Comment on Someone created a public domain version of Netflix
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 4 days agoFor the record, not all agentic coding is “vibe coding”. It is possible to do real engineering with an LLM.
In the same way the advent of the compiler helped us go from high-level human readable formal language to low-level machine readable formal language, an LLM helps us go from high-level natural language to high-level human readable formal language. The distinction between vibing and engineering is how much intention you have about what the tool spits out the other side.
Vibing says “all I have is an input, I don’t know what the output should be, so I’m not even going to look at it”. Engineering says “I have an intended output in my head, and I’m using whatever tool will reliably create my intention the fastest”.
Unfortunately it is the nature of the anti-coding-LLM debate that people who never wrote a line of assembly language, and never in their lives wrote a line of code that wouldn’t be run in a managed runtime of some kind, now think they’re the Masters of the Coding Universe and are qualified to dictate what are the Right Tools and the Wrong Tools to be a Real Programmer™.
Fortunately, as you rightly point out we’ve seen this dance a hundred times before. This too shall pass.
Exactly. Vibe coding is horrible in the wrong hands, but a skilled programmer can utilise it to carry out boring tasks.
If you’re still learning to code, you can’t evaluate the quality of the output, which will result in wild goose chases, wasted hours and tangled low quality scribble code. If you can find and fix the mistakes, you can actually make certain tasks go much faster. Also, don’t let an LLM write more than 20-50 lines at a time. Finding mistakes in longer segments gets very tricky.
If you have a plan in your head, you can request short segments like that. If you let the LLM take care of everything, it’s just going to dump 200 lines, and then you’ll need to rewrite most of it by hand. Gradual step by step approach works well, but it requires constant oversight.
Vibe coding is horrible in the wrong hands, but a skilled programmer can utilise it to carry out boring tasks.
If things continue as they are, eventually there will be no more skilled programmers.
If producing quality code no longer requires skilled programmers, you’re right. As it stands, LLMs produce very raw code that absolutely requires lots of human oversight to qualify as functional.
Nah, I agree with them. All the skilled programmers are getting fired by a bunch of companies with poor financial sense who want to blame everything on AI. Also, if this thread shows anything, then it’s that prospective skilled programmers would rather ask Claude to do their homework for that quick dopamine hit than actually learn that they’re supposed to use parameterized queries so that some random kid’s mom doesn’t delete their production database.
I am convinced most of the people who hate LLM.Assisted coding are all the dicks from Stack Overflow who are pissy that everyone found a better resource to ask questions against.
No actually. It’s because I ran pyright and there are nearly 1000 type errors. It’s because your LLM decided to setattr and getattr all over these Pydantic models. It’s because for some reason you’re using protocols where an ABC would make more sense. It’s because I told you all this on your last PR, you fixed it that time for the most part, then you’re doing the same thing again on this PR. And it’s because now I have to open a PR that conflicts with one of the 200 files your PR touched fixing all the problems your LLM introduced. All this because you refused to read the docs for two packages and follow the examples.
Look, I’m not calling you out specifically. I’m just ranting about my day job.
This sounds exactly like your typical SO reply and I can’t tell if its intended to be satire.
Sounds to me like you haven’t worked on a team before.
littleomid@feddit.org 4 days ago
A compiler is deterministic. LLMs are by definition nondeterministic.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
Trying to understand where you might be going with this. Is the implication that non-deterministic/stochastic algorithms have no practical use in engineering?
littleomid@feddit.org 4 days ago
No, they have a place where stochastic algorithms are necessary. For writing a hello world application, no stochastic algorithm is necessary. Comparing compilers with LLMs is comparing apples with oranges.
teawrecks@sopuli.xyz 4 days ago
I think it will become more apparent over time. But consider that the practice of software engineering is a stochastic process. Give 10 different engineers the same goal, and you’ll get 10 different solutions.