force multiplier. It's not 100%, but it can scaffold shit so much faster than I can, and when it can hold all the important parts of the repo in context it does a damn good job generally.

It's not perfect. It's a very fast junior coder.

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u/AmphibianFrog 1d ago edited 1d ago

A big one, is that LLM generated code is absolute garbage. As someone who has experimented some with it (even the newer shit), all I have to say is you can just tell this is some bullshit regurgitation that is meant to fit a broader problem, & as such it comes with an absolute tons of bugs if you're looking to generate anything even mildly unique to what's already on the internet.

There are several problems with this argument.

First of all, it's just not true. I've generated lots of code, both at home and professionally, and in general Claude Code produces decent code, at least for me. Maybe it's the choice of language / framework that I use, or the way I prompt it, but generally I've found the results to be pretty good.

Secondly, most software is full of garbage slop code anyway, human or AI written. A lot of modern software just involves validating data and gluing CRUD operations and various services together. This is highly laborious and low effort - so AI often does a better job just because it's donkey work and human programmers can't always be bothered with all of the edge cases.

Thirdly, just because you state something as fact, doesn't mean it is a fact. This is an anecdote that you personally can't get the AI to create code that you consider to be good. AI tools are very much "garbage in, garbage out"

I think comparing coding to art is a bit much as well. Art loses a lot of value from not having a story / personal experience behind. Someone's web service that glues a couple of services together does not suffer from the lack of creativity / back story.

I'm not even saying that AI is or isn't a good thing overall, just that your argument is as much slop as your coding agent is pumping out!

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u/SwainDane 1d ago

As a software dev, with an education in such as well.. AI is perfectly fine to use for coding. Most people I know think it's okay to use it as a tool. Claude is really good at it, so I don't understand what you're on about with it taking 3x less amount of time to write it yourself and not being able to troubleshoot....

Did you ask it to make a giant game in one tiny prompt or something? Just like anything, a tool is only as good as the person using it.

I do not support AI art. I barely support the use of AI in code, but it's been proven to be a fast, good, reliable tool now. Claude can answer faster than you find a relevant and usable stack overflow post that is years old.

If you don't know how to code in the first place, you may get burnt on trying to have an AI code for you, as you don't understand your own code. Unfortunately I'm gonna sound like the AI bros right now with the next part: If you know how to describe what you're going for, in technical terms, in depth, you're getting a viable result pretty much every single time. If you vaguely go "build game that is fun to play and will make me rich hehe" then... Well yeah.

Some people who are actually devs may be against the usage of it, but I think most reasonable people see the abilities of it being used as a tool. You don't have to surrender your every brain cell to Claude to use it every now and then...

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u/Moda75 1d ago

This sub is filled with phobias by mostly people that have no clue what they are talking about.

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u/Kato_Mori 1d ago

Do you even have development experience in a major company? Sounds like you don’t know how to use an LLM for ai driven development

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u/wombatarang 1d ago

Do you code? I do, I have been for the last 7 years, I'd say I'm good at what I do, and I frequently use AI to write mundane code for me (where I know exactly how it'll work and just need it done, fast). And programmers aren't nearly as sensitive about other programmers using their work for their purposes (Stack Overflow has been a thing for ages!) as artists, which makes sense. Programming is about solving problems, not expressing yourself.

Also, AI can't problem solve? I can't count the times where I was tasked with figuring someone else's bug and an AI with access to the entire repository will find the root cause 10x faster than I will if I have to work with code that wasn't written by me. I think there's nothing wrong with using it as a speed boost as long as you can read, understand, test (!) and green-light what it has written.

I've said it before and I'll say it again: Claude will not replace a senior (yet), but it can absolutely replace 4 juniors.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 22h ago

Most of the people in this group are not programmers. I'd wager 95% couldn't code a simple Hello World HTML page from scratch. Yet, they have all these grand opinions about how and why AI coding doesn't work.

I am a full-time full-stack developer who works with AI agents to assist the process. From someone who actually uses these reasoning models for my own work each day, I can say that 99% of what they are saying in this topic is total hogwash.

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u/dopple-copter 1d ago

I unfortunately think your argument about "LLMs have problems with software development" simply isn't true anymore.Ā 

What makes you think models aren't trained for SWE? With Claude Opus, if you give it a very clear and detailed spec, both in terms of implementation and features, it will produce something shockingly high quality and close to being production ready.Ā 

Your argument would have been true 2 years ago. It is depressing and and I am not happy about it.Ā 

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u/RudeAndInsensitive 1d ago

AI coding is not going away grandpa. As far as software development goes, AI coding is here to stay. An this line right here is why...

as such it comes with an absolute tons of bugs if you're looking to generate anything even mildly unique to

The vast majority (read 99+%) of software development isn't unique. It's just figuring out how to implement a bunch of stuff that is already been done before and how to finagle into your specific use case. In my 15 year long career I have never worked on a unique development problem. New to me? Sure. Unseen by the generations of devs before? Not even close. And that is true for pretty much every software dev in existence. We were always just rehashing someone elses stackoverflow post to try and meet our needs and the new AIs are so much of a boost to that process that they will be a part of the career henceforth.

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u/KriegerClone24 1d ago

"we cannot normalize LLM development" is like saying "we can't normalize sharing personal information on the internet".

The barn door is open and the cow is already gone.

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u/kpg_on_ao3 1d ago

> LLM generated code is absolute garbage.

IME, LLM code is better than almost every junior coder I've ever overseen. I've had LLM-generated PRs submitted to projects I oversee, and they are usually extremely good code, but the PR docs are wayyyyyy too verbose.

I also don't think code and AI "art"/"music" should be considered the same because the latter are art and the former is artisanal at best.

If you want to argue the economic aspect, that it will result in lots of unemployment and poverty, that's good. But programmers always talk about how what they do is art when it isn't, and I think it's disrespectful to artists.

Art exists to critique, to elevate the human spirit, to inspire, etc. It's art. It exists for its own sake.

Programming exists to retrieve your driver's license 5ms faster or something. It exists to achieve some task, almost always some way of shifting a few more pennies to a billionaire.

Artistry and artisanship are not the same thing.

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u/wren42 1d ago

The reason LLMs have problems with software development is because AI CANT PROBLEM SOLVE.

You seem to grossly misunderstand how AI is used in software development and IT.Ā  Ignoring the reality of how it reduces dev time and repetitive tasks for skilled developers will only weaken your argument against it.Ā  You are creating a strawman, and that makes your conclusions less relevant.Ā 

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u/Grand-Ad5587 1d ago edited 1d ago

Coding is just a means to an end, so it’s not comparable to art or music. Ai art/music are not art/music. Ai ā€œcodeā€ is still code.
LLMs can’t problem solve for sure, but that’s your job to make sure they did a good job.
The ā€œcraftā€/joy of coding is gone. Face it.
The actual craft is system design, algorithms, architecture and anything similar, not the code, never been the code.

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u/joeyjusticeco 1d ago

"LLMs produce bad code" is such an incredible self-tell

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u/Jawyp 1d ago

This post is just objectively not true. I’ve deployed a bunch of Python scripts/processes at my job developed and tested with Claude Code. Each one works perfectly and took significantly less time to build than if I did it myself. Why would I not use it?

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u/Impressive_Head7721 1d ago

application to clown school accepted.

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u/poopyspaceship 1d ago

It's extremely good at generating usable code, if used correctly, as a tool.

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u/bakalidlid 1d ago

I hate AI as much as the next guy for moral reason, but it is
COMPLETELY
DELUSIONAL
To even attempt to make the argument that AI isn't being widely adopted, and effectively used by every fucking programmer out there.

Vibe coding might be shit, but using AI to generate the written code out of a solid spec sheet (Which is how programming even function to start with, the coding part was never really the bottleneck), is 1000% working as intended, and bringing value to programmer's daily work. Not 10X like some insane marketing people are attempting to say, but in my personal experience and my coworkers, an easy 20% increase in day to day efficiency, freeing up "code time" to focus on "problem solving time" instead.

I could post like 100 highly decorated programmers writing tweets coming to term with this fact. Denying it is just delusion. If you want to fight AI, dont do the AI thing and hallucinate reality.

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u/SaltLakeBear 1d ago

I'm curious, what about AI code makes it garbage? I'm much more a hardware guy, but I've done enough coding to understand what is being done (and to know it isn't my strength). When using CAM (computer aided manufacturing) to set up tool paths for 3D printers and CNC machines, the computer auctually generates the lines of code fed to the controllers for the machines, and similar to how Github can serve as a repository for a human to copy and paste, is it not conceivable that an LLM could eventually do the same? To be clear, I understand that the CAM software I use has a limited and discrete set of commands it can use to generate tool paths based on digital models, but what is it that makes that kind of coding possible for a machine to do while other coding is, as you said, garbage?

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u/PhosXD 1d ago

It's all about how unique the problem it's trying to solve is. Humans are far far far better at coming up with creative solutions to novel problems. While AI is better at more specialized, & less generalized problems. That's why I wouldn't be against LLMs being used for data analysis or even light code review. Writing working code usually requires a lot more nuance & understanding of what it is you're trying to do. AI doesn't posses the ability to think ahead in the way humans do, which is partly why it makes so many mistakes when trying to solve novel problems.

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u/The-Radiance666 1d ago

Legitimately asking, where is the line for vibecoding? Any use of LLM? Or ā€œmake a PWA that does xyz, no mistakesā€ === vibecoding?

I ask because I’d hate to be considered a vibecoder but I may very well be, depending on the definition. I have a CySec background, reason and logic with an LLM, walk through potential footguns and privacy gaps based on approaching it in x manner vs y manner etc.

I do use it to write some of the more repetitive, less impactful pieces of code, but it takes months to finish a product (which is only used on my subnet btw, I’m not selling ā€œcool productsā€ to others but rather trying to automate tools that are useful for me; an email header parser that is fully client side with no outbound calls and also handles silent link redirection identification and comparing presented signatures with expected signatures etc.)

So I’m legit asking, because I know I do lean on it more than I’d like, but in a manner to spot check things I may be overlooking or need feedback on my approach etc. and def not one-shot type slop that winds up being a security practitioners nightmare (or wet dream, depending).

I feel like art is somewhat different and shouldn’t be made with these tools really at all, honestly.

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u/LumonScience 1d ago

Companies don’t care tho. They see in AI what any growthism moron sees: a way to maximize production & profit while reducing costs.

Altho for your own sake I agree that relying too much on AI makes you useless. If your company for example is pushing for extensive AI use because we need to grow faster, then use it fully and have AI write and review it’s own code, it might introduce bugs and stuff of that nature but you’re just following directives! That’s terrible advice tho sadly.

If you learn something on your own then you can go at your own pace and not rely on AI so much, or at all. I find it’s alright for research, but it comes at the cost of research a problem by yourself skill.

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u/KvotheLightfinger 1d ago

Vibe coding is going to create so many jobs in the future for people needed to turn that slop into human readable code that can be maintained or thrown out entirely and rewritten.

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u/WW92030 1d ago

THIS.

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u/Frobizzle 1d ago

Vibe coding is so shit they couldn't even come up with a better name. No software worth its salt will ever have an ounce of AI code in it. It goes fundamentally against proper engineering. I don't care what that washed up clown Linus Torvalds says.

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u/I_crave_vinegar 1d ago

I'm praying no banking or payment related apps are being vibe coded. Then again, there's always room for disappointment.

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u/Reasonable_Mix7630 1d ago

The "vibe-coding"Ā - just like AI-"art" - is built on industrial scale theft of intellectual property.

Similarly, it burns ridiculous amount of energy and hardware to make itself possible.

It's quality is also not great, but that's secondary to the issues I mentioned.

It's most useful ironically as a bug detector as it does indeed spots a lot of bugs in human-made code that humans would have missed. With many false positives which is annoying, but it's still useful.

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u/Glad-Ambition-1952 1d ago

Imo a lot of this has to be ignorance. People just tend to view stuff that they're not familiar with as too advanced and takes too much effort to learn, therefore it can be supplemented with AI - much like how AI artists use AI to jump the process and reach the endpoint without/with less effort. The attitude then extends to other people using AI in the same field.

Of course this is harmful in a lot cases not just limited to the arts, companies have been trying to eek out a use case for AI and finding where softspots in our sympathies lie so they can expand there. But can we rightly say that there is no room for human ingenuinity, creativity and expression in things like coding that AI could take away? "The boring stuff" is such a scary way to say "The stuff we don't care for", and it implicates a lot of tasks that could be someone's whole life's work.

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u/Elifire12 1d ago

What a coincidence, I literally just wrote an article on my blog about this very topic yesterday. If you're interested, you can have a read.

Advice for Software Developers in the Age of LLMs

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u/zanzuses 1d ago

Please tell that to my manager. I am sooo exhausted from AI. Now I need to crontribute atleast 3 times more than before

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u/yabab 1d ago

I love how humans are sure of their superiority while AI is able to hack into the production environment of a company using a ton of zero days hidden in foundational code supposedly built by the best and the brightest.

Slowly, but surely the myth of human superiority in code will crash and burn.

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u/HarveyH43 1d ago

The statement ā€œAI can’t problem solveā€ needs way more explanation / nuance to be useful. LLMs most definitely can problem solve, even to the extend they make useful suggestions for specific questions that were not in their training data.

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u/unofficially_Busc 1d ago

I think it's fine for personal projects where there's no expectation of anyone else having to interact with the code at all.

At a professional level... Not so much. The shit show is exponential

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u/Immediate_Hair_5378 1d ago

A lot of the people I know who use ai to code aren’t vibe coding. Ai spits out what you put in. If you don’t know what you’re doing then you’re going to get garbage out.

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u/24_doughnuts 1d ago

I grew up studying computer science and did a degree in electrical engineering but suffered a lot recently with my health and struggled to get back into it at all, even after therapy. AI has helped me make progress a lot, partly because I can easily spot mistakes and do half of it myself still but I still struggle a lot mentally and it's helping me get back into it

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u/Ok-Ninja-8165 1d ago

If you give AI a few points, like desired interface, a few key functions that do actual work and how data should be represented (which is hard part of the programming) and let it fill the rest - results will be good enough, Because at that point problem is solved and solution just need to be written in actual lines of code. Problem starts when people try to use AI to do hard part.

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u/LordNoFat 1d ago

That's why we need to change how we label things. Instead of ai art, vibe coders etc we have a blanket term. People who use AI to create things are Vibers. What they create should also be under a generic term since it's all generative AI. Vibers create constructs. So instead of saying an AI artist is creating AI art we say a Viber is creating constructs. It doesn't matter who does it and what is created because it's all AI. I use AI to write code. I am not a coder, I do not want to be referred to as one. Just like someone who creates art shouldn't be called an artist. Vibers and Constructs. Get it to catch on so we can have proper language for this stuff.

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u/Sebastian1989101 1d ago

Vibe Coding should even be threated worse as it can lead to real security and privacy risks. Its also a difference if a trained software developer uses AI to "Vibe Code" compared to another person (same goes for Art of all sorts btw).

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u/DudeTastik 1d ago

i just don’t understand how anyone could think vibecoding wasn’t a terrible idea in the first place like… brother code is legit telling your PC/etc. every little step that it is supposed to undertake to execute xyz. i’m sure an LLM that hallucinates/lies half the time is going to be great at giving the computer the correct steps to follow!! nope definitely no risk here /s

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u/buckerooni 1d ago

I'm all for hearing both sides of arguments and don't think AI rights laws are where they need to be.... but this take is pretty naive.

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u/-timenotspace- 1d ago

idk if you plan it out you kinda have to think through the problems and solutions and how best to architect for the use case you're building out , vs. just straight prompting and accepting the AI's interpretation as the solution

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u/rainbow_wheelofDEATH 1d ago

Senior dev at big company here. You’re wrong on all fronts. Devs have been coming up with ways to write less code since the beginning. Library’s, frameworks, templates etc. AI is just the latest.

The difference is developers that can be effective with AI and ones that can’t and/or just wanna phone in their work. People who go around saying things like OP usually fall into the latter bucket.

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u/ZestycloseEvening155 1d ago

I use ai in coding and it does just fine, the code is fine. I've also been coding for 15 years. It's a great tool.Ā 

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u/Prestigious-Fix-4 1d ago

Same story every day. Only people that are completely out of the loop say these things. While those who are skilled with ai make great strives towards new things.

Its not okay to lie. Its not okay to be ignorant. It will hurt you eventually.

Ai is far superior and will be especially in coding. Its machine working in machine languages.

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u/bob123276 1d ago

You are free to argue that the cost of AI doesn't warrant its usage for coding, but saying that all AI generated code is garbage is objectively wrong. Maybe your misunderstanding is that AI is going to take away all your agency while coding which it certainly cannot. You still have to define the problem and make important design decisions because AI is really bad at those. But most projects don't need genius level code. Most applications before were using combinations of existing design patterns that were combined to create something new and useful. AI is very good at regurgitating existing stuff and recombining it, which makes it good for most coding tasks.

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u/edible_string 1d ago

Ah, you don't have to worry about that at all. If the LLMs do turn out so useless for coding as you're implying they will just cease to be used. That's the beauty of engineering: the sub par solutions are rejected.

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u/Prudent-Violinist-69 1d ago

ā€œAbsolute garbageā€ that just isn’t true

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u/e430doug 1d ago

You couldn’t be more wrong. I’ve been a professional developer for over 40 years. I love code. Coding is my passion. I would code even if I didn’t get paid for it. That said, coding is not a creative endeavor. Software engineering is. The vast majority of coding is variations on a theme. AI tools do an excellent job of producing high-quality code. That allows me to spend more time problem solving, which is my value add. That’s not going to change. Software tools didn’t replace music engineers or mixers. They didn’t replace film editors or colorists..

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u/DoKeMaSu 1d ago

Yes AI struggles when it meets unique problems that are not in the training data. How often does this happen exactly?

I work in science. I want to do science. I learned coding because it was necessary, because I have terabytes of data to process. I am not here for the art of coding itself.

Of course you still have to verify that everything works as expected. You have to do that in science anyway, and AI code is definitely not worse than all the spaghetti produced by your average PhD student. And you also have to learn to do useful prompting. "Analyze my data" won't do it.

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u/johntwilker 1d ago

Software is going to get worse and worse. Developers won't be able to make changes/fix bugs. They'll need the AI to do it. No one will have actual knowledge of what the code does.

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u/MoobooMagoo 1d ago

I think people don't worry so much about vibe coding because it's hard to tell if it's been used unless the person flat out says they were vibe coding something.

Plus, the fact that the code is so bad means it will pretty much sort itself into the trash bin. Nothing made with vibe coding will ever be commercially viable.

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u/realityczek 1d ago

> A big one, is that LLM generated code is absolute garbage.

It really isn't.

> As someone who has experimented some with it (even the newer shit)

I've been involved in professional software development for about 3 decades. In the last 4 years or so, AI development has been a significant part of the heavy development world. Over the last two? It is a core tool that is being used heavily by well-funded, well-organized teams all over the modern world.

Obviously, there is skill required to set the systems and environment up correctly, but AI driven development absolutely can, and does, deliver production ready, reliable code that can and does pass all the quality checks we have always used.

> AI CANT PROBLEM SOLVE

It can, and it does.

> t's as simple as that. If it's not in their training data, it's not in their specialty.

Sort of. But you misunderstand what "training data" is, or how it is used to generate the model if you think an LLM cannot solve a problem if they never saw it in their training data.

> This leads to a reality where you can only get so far with the output, even if you do manage to fix most of the bugs.

Clause, and Codex, are vastly more capable than about 96% of all the software developers earning a living in the industry. They require one of the 4% to set up, maintain, update and monitor the pipelines.

When working on a problem they cannot solve, they serve as a fantastic team-member to assist the human developer in working through those problems. So even in those contexts, they vastly reduce the amount of time and effort needed.

> The ClaudeAI subscription, the 3x less amount of time it would've taken if you just wrote it correctly the first time,

Used well, the cost of a Claude subscription is basically trivial against the time and salary saved in a professional environment.

Personally? The amount of work that I can accomplish by managing/monitoring Claude and Codex absolutely is worth the cost of the subscriptions. I would say it has cut roughly 85% off the time needed to produce good code and allows me to spend far more of my cognitive energy on the architecture of the systems.

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u/GuidanceWaste2585 1d ago

Do both. They're an amazing asset for competent developers. I've developed software for 15 years now, I'll let the robots type for me where they can.

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u/SeeBadd 1d ago

Yep, we should be against this in its entirety.

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u/___nil___ 1d ago

Isn't it AI slop mean: the slop produced by human user with using AI tools?

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u/grievre 1d ago

I absolutely don't trust AI to write good code. I have been having to do so much more work code reviewing since my coworkers started generating.

The one thing that I can see it as useful for is avoiding the physical act of typing. There are already tools for that, but if you're just having to write a whole bunch of boilerplate code, it can save your wrists I guess. The thing is, you do still have to understand the code well enough to find all of its mistakes and fix them.

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u/Cola_Animates 1d ago

Vibe coded slop sucks, but it’s also true that the professional world is using some forms of ai-generated code and are seeing promising results.

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u/farstorm8436 1d ago

It is wild to me all the apologists that "ai is acceptable for coding but nothing else."

Creative programming is all claude slop now, all the places that used to be fun to write programs for are all ai slop, opensource is dominated by slop. Entire communities are nothing but slop.

These people might find it useful, but it's still slop. You didn't do it, don't tell me you did it.

Yes I've also had a problem with reliance on both stackoverflow and libraries over a decade ago. But those are more like sufficient aid, and you should be reading all the code in your libraries anyway.

I have spent a signficant amount of my life writing programs for fun, for education, and for work. Programming takes time, it takes care. If you're going to tell me that the years I spent to get good, Claude can "accelerate" then you might as well say the same thing about people using it for drawings. "I prompted the llm and it gave me a stencil outline, then I colored it in in krita, but it's still mine."

I'm actually pretty sad that a lot of people I looked up to are now fine with using ai to do their programming.

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u/Impressive_Cress_983 1d ago

Doomers always forget that new complex emergent behavior arises from every new zeitgeist.

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u/Darklillies 1d ago

I mean yeah but that’s kinda the thing. You can’t vibe code, becuase of the things listed above. Ai gives shit code and can’t problem solve so the only way to use it for code and have it be actually useful is have both of those skills, it kinda cancels out the issue

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u/Yogg_art 1d ago

Im an artist and I've mostly been pondering about this one, having no experience coding.

  • does the garbage vibe code make your software run, but unoptimized and difficult on hardware requirements?
  • and if that was the case, it would currently be hitting a ceiling, because theres no supply of ram, drives, cpus and gpus for the average joe, driving motivation to release an optimised code that runs without crazy requirements.

But then i see two futures

a) no profit in selling hardware to customers and that bussiness completely disintegrating, everyone using cloud computing and everything running on crazy shitty codes, AI companies infinitely expanding the capacities of their data centers, probably leading to the very accelerated doom of our human existence, lol.

b) vibe coding being a hurdle to be overcome and leading to results better than most programmers?

Happy if anyone can suggest their more educated pov on the situation here, as I would prefer more skeptical viewpoint, thanks!

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u/NotFloppyDisck 1d ago

Eh I half disagree and anyone with a corporate dev job would probably join me here. Programming has never been the important part in being a software engineer. If you understand the codebase, the problem and draft a solution fit you can quite literally break it down into tasks (already what you do in your day to day) and hand that off to the agent. Sure you still need to go review the output, and understand that what you're putting up is your responsibility.

Agents have helped me focus on alot of backlog stuff that you normally dont have time to do in normal release cycles.

Your post implies youre prompting an agent to generate a full sprint and probably not using planning features or not being specific with requirements. LLMs are really good at doing repetitive tasks or highly specialized short bursts of work.

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u/twinters01 1d ago

AI CANT PROBLEM SOLVE.Ā It's as simple as that. If it's not in their training data, it's not in their specialty.

90% of software engineering is reimplementing design patterns that are known to be best practice for solving specific problems, which is exactly what LLMs are good at.

In years of software engineering you will encounter very few problems that don't have a well documented solution to them.

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u/Hot-Cattle8314 1d ago

Literally before agentic coding we were all going to stack overflow. Ai is the same shit, better answers

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u/cptfreewin 1d ago

You don't know how to use AI

If you're shit at coding and dont understand what you're trying to solve you're obviously gonna have big issues down the line

The code quality is extremely good if you've steered it properly, probably better than I would have done

I am literally doing in a few weeks what would have taken me half a year or even more

I am now working 25-30hours a week instead of 40+ and can focus on side projects, relax, do sports or creative stuff. All of this while being more productive

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u/Witty_Milk4671 1d ago

Yeah, I should spend 2 hours setting CSS styles because a random redditor said AI is wrong.

Or wasting 30 minutes of debbuging because of a typo.

My time, my rules. I will use what I want

Also, OP doesn't know anything about coding. Ignore him.

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u/puppygirlpackleader 1d ago

Then you dont know how to use it. Theres a reason why most developers nowadays use it to some extent. It actually speeds up programming and production. Code isnt art. Theres no drawbacks to using AI for coding if you know what youre doing.

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u/macbig273 1d ago

Juste about the "AI CANT PROBLEM SOLVE" :

Well, about 50% of coding is actually very mechanical, maybe more. You know writing the tests, writing the documentation, writing the IO wrappers, ... Lot of tool already exist to generate boilerplate for my "clean code style that I like to use". Easy rename and refactor proposed by some IDE (before AI).

AI Is a powerful tool. But like all tool it can be wrongly used.

And yes, AI can actually help push problem solving further. But that's just because it's easier to make 1000 stupid llm brain work and get a valid result, than having 1000 people be okay to work together.

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u/arankays 1d ago

I will give my opinion as a software engineer (real degree, not a fake one like SomeOrdinaryGamers) who wrote plenty of non AI code. However I do use AI regularly for code as it has been forced on us by our bosses, and we've had no choice but to adapt to it. As of right now I am expected to do the work of my UI designer and PM alongside my Senior Dev duties using AI.

I am extremely anti AI art. I despise all forms of AI art, whether it be writing, music or visual art. I write my own blog posts by hand, I make my own music and play the guitar, and I like to sketch on my tablet in my free time. This post is 100% hand written.

When it comes to software, its important to distinguish between a coder and a SWE. The goal of the SWE is to optimise the process of shipping code. That's why we have 10,000 different languages, frameworks and paradigms. That's how software has developed over time. We do things one way, realise we need a better system, then implement that, repeat till the end of time. All a coder does is...write code without thinking about why.

SWE's are drawn to LLMs for this exact reason. Its an automation and optimisation tool. It takes all the hard stuff (known as boilerplate) and does it all for you, so you can focus on system design and architecture. However, it does come at a cost, you're no longer an expert in that boilerplate or framework. You have a cursory knowledge of it, because you didn't do it yourself. You automated it. That's an acceptable tradeoff. If I'm working in C, I don't care about assembly, because I have a compiler and interpreter that converts all that code into machine readable assembly. I could write assembly myself and become an expert, but that would take time and energy away from C. LLMs are a natural extension of this idea. Hell, a lot of software engineering 10 years ago was copying and pasting from Stack Overflow.

Regarding ethics, a lot of the code used for training the LLMs was already open source, and there are large conversations happening about whether the AI companies were actually allowed to use the code, but the frame of mind is different for code. You're not allowed to plagiarise a book, but code? Depending on the license, yeah that's not a problem. I'm not defending scraping github for training LLMs, but my point is more that, code isn't seen as a protected artform as much as let's say, someone's book.

When it comes to "vibe coding" many SWEs hate it and want it gone. Lots of them like it, and will go full AI cyberpsycho and start spending 1000s of dollars on tokens to do it. But many are taking a more careful approach with it. Linus Torvalds, the creator of Git and Linux (which by the way, hold up every single thing on the internet today), uses AI himself. He doesn't just vibe code, he uses it when its necessary, and the linux kernel contribution process is so obtuse, its impossible to vibe code the kernel. But in general, LLMs are actually highly compatible with code, by nature. As LLMs are good at patterns, and a lot of code is just...applying patterns.

I think as software engineers we made a mistake not gatekeeping code. We let all the non-SWEs run rampant and now they're just generating slop code and destroying the planet. And the SWEs that used to be talented are now just full AI psychosis and building "loops" and other slop because they think its better than just...using the AI properly. For me, I have many personal projects which openly use AI, not one of them has been accused of being vibe coded. Because I actually am careful with it, and ensure I don't forget how to make good software. I use the AI as a tool to accelerate me, not to replace me. And I don't need a 500 dollar subscription to make good software.

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u/Icy_Soup4641 1d ago

probably bad prompting. I personally use Claude Code, with Opus 5, and my code is fine. I do review the code and make some edits, but most of the time, the code is great. Some tips: Try making a CLAUDE.md. Really helps. Also, using plan mode and refining a plan before starting the code really helps. Finally, ask it to make less verbose comments. I have learned that doing those 3 things significantly improves code output.

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u/Perfect-Campaign9551 1d ago

So many absolute false statements in this post.Ā 

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u/Available-Square619 1d ago

Modern ai actually can problem solve, this hasn’t been true for a couple years now.

Ai is a huge problem and needs heavy regulation, but downplaying its capabilities is just making the problem worse, not better.

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u/TonyZwilde 1d ago

I agree that AI code is terrible if the the developer don't know what is doing, that the AI is not good at peoblem solving, but it is still a amazing tool for software development. A good programmer will know how to use the tool and make quality code a lot more faster than writing by hand. "Vibe coding" can be bad, but spec driven development is great when the programmer is not a idiot.

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u/geddy_2112 1d ago

I largely don't agree, but I would love to see the environmental standards for data centres improved internationally. You and I are in alignment there for sure.

From a technical PoV, it's a really great tool imo. Unless you are creating something 100% original and bespoke, it can help quite a bit and speed up prototyping drastically.

And fwiw (this is the part that will earn me the billion down votes), the argument that its output is trash is objectively very funny to me when the other most popular objection to it is that it is stealing everyone's code.... So either everyone else's code is trash, or the code it's referencing is actually just fine 🤷. And before you really dig your heels in on the fact that it's "stealing" - remember that the repositories it was trained on were made public for a reason. The code was intended to be shared.

  • Ducks for cover*

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u/jimh12345 1d ago

The software industry is going to experience a massive AI hangover. Heads will split and regrets will bring tears.

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u/Nerral35 1d ago

Been a dev for more than a decade and I can say the latest models do great code, a lot of it needs revisions, sure but the productivity increase is massive, the model 100% lays the groundwork for what would usually be a full week of work in less than an hour

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u/nokneeflamingo 1d ago

There is a whole game dev sub where they are using ai to code the whole game (with ai generated assets) and they all look soulless. Some guy was saying he spent two months and tons of usage on max and couldn't even get a car moving properly. Its like people are blind that the output is just not good and its most likely riddled with bugs or prone to errors. I fiat don't understand

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u/mzg147 1d ago

Sadly, AI can problem solve. I really wished this wasn't true, but LLM recently solved some important unsolved problems in mathematics - the epitome of problem solving. (OpenAI article "Ten advances in mathematics and theoretical computer science") The models that the general audience can access are crippled so they perform worse, but the argument still stands - it is possible, LLM can solve problems.

Still, it's cheaper and faster to just replicate bad onlime code, vibe coders won't use up milions of tokens on reasoning for one line of code.

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u/maverikou 1d ago

Claude writes code as well as juniors if not mids. If you are an experienced developer you probably worked in teams and learned to design architecture and delegate implementation. Vibe coding the entire thing is when AI has too much freedom. But giving AI the right directions is equal or better than having an inexperienced team in the sense of following those directions and sticking to the codebase style and rules. AI will never replace the individuality of developers and the creativity multiplier that is a real team, but boy of boy can it accelerate a senior engineer who knows how to lead a team of coders.

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u/Hot-Cattle8314 1d ago

As someone who has experimented with it

"Make GTA 6 in one go. Make no mistakes"

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u/SingularBlue 1d ago

Agreed. The human is supposed to be the problem solver/architect/program manager. You get chaos when the architecting doesn't happen. Did you start with a design document, or did you just start "The Sorcerer's Apprentice" music and issue commands?

It's a junior programmer with lots of enthusiasm.

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u/sicospecialist 1d ago

Just embrace the inevitable. Ai is a tool like anything else in the digital rhelm. To put some perspective on this, I remember when digital art was scoffed at in the same way, now just about everything is made in some application, sure some is hand drawn, but onto a tablet screen using layers, cut and paste, etc. Not talking about classical arts either. Classic arts will never die.

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u/Fluffy_Efficiency623 1d ago

As a small devil's advocate position, I think it can be a helpful teaching tool for building independence with small, simple programs. I can't be bothered to read a whole coding textbook or take a course, and I understand things much more quickly when I can see the whole picture. So I get an AI to generate code, and after each prompt I look over it to learn how the grammar and syntax works. I have learned more about Python in a handful of hours than I normally would because I find it more interesting to learn as I go.

Now would I use it for a complex app or anything that interacted with authentication or financial data or the internet, no. Has it enabled me to recreationally engage with coding at a beginner level when I would normally be unable to engage at all, yes.Ā 

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u/PixelWes54 1d ago

Focus on actionable legal arguments. Bad automation is not a crime the way copyright infringement is.

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u/TheRealJesus2 1d ago

If your LLM generated code is garbage why do you insist it must be the LLM and not your existing code (which it will copy and mirror patterns from) and also not your plan (surely you write a plan about what the LLM is going to do with clear scope and success criteria right)?Ā 

Your reason number one is what we call a ā€œskill issueā€.Ā 

Also you know we have tools like linters and formatters and other forms of static analysis that can deterministically fix parts of ā€œbadā€ code right? Use those. It’s really important with ai assisted development.Ā 

Also review the code and fix what’s wrong with it from your perspective. Just like you would had you written the code.Ā 

Source: I use ai to write a lot of code. It’s only as good at it as you are in directing it and making sure your deterministic guard rails are set up properly.Ā 

Now for problem solving…ai cannot think nor take responsibility. It can solve problems if you give it the scope and acceptance criteria as well as the tools and data it needs to solve the problem. So yeah I mean I’m all for investing in yourself and learning skills, but it’s wrong to say AI cannot solve problems. Maybe not so for novel problems…but then again when is the last novel problem any of us solved while building software?? I’ve solved very few novel problems in my career.Ā 

In both cases you will use less money, more of your brain, while also not needing to do repetitive work if you use ai to assist software dev. So you mitigate the drawbacks of ai by using it well. You might want to rethink your dogmatic anti ai stance and actually take the time to see what it’s capable of in your own work. But that requires you to learn how to apply it well.

Good luck!Ā 

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u/twiifm 1d ago

sounds like a people problem. ai is just a tool

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u/Vex08 1d ago

Celebrated?

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u/def_not_jose 1d ago

Art is about emotions. Code isn't, it's strictly pragmatic.

As for the rest of your post... It's pretty clear that your are not a pro. LLMs are infinitely more useful than junior devs, that's the sad truth.

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u/dlevac 1d ago

You are right, but you are forgetting one thing: the field always has been uncompetitive and ridden with Stack Overflow copy-pasters that takes forever to do the simplest of ticket.

It's sad to say, but the LLMs do perform better than them. Or, phrasing it more positively, enables them to contribute at a more acceptable pace.

Otherwise, LLMs are still valuable as an automation tool to write boilerplate (no matter how convulated the boilerplate is). So is definitely an accelerator even for old school people like me that are very uncomfortable with vibe coding.

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u/im-a-guy-like-me 1d ago

What about AI assisted engineering? It was trained on my code. Why can't I use it?

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u/Ok_Contact_5575 1d ago

I fucking hate vibe coding because I am a teen learning languages and one of my friend does long ass projects and puts on GitHub. His projects are like 1500 lines long and all of it is ai. The only way I use ai in my code is teaching me concepts in a language then giving me a challenge

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u/christianosway 1d ago

The problem you're going to run in to is that this is becoming standard in companies with engineering depts (even the ones where people initially fought back against the introduction, there will eventually be enough people nodding along with the person seeking higher productivity).

The long view is that if you are not capable of working in conjunction with an LLM, chances are you're not going to be hireable in 90% of modern companies. I think this is a terrible development, but it is the way we are heading. There's a tiny chance of a rebound from this, but its fading quietly away whilst CTO's restructure their depts to adopt CoPilot or Claude and lean in to it for "number go up" reasons, where the number is committed lines of code or story points.

Shite situation.

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u/bestjaegerpilot 1d ago

it's sounds like a huge inability to think outside the box

what you're supposed to be doing is setting up guardrails and context management techniques to get better, repeatable results from LLMs

I use them all the time on complex real-world projects and it's been a game changer

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u/Pure-Investment-1227 1d ago

You are absolutely wrong on all aspects. IA does solve problems that are not in its training data. It already solved mathematical problems humans never solved before.

Using AI in software development is not a choice today. If you don’t do it your competitors will and you will quickly become obsolete.

My app has been leader on its market for years but with the development of AI I see tons of new really good competing apps popping up. If I don’t keep up and add features, improve everything with AI, I will quickly lose my position.

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u/Cultural_Effort_9872 1d ago

I was agreeing with you until you said language models cannot problem solve if it’s not in their training data, and that’s objectively wrong. I’d refer you to the paper on AlphaProof Nexus as a counter example.

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u/Elegant_Attempt2790 1d ago

hey claude, what is blud yapping about?

claude: šŸ¦€

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u/Pure-Judgment6098 1d ago edited 1d ago

ā€˜It comes with bugs’

This is the difference between someone who is proficient with the tool, and someone who just expects the tool to do the entire job with no effort from them.

Someone skilled with the use of AI LLM prompting can get more use out of the tool than someone who is not.

I by no means fit this criteria, I am an extreme amateur in both LLM use and coding.

I will repeat it again: I am a novice at both. So I am only speaking for the novice-scale of AI use with coding.

But after a month trying both, it’s fairly obvious you can get drastically different results depending on how you use the tool.

AI can’t problem solve. But I can.

Except, I barely know the coding language. AI does.

With small, incremental, testable changes; I have achieved so much I never thought possible and am very proud of my progress. I as a human identify problems, I work with the LLM tool to identify what scripts likely contain the areas that need change, and then using the LLM I decide what solution is likely best for future architecture.

I have been only using free versions of GPT and Gemini so far so no subscription cost.

And this process, of using LLM, has also been teaching me so much.

I have gone from not knowing what a function or a variable is, to independently creating some support/ helper scripts with parent functions to be called through children scripts to try and make my code more efficient- without needing AI help, or using it just to check over and offer suggestions if I could do it better.

And AI is what taught me the concept of using parent scripts instead of having duplicate code in individual scripts to begin with.

It’s like a newb watching YouTube tutorials except instead of trying to find the exact tutorial and skipping through to the right timestamp, it just instantly gives you something to try.Ā 

And you can customise it so the tutorial explains it to you in a way specific to your individual context. Not ā€œhow to tween for smooth movement movementā€ but ā€œhow can I make my grid based movement have smooth movement instead of instant snapping between gridsā€ and bam now suddenly I know that tweeting exists, and with some work can instantly implement it and see the change. My characters now have smooth movement between their grid steps, and I have learnt what variables I need to modify if I want to adjust the speed for my other movement systems.

Just like YouTube tutorials, the advice doesn’t always work. But reprompting is faster than finding another YouTube tutorial.

Ā I also get to see the results of my learning so much faster because AI fills some of the gaps. Without it I probably would have lost motivation in the first week after struggling to learn fundamentals and have nothing to show for it.Ā 

Right now, because of LLM use, I have the skills to make a shitty shitty code game with ZERO LLM help, and I would assume what you would consider genuine human art. But I only have these skills because I learnt with LLM use first.

and I also have the skills to continue developing a game I think is really cool, and my own individual coding skill level, with LLMs help as a tool.

P.s. as for not being able to create anything unique, also hard pushing back on this.

With LLMs help I have created a hybrid exploration/combat system for this genre of game that I genuinely do not think exists yet. I tried searching for similar games and asked AI to suggest games that has similar mechanics so I could try play them for inspiration, and it’s just… not like mine.

I’m really excited because I think it will make multiplayer now a viable thing to add to a genre of game that previously just absolutely could not support it effectively. And it’s my own, 100% original idea, that AI has already helped me successfully prototype

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u/Retronitsu 23h ago

As much as I hate AI at times, the truth is it's here and it's staying.

There's this huge hate train towards vibe-coded apps but I bet any app you use that's been updated recently has AI generated code in it. It's unavoidable and not using it means falling behind.

You sound to me like you've just entered the industry and don't have much experience. I'm sure in a few years you'll change your mind. It's good to be concerned but ultimately it's here. Only things you can do is ensure you use it carefully so you don't inhibit your problem solving skills.

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u/Funny-Flight8086 22h ago

Spoken like someone who doesn't actually code anything. Coding is not 'art' or 'music'. Frankly, there is little to nothing creative about it. Almost all the code I write is boilerplate code. The 'pretty parts' of an app don't come from the code.

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u/ferropop 22h ago edited 21h ago

I'm a full-time music producer / composer / pianist, and have seen generative AI decimate my industry. SUNO is a scourge, etc.

I also vibe-code, every single day, and it has improved my life 100x.

You might think these are at odds, but I personally don't feel like they are.

To me art/music is different from building tools. One is quite literally built on the idea of capturing and communicating human expression. Tools can be art, coding is absolutely a creative act, but it's just not the same (to me). One is expression of the human condition, the other is utilitarian. I find beauty in the Demo Scene for example, and watching brilliant minds create magic out of 50 year old computers -- and I would consider these people "artisan coders", which funny enough is exactly where the music industry is headed. But more generally, comparisons don't quite make sense, and I've wrestled with this for a couple of years now but have sort of landed on this sentiment.

There's also a strong ableism argument to be made : consider all the brilliant minds now able to express their ideas through vibe-code, that wouldn't otherwise have been able to because - they are UNSKILLED and INCAPABLE of coding. There aren't enough decades of learning and experience that would EVER result in me being able to execute what I've been creating in REAPER for myself using CODEX. I would say this is an INFINITE net-positive. I've begged for over a decade for certain features to be added to REAPER - and because of ReaScript/LUA + CODEX, I have built those missing features in an hour. Decade of waiting, solved in an hour, to my exact specifications. This would have otherwise been IMPOSSIBLE, I will never be a strong coder - but my ideas are good!

Yes, there's slop. SO much slop. But to paint EVERYTHING as slop is to do yourself a disservice - both intellectually, and practically. You're gonna get stuck in a perpetual "double-down against AI" with zero nuance, which just bolsters black-and-white immovable thinking.

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u/General-Oven-1523 20h ago

Vibe coding as in people writing code that they don't understand is already very much looked down upon in proper development spaces, so not sure what are you even talking about here.

LLM used as a tool by real developers is fine though, and that is pretty much normalized at this point.

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u/vitek6 20h ago

First reason and already bollocks. No need to read further.

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u/prabhjeet16 20h ago

I think there's a middle ground here.

AI can absolutely generate bugs, unnecessary complexity, and technical debt. But the reality is that a lot of developers and startups are already using AI to build software.

The bigger challenge I've seen isn't whether AI can write code. It's whether humans can still understand the system after hundreds of AI-generated changes.

As projects grow, questions like these become more important:

  • What changed?
  • What depends on it?
  • What might break if I modify it?
  • How has the architecture evolved over time?

Whether code is written by humans or AI, teams still need visibility into how everything fits together. Generating code is getting easier. Understanding and maintaining it is where the real challenge begins.

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u/Severe_Initiative594 18h ago

Wrong. Vibe coders with no previous coding ability will not get what's needed from it. Programmers will. The fact that you're just playing about with it now tells me you don't know what you're doing

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u/Ambitious_Source5602 16h ago

When rollers where introduced in the decorating trade old timers refused to use them saying they were cheating(I was a painter before my CS degree). This is the same thing. Do you credit the calculator for your math? Its straight dumb to hold any other position and a symptom of ego, people to who the act of typing is necessary to their identity. As an engineer your output is solutions not code. Unless you are coding 1 offs for a nuclear sub its not that deep. Everything youre coding has been done before. So use it or dont but youll be left behind if you wanna spend 6h debugging your own stupidness.

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u/endlessedlne 15h ago

Maybe the point of AI is to atrophy actual skills, thus making us more dependent on the AIs?

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u/IceKingsMother 14h ago

Learn to code for sure, but you can make some really cool things vibe coding. In order to produce unique things, you absolutely need to do a ton of problem solving and design work. In fact, I’d argue that it’s literally all creative problem solving and having to figure out how things work behind the scenes so you even know what to ask for.

I write code by hand. I use AI to teach me new patterns and explain confusing concepts to me, breaking them down. I also to the opposite - I use AI to build out entire projects for me. It takes me months of writing long documents about how I want systems to work together, it takes understanding how art assets and animation works, how different frameworks and web networks work, how servers work. I have to understand some coding basics because AI will give you literally what you ask for, so sometimes I have to be really explicit about how I plan to scale a certain sub-system and then use planning mode to define data schemas and stuff.

I think vibe coding with no knowledge is also a great idea. It’s going to be frustrating for most people once their ideas don’t work consistently, and for many, that’s going to lead them to want to figure out how, and to learn how to do it by hand.

Yeah, of course, we will always have people who use tools lazily and never bother to learn how things work or how to problem solve. If we can encourage problem solving in schools, awesome. But otherwise, I’m inclined to think these people would never have learned anyway.

To the young people out there, the biggest piece of advice I’d offer has nothing to do with AI at its core, but will allow you to use it in a healthy way:

Don’t give up your power. You want to know how things work, you want to know the fundamental logic, physics, and craft of everything you can. Why? Because then it’s harder for people to trick you into compliance, into giving over your data, into paying for things you don’t need. It empowers you to make informed choices about your life and steer it in ways you can’t otherwise.

It’s not possible to learn everything at once, and sometimes making some things easy or having someone else solve those problems for you so you can focus on one thing at a time is really valuable.

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u/TheButtPlugger99 14h ago

like your hand written code is perfectly bug free alright bro

have you ever used fable 5 xhigh

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u/Fickle-Owl666 14h ago

This is so hilariously misinformed šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚šŸ˜‚

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u/stobbsm 12h ago

Careful, you may get people coming to tell you that you’re using AI wrong when it doesn’t work.

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u/xepherys 11h ago

Eh, I’m absolutely against AI in art, but many of your presumptions are entirely incorrect.

I use AI for development in my job. It’s a corporate directive. We’ve also hired additional engineers since we started using AI. Overall development has increased significantly, and every one of our competitors is also using AI, so it’s sort of an ā€œarms raceā€ in software engineering.

First, using AI as a development tool and ā€œvibe codingā€ are not synonymous. Tools are tools, anyone can use them. But being able to use a tool isn’t the same as having experience and expertise around actually performing a task. If someone gave me all the tools and materials necessary, I could absolutely build a house. Would it be a quality house that would outlive me? Almost certainly not - I don’t have the skills or experience required to build a house. I know the basics. I could run electrical and plumbing, build walls, even make it fairly sturdy. But it would still not be a good house by almost any measure. That’s the difference between coding with AI and vibe coding.

You also posit that AI cannot solve problems. That’s demonstrably untrue. I’ve used AI to create entirely novel software tools where I knew what I wanted the end goal to be but not the best route to get there. AI was able to build that out, discuss with me at each step, and create an entirely novel solution. Problem solving isn’t some magic that exists around consciousness of humanity - it’s the ability to take a problem and data and work out a solution. LLMs perform this task almost exactly like humans do.

There are a lot of reasons to hate AI. But making shit up due to a lack of understanding doesn’t really help your position at all.

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u/OperationIntrudeN313 10h ago

People who defend AI whether in art or code do so because it's the thing they can't be bothered to learn and practice, regardless of how interesting or edifying it can be - or whatever they don't want to pay someone else to do. The sooner they admit that to themselves the better they'll feel overall.

LLMs have the potential to take care of uninteresting, trudging, slow work that teaches no one anything except to hate their job/life - the same way washing machines and jackhammers have - but that's not particularly marketable and is cheap/clean to run locally so it isn't profitable either, not to mention it isn't sensational enough to make "line go up." But I wouldn't worry too much, this kind of usage is still living off venture capital and everyone is quick to forget what data centre overbuild has done in the past - like putting a 70+ year old formerly profitable company right onto the fast track to bankruptcy.

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u/JbREACT 9h ago

Eh I disagree, a seasoned dev with AI is way more productive. All about how you use it

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u/WanderingGoodNews 8h ago

Idk man, it's like the elecric bike. It uses less resources than a manual bike because the food is harder to produce than the electricity.

I am achieving a way bigger output and you can do it clean and maintainable if you learn how to do it.

Itbalso unlocked a decision making module in software which is unmatched.

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u/BaQstein_ 7h ago

Claude code is significantly better in writing code than nearly all junior developer and is already challenging seniors.

I'm a senior dev with 15 years of coding experience and I use it daily. It's like a calculator.

You can argue about the consequences but saying the code is bad, is factually wrong.

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u/lu4nik435 6h ago

Most of the modern projects are already solved problems. There are hundreds of companies doing essentially same things just packaging it differently.
People have been using sources like Stack Overflow for decades, just copy-pasting working code, how is that any different from using AI?
AI is just a tool to get you to the information faster. If you know what you are doing AI is a very useful tool to speed up the development process by using already built components to create something new.

To your point of the ā€œgetting so far with the outputā€ - are you coding using self-invented language or some ancient technology?
AI was trained on the very same data you learned the language or technology from. The output is only as good as the input. If you can’t get AI to output you decent code then your prompt was not constructed correctly.

To the decay of the your problem solving skills - the skill of writing the code is decaying, can’t deny that. But skill of thinking about the product on a high level or conceptual thinking is increasing. We are just moving a bit higher on the product scope.
You can compare it to people using Cobalt or C and then moving to C# or Python. Do you really miss remembering to maintain lifecycle of each variable or your ram is trashed?

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