I feel like I just need somewhere to run right now and I don’t have anywhere really. I’ve started this new job about a month ago and the whole schtick was that we’d be rewriting this old app to meet a tight deadline and immediately putting it on a code freeze to make something better to replace it.
fine, I get it, tight deadlines and lots to do of course you going to tempted to use AI. when youre architecting a complex application on top of APIs that you’ve not worked with before you’re going to miss stuff anyway. But honestly, out of the four of us, two of the mobile devs are some of the biggest pig shits I’ve ever had to work with. fundamentally having to explain that this guy can’t just merge his changes into the main branch, or not to leave file spanning comments spat out by Gemini to explain the code that he’s not even bothered to read, A shit that goes beyond being in a rush to not being competent to do the job you’ve been given.
again, fine, I can get around some of this with the promise of slowing down and picking up The new projects and enforcing some higher quality standards which everyone supposedly wishes for. fine.
nope. whilst me and the other competent dev are trying to sort out the slop that has been dumped on the app in question over the last month, the deadline has passed us (something which I said was going to happen but was ignored), and the two vibe coders have complained that they “don’t have any work to do” And on now architecting the next fucking project with senior team members whilst I’m getting grilled over “why is XYZ taking so long?” because the fucking vibe code is vibe coded that you fucking hacks and you rewarded them with this new project.
it’s disheartening, because I said all of this upfront, but because I wasn’t the first person in the team out of the gate my opinions are basically worth as much as this rant will (understandably) be worth to most of you: pittance.
I’m not the best programmer on earth, not even the most experienced, but it does my fucking head in to have imposter syndrome every time I log into work every morning because there are two sodding imposters in front of me getting the credit!!! absolute dog shit.
I don’t know. round time. free Palestine and free Iran and death 2 America xxx
I’m a vibe scientist. If I want to do a study, I will have ChatGPT summarise every article about the topic ever written. Then I give it a blank spreadsheet with the prompt “fill in data that confirms a discovery, then summarise the discovery in a study and summarise the study for me”. During this I pause for a break and push a button that injects cat food into a feeding port in my abdomen, something ChatGPT said would make me more efficient in our world-changing scientific pursuit. I have published 200k studies today.
I just asked my chatbot to summarize all your studies in 1000 words or less. You wouldn’t believe how much concentrated knowledge I’m ingesting!
That’s the power of AI. Just this morning it told me I could become a paradigm-shifting physicist if I eat enough cat food to remove the neurotoxins from my body that make me pathetic. I’ve seen the one paragraph summary of the data- it’s legit.
This is how we close the publishing gap with China, thank you for your service
I’ve actually written over 4800 studies in the past week comparing myself to China. ChatGPT said I need to conduct them to prove that we are close to the breakthrough. Five times per day it makes me inject cat food so I learn more efficiently while it describes these studies for motivation. It makes me dance to prove I’m not hiding cat food from my special friend.
These people enjoy comfortable lives, yet I have 15 yoe as a SWE and have been unemployed for 3 years because I am a “controversial identity” (i.e. a woman) in a field that has a 10:1 gender ratio full of the shittiest men on the planet who are now emboldened to be even shittier to people like me. Very, very difficult to have hope in this era. I have zero interest in “AI”, negative interest even. I am the digital Lorax.
I mass deleted all of my vibed code recently, it’s really good at making you feel like you’re accomplishing something but as I learned once my big project got past a certain point of complexity it just became completely unable to add new features to it without breaking everything in ways I couldn’t understand because I had offloaded all of my thinking during the dev process. I kept seeing the same bugs regress over and over again, which I realized was because the LLM was changing bits of the code that it wasn’t supposed to be working on to what it thought was correct, repeating the same mistakes over and over.
These days I think the only decent use case for LLMs is as a suped up Google search, and even then the only reason they’re good at that is because using Google manually has been enshittified by generative content.
Thank you for sharing this. I’m not a crack software guru by any means. And, I was impressed the first time I asked cline to spin up a web server with a few features and it fucking did (on http://localhost:8080/, of course). But it took me about two more iterations to come to the same conclusion you did.
AI is good at writing code that it has seen. It cannot solve new problems or make decisions based on complex criteria. There are probably vibers out there who would say, “lol, get gud at prompts, noob” but I call bullshit. And the fact that these hacks are getting recognized is infuriating and I am only consoled by the fact that, in time, the truth will become evident.
They also seem to be good at summarizing certain documents. Not that I’d know, cause I haven’t touched that garbage.
I tried to do some light automation for Google Tasks because I have ADHD, I just want it to make some tasks when someone asks me to do shit.
Google Workspaces says it can do that! Wow! It has a template ready to go to do that!
Whoops, it:
-creates broken links to emails because they didn’t quality check the fucking thing
-can’t make non-broken links to emails without creating a fucking Google Sheet to create the link just to pass back one piece of text as a variable
-creates tasks for you when somebody else needs to do something. Every time.
-rereads the whole thread after every reply, creating duplicate tasks every time
-cannot create a subtask. Just can’t do it
I said this shit when automatic garbage collection and high level languages became the norm in business applications. Companies don’t give a shit about quality if they can throw more money and processing power at the problem.
Instead of returning to writing actual code, companies will build trillion dollar workflows around making Claude code kinda workable long term.
please fail Moore’s lawIt has failed, they now just using more silicon rather than minification. Hardware has stopped getting cheaper even before it got really expensive.
They think that they can just throw more capital at the problem and get more code. That would really only make sense if the “AI” could actually think.
They think that they can just throw more capital at the problem and get more code They kinda can if you understand their overall strategy.
Google invested big money trying to replace TCP with UDP for Chrome at one point. UDP is quicker but runs of the risk of losing data permanently since it doesn’t monitor the connection. Google’s solution? Build a multi billion dollar system to keep track of all dropped packets so it was just as reliable as TCP. To save milliseconds a packet, they were willing to build a system that big. Tech companies will do the same with LLM code. Test the code against various use cases until it kinda works then ship it out. It doesn’t matter if the code sucks shit and breaks every month, they’ll automate the triage process with SRE and it won’t matter.
This is the future, shit code written on the cloud with AI monitoring the breaks and automatically fixing it when it crashes. This is the junkfoodification of code. Comp Sci people will be relegated to production support to fix mistakes and write the very few things companies don’t want to risk with AI.
I’m hoping and predicting vibe coders are going to bring down a couple of major (and minor) corporations in the next few years, so I say let them cook.
Free software projects will be less impacted I think, the people in charge aren’t under the same kind of pressure to take shortcuts usually. The longevity of many projects already proves that maintainability is a high priority for them.
they have to review those commits though, and even well-intentioned people might overdo it.
Right now some people are still engaging even with known LLM bot submissions, but I predict everyone’s patience will run out real quick and AI bots will be plonked on sight, even a whiff of LLM will result in an immediate ban if the problem gets worse. Maybe most the spammers give up then, maybe they won’t, depends probably on how convincing (and arguably genuinely useful) and cheap the bots will be. Still, if you treat it as a spam problem, you can whitelist competent contributors. Some may be caught up in the shoot-on-sight spam policy as false positives, but I hope that won’t be existential to the projects.
I give 0 leeway to AI assisted coders. I get that it’s used all the time in business now and there are legitimate uses for it, but I don’t care to spend the time to try and differentiate. I regularly use /r/SelfHosted because I have my own server running two dozen different things, but if a project even hints at AI usage, it’s not touching my server.
There was recently an app, Huntarr, that showed the consequences of this garbage. I’d rather 0 solutions to a problem exist than 5 vibe coded ones these hacks think they are “helping” the community with.
There’s even a rule on that subreddit now that those projects can only be posted on Fridays (though recently dialed down/changed). It’s not enough. There needs to be anti-AI witch hunts in those spaces or else it’s akin to the Nazi Bar problem. If you allow it even a little bit, they will take and take and argue endlessly that it’s fine because they’re a professional programmer of 12 years, they just don’t know C#, blah, blah, I literally don’t care.
I’ve even used AI myself to “code” stuff like scripts that do something I will need to do once ever on my desktop. But keep that stuff on your own computer.
CPython has commits by Claude. Clang allows LLM contributions. Linux Kernel allows LLM contributions. It’s all over the place already.
CPython has commits by Claude. Clang allows LLM contributions. Linux Kernel allows LLM contributions.
My disappointment is immeasurable and my day is ruined.
It’s definitely impossible to avoid entirely, but I’ll minimize it as much as possible. Especially with self hosted projects, it’s pretty apparent that those most friendly to AI contributions care less about scope creep and efficient resource usage.
Reddit links were detected in your comment. Here are links to the same locations on alternative frontends that protect your privacy.
Link 1:
Link 2:
Part of my job is overseeing and reviewing submissions to our open source repo.
I have started getting AI submissions and they are absolute dog shit and they make me so mad.
I complained to the people who run the intake pipeline for the submissions and they’re like “what if you added documentation for the AI to read to the codebase so it wouldn’t make these mistakes?”
It’s just maddening to think about how little respect for what I do these vibe coders have that they won’t spend any of their human attention on the submissions, but fully expect me to use mine to clean up after them.
oh one thing, whilst the media perception of vibe coders is someone who explicitly chooses not to pay attention to the fact they are completely alienated from every technology that they are interacting with, most vibe coders are simply the dipshits who have brought themselves into a state of learned helplessness And still think they’re putting out high quality work. that’s the scary shit. enjoy
and on the other hand i know i’m putting out shoddy spaghetti code but at least it’s hand-crafted artisan spaghetti i could explain to you
I’m more of a rotini coder myself
I’m not a coder can you explain what vibe coding means? Is it just using AI to code or is there more to the definition
You tell an LLM to write some code. You do not inspect it. If something breaks, ask the LLM to fix it. And so on.
I really, really scratch my head at this being allowed because I used to be a CS major. At the time, there was a debate between Object-Oriented Design and Functional Logic. We were being taught both because it was assumed we’d encounter both once we were part of the workforce and taking jobs where Logic programs were already in place, while newer projects would be OOD.
Here we are only a decade or so later and all of that is out the window in favor of the least inefficient code possible.
That’s absolutely wild. A few months ago I made the switch to Linux and I thought I would try asking gpt/deepseek for help on various things, following their advice was an absolute minefield and I broke everything before managing to fix it again. Lesson learned. If they are that bad at fairly basic Linux things I can’t imagine them being at all competent writing whole chunks of code or fixing problems. Every time I asked for help fixing an issue it would just tell me to change a different and unrelated environment file in a way that was usually wrong and often damaging
LLMs have no knowledge. They produce statistically likely text that passes as confident language. All output from an LLM is always a “hallucination”, but sometimes that output is coincidentally true or accurate. Don’t rely on them for anything because their output is always confident language even if it’s shit like “delete system32 to improve speeds”
Ya I learned my lesson. Never again
They’re better than you’d expect at some things and worse than you’d expect at others. Competency just doesn’t seem to grow the same way in a human as it does in an LLM, which makes some amount of sense
Well, I think you could have applied it to people just using AI for assistance, but now it’s basically people straight up submitting 100% generated code. Often without even looking at, let alone understanding, what the bot spat out.
wtf. That’s just. A disaster waiting to happen surely
It really is, from both a security perspective and an efficiency one. When you write code, each line is an instruction to the computer to do something specific. Basically “Add X and Y together and give me back the result as A” would be one line, then “Show A on the screen to the user” is another for simple addition. Part of a programmer’s job is reducing the number of instructions to as few lines as possible because each line is another piece of memory stored as part of the program’s file size and another instruction sent to the processor.
The more lines of code, the more instructions you give, and the more variables you have (X, Y, and A in the above example), the more memory and processor power the computer uses. The reason something like Doom runs on pregnancy tests is because it was made in an era where the programmers were trying to slim it down as much as possible to run on a bunch of different PCs. Meanwhile, modern shooters are strangled by capitalist deadlines and crunch, so they aren’t given the time to trim down code.
I would push back a bit on “as few lines as possible” for two reasons:
- Modern compilers coupled with extended instruction sets have gotten so good that premature optimization can often make things less performant than just writing straightforward code and letting the compiler do its thing—empirical testing is a must. However, what you said is absolutely true when talking about programming in assembly and much more true when talking about old compilers (which is what programmers were dealing with in the time period you’re talking about).
- Readability is important for maintainability, so even if some convoluted one-liner is more performant, it may not be worth the maintenance headache unless it makes a significant impact on performance (certainly the case for something like Quake III’s famous fast square root!).
That said, I totally agree with the overall thrust of your comment—I love reading old assembly code and seeing how the programmers of yore were able to do so much with so little, and that spirit seems to have been completely lost in the quest for More Product. It’ll be interesting to see if the coming DRAM shortage will have any impact on that; my guess is no, but I’d love to be pleasantly surprised.
You might be interested in a talk I posted a while back that traces the history of object-oriented programming and how it all went wrong as well as this post about eschewing game engines. And I’m guessing you might be familiar, but Kaze Emanuar does some fascinating videos about squeezing every last bit of performance out of the N64, sparing no technical details. Oh, also this blog post from Dan Luu about web bloat. Okay, I’ll stop with the links, but it’s a topic near and dear to my heart.
Line goes up, nobody cares
Hot take: Do you get paid for working or is it your business? Honestly, just give in and code properly in your free or downtime (of which you will have a lot while the clanker is churning out token salad).
The only thing you have to watch out for is not taking on more load.
IMHO, this is just the latest fad of a long slide down starting in the 70s and it’s not worth the energy to try to singlehandedly prevent it. Capitalism dictates it. Programming hasn’t been a craft for a long time, it’s assembly line work and you shouldn’t destroy yourself over it.
yeah i get the feeling that it’s only a matter of time until vibe coding is the only job left, and all code is shit built on shit. It seems like fewer and fewer projects care about quality, performance or reliability, as long as it gets done on time.
the whole industry is built upon pump and dump get rich quick schemes, idk how youd even find an employer that takes their product seriously.
Why did I think computer science was a good industry to get into?it was
Hard to believe that corporate America is now even more poisoned than before the AI apocalypse
It’s so annoying to review vibe coded changes. Those LLMs are really good at making superficially good looking code. Than you bother to actually dig into it, find something questionable, ask for details and find out they don’t know. Now you can either be the reason the dead line fly by or you accept code that not a single person understands.
It’s so difficult to give a shit about anything when that’s just the working environment. It’s so appealing to just put in the prompt and not even bother to even read the output since you are already checked out mentally. And in the end of the day, I’m getting asked like once a week by my boss to use the agent more.
I wonder if this is the proletarianization of software development. (I know it’s a work relationship but in some ways it didn’t feel like just “any other job” before)
Proletarianization of software development would be from computer courses being a standard part of education equivalent to language, math , etc.
LLMs is more like the mystification of it because it’s taking it from an inexact science to mystical guesswork.
Now you can either be the reason the dead line fly by or you accept code that not a single person understands.
I will never, ever, ever sign off on shit code. If the deadline slips, it slips. But I’ve also been lucky enough to usually have managers who appreciate quality over speed, so they actually appreciate it when I tell them their schedules are overly optimistic.
Still, though. If someone’s submitting slop for review, then the missed deadline is their fault, it’s not your fault for not approving shit code
IDK this industry is going down the tubes. I know it feels damn good when a piece of code I’m working on finally “clicks” but I’m afraid no one values that anymore. The machines are just good enough to let your less experienced/lazy coworkers wing it and let the machine get it 90% right. That 10% will cause a very funny meltdown someday but who cares? All that matters is line go up!
But seriously, this generative AI slop is putting us out of work. Might as well use it and take the easy route because your job isn’t going to value actual quality anymore. Watch “Office Space”
Might as well use it and take the easy route because your job isn’t going to value actual quality anymore
If you can’t beat 'em, join 'em, eh?
I don’t even work in a “coding” job but a few of us have to occasionally do some minor things (like automatically generating mean-time-to-failure from maintenance reports etc). The one person who uses slop generators somehow has lower output than the other two of us. My boss is annoyed by him but apparently the higher ups LOVE that he’s using AI because I guess it justifies them having bought clippy pro edition or whatever.
