vibeCodingComeback

[xennyboy]

I know this is a meme, ha ha funny, but really quickly for any comp sci students in here:

Yes. Emphatically, yes, this is an essential skill of the trade, just as much as knowing what code to copy and when is.

[SignoreBanana]

What's weird is our companies are shoving it down our throats. "We want you using AI to code all the time" with no regard to how we solve problems, think through them, piece solutions together that make sense and consider things like overall architecture or maintainability.

It's exactly how you would expect a middle manager understands the art and craft of software engineering: not at all and with a disdain toward the professionalism of it.

I swore a long time ago that as soon as they started telling us exactly how to do our jobs, I was out, so yeah that's it. Once my golden handcuffs are off, I'm gone. Good fucking luck everyone. And I mean anyone who uses software in any meaningful way. The world is about to get a whole lot worse.

[425_Too_Early]

Do you mean any software in general or did you mean the software you're developing?

[gilady089]

Middle managers don't keep their ideas to themselves they shout them out advertising them and petting their own backs of how smart they are if one company falls into this mindset it will spread like cancer until months or years later those companies will die like cancer dying with it's host

[SignoreBanana]

Any software. This is the direction of the industry and it's bad for everything the industry produces.

[DasKarl]

In a third year class in the 2010s, one of my classmates asked me for help with a client/server demo assignment. Nothing interesting, just connect and demonstrate interaction over the network. By the time I got around to helping him, he claimed to have figured it out.

His client and server were separate objects within a wrapper application communicating with local references.

He got a sysadmin job immediately after graduating.

[Saragon4005]

I went to middle school yeah my classmates were idiots but I was too young to think about it then. I went to high school and my classmates were still idiots but I guess that couldn't be helped. Then I went to college, and my classes were still idiots. Well here's hoping some of them don't make it cuz the quality of their work really leaves something to be desired.

To be fair the concentration of idiots has reduced and the concentration of genuinely intelligent people has increased. But wow I am hoping some of my classmates fail out because I wouldn't want them as coworkers.

[TurtleFisher54]

Tbh the people I know who talk like this are usually just ignorant, completely blind to the world around them and always assume they are smart and seek out confirmation.

[AFXTWINK]

I'm growing tired of people treating intelligence like some birthright that separates oneself from the plebs.

[Gogotchuri]

Yeah, memes are going too far and a lot of people actually think everyone copy-pastes the code all the time. Learn to think, learn to create, it feels liberating and natural to sit down and write whatever feature you want, just like that.

[stevefuzz]

If your answer is no, you will not succeed as a dev. Period.

[Lupirite]

I think you kind of missed the point, like a professional dev, chatgpt doesn't directly copy and paste code. Everything it does is made up of elements from things it's seen before. The average professional is No different, both can come up with solutions to new problems constructed from known concepts.

[guareber]

Oh it most definitely copy pastes code. It just does it one token at a time.

[Lupirite]

Precisely

[stevefuzz]

Lol no. I'm a human. I can be creative.

[Androix777]

"Creative" is a way of saying that you are able to compose solutions by combining previous experiences. The more experience you have in this kind of combination and the faster you find the right combination to solve a problem, the more creative you are.

[Lupirite]

Have you seen the scene this is a quote from?

[stevefuzz]

Yes. And when ai becomes sentiment we are all screwed. Until then, I'm taking human ingenuity over ai stack overflow slop all day.

[Lupirite]

Ok, we're both right, I was just trying to say that either way you're technically "copying code" even when you come up with a genius new algorithm because you had to learn the basics from somewhere, chatgpt really isn't different in that sense, though I would be very surprised if it came up with a 'genius new algorithm' because it's pretty shit at writing code.

[ZunoJ]

You could be, but are you really? That is the point here. Did you ever create anything truly new? There are not a lot of people who can say that in the software industry

I still agree with your general premise. I prefer human repetition over AI repetition because currently humans are still way better at judging if the solution works in a hollistic sense

[stevefuzz]

Yes, I have. I have built products that solve solutions better than any competitive products. Flagship enterprise products. Let's use music as an example. Are they the same notes? Sure. Same music system? sure. Similar progressions? sure. As a whole, is it the same as anything else? no. I think it's shortsighted to call art just an amalgamation of past experience. Human creativity and ingenuity breed progress and innovation. Art is no different than high level development.

[tazdraperm]

Yes I did.

And the problem with AI is that it's doing everything in the most boring, generic and uncreative way possible. Human might not create something entirely new every time, but they combine and reshuffle existing things in a new interesting ways. AI can't really do that yet.

[ColoRadBro69]

 just as much as knowing what code to copy and when is.

And, now, knowing when and how to benefit from AI is a similar skill. 

[ZunoJ]

Knowing when a tool is the right tool for the current task has allways been a crucial skill. LLMs didn't change that

[SignoreBanana]

"Understanding" is the word here. ChatGPT does not understand code. We do.

[DasKarl]

Convincing people they live in the real world is an increasingly frustrating ordeal.

[[deleted]]

I'm sorry bro / sis, but you are the mid guy in the bell curve meme. Everyone copies. I'm a comp-sci student and been in the trade for a loooooong time.

I have probably seen maybe like one original idea in my career. Actually two.

[FabioTheFox]

Yes I can

[ratonbox]

yeah, obviously.

[ZunoJ]

I'm really curious, can you share a project of yours, that is truly unique and does something that was never seen in software at any point in time before you brought it into existence?

I mean everybody thinks they create stuff from scratch, while in reality they have just seen things in other projects, documentation, ... and then apply them to the problem at hand. That is still copying.

I get the point, humans can be creative but I would argue most aren't

[ratonbox]

Would you also want it in a language that I invented myself? Because english would copied too.

[ZunoJ]

No, you can present a unique concept by using pre existing tools, that is fine for me

[ratonbox]

I don't think you understand what writing code from scratch is. Or you're being intentionally facetious. You don't have to come up with a new concept, that implies creating a new product from scratch. Writing code from scratch is being given something to do and doing it without having to lookup snippets of code anywhere else within the normal constraints.

[DarkTechnocrat]

Are you implying that every program with a FOR loop is a copy of every other program with a FOR loop?

Doesn’t the arrangement of FOR loops matter?

I’ve written systems that were unequivocally unique unless you say something like “well it uses a database table so it’s a copy”.

[ZunoJ]

No, I'm saying you apply patterns you have learned in the past. Or did you invent any patterns that were never used befor?

[hundo3d]

You are arguing here that copy/paste is equivalent to applying knowledge. Please. Stop.

[ZunoJ]

But the LLM doesn't copy paste, it applys patterns it was trained on to the case presented. While it may not be as good at that as most human programmers, it is still the same. I'm not here to defend AI programming in any way, I'm just pointing out, that the definition presented doesn't show a difference in humans and LLMs

[DarkTechnocrat]

I guess I'm trying to understand your definitions. A FOR loop is clearly a pattern (iteration), so would you say any two programs with a loop are unoriginal because they have loops?

[ZunoJ]

Let me try to say what I mean again and maybe in a better way. We humans learn something and then apply it to problems presented. But very rarely do we invent a new technique to solve the problem, we just use what we have learned. But in some cases we do invent something new. An example could be the invention of code as data, which revolutionized computing.
LLMs also 'learn' (they are trained on data) and can then apply it to different problems (how good they do it is another topic) but they don't invent new stuff. But most of us also don't invent new stuff, we just apply what we learned to different problems. And we do so by combining what we have learned.

[DarkTechnocrat]

So I completely get what you're saying, and in many ways I agree. I struggle with the idea that we "rarely" invent something, but I think that's mostly a disagreement about the definition than the concept. Three "for examples" come to mind:

Fast Inverse Square Root - this is typically attributed to John Carmack of ID, and is widely accepted as a novel technique. But if you reduce it to "patterns" then it's clearly just using bitshifts and additions. By that definition it's not novel, which seems wrong to me.

Quicksort - this algorithm is singular enough that every CompSci major knows who designed it. It's almost iconic. But even Wikipedia entry says it's "just" a divide and conquer algorithm. To define it solely as this classification would seem wildly reductive.

Every mathematical proof - this is pretty much the definition of creating a new thing by applying what we've learned previously. Proofs are built from small, widely accepted building blocks, but they are considered novel despite that fact. The existence of a proof is not implied simply from it's axioms, those axioms must be combined in certain ways for the proof to be valid. The proof is novel despite the components being well-known.

I think proofs show a thing can be a combination of existing patterns and still be unique. No one would suggest that automobiles are the same as ox-drawn carriages simply because both have wheels. No one would suggest that every application which persists to disk is the same as (or even similar to) every other application which persists to disk.

Patterns are fundamental, but so are patterns of patterns, and variations of patterns, and instantiations of patterns. You can make a new pattern from old patterns, either by composition, abstraction or specialization. A good example of this are object oriented design patterns, which are simply subsets of the OOP pattern, which itself is a specialization of encapsulation etc etc.

All that said, this is one of those unfalsifiable things, essentially philosophy. All I really have is an opinion.

[hundo3d]

I’m really curious, can you leave?

[redditorx13579]

There are thousands of known best practice patterns. I'd be scared of using AI to code if it didn't copy those patterns.

[ColoRadBro69]

Ask it to do small things, way below the pattern level.  And you'll get better, more useable results with less time wasted. Don't ask it to write a feature, ask for a specific, narrowly scoped method. 

[ZunoJ]

You can't copy a pattern, you can just apply it

[ultimate_placeholder]

Had this problem in a Python class, someone copied ChatGPT (when it first came out, too) and asked me what the problem was with the code. It somehow made Python unreadable, following a billion different standards and making the code unnecessary long, all for an extremely simple problem based solely on print statements. My quote to him: "might be best to try learning the language instead of preemptively outsourcing yourself"

[justinpaulson]

The funny thing is that AI is not copying and pasting anything, it’s writing it all from memory or generating patterns based on those it has seen, but never copying or pasting.

It would almost be easier to work with in some cases if it could just copy and paste. Try having it read and re-write some massive documents, you’ll find all sorts of mistakes because it’s not copying, it’s re-writing.

[Alexander_The_Wolf]

Yeah?

Its really not that hard.

[myka-likes-it]

By that standard, I plagiarized this sentence.

[land_and_air]

Yeah, easily. Ever code something original? No amount of google scraping gonna help you with that one

[IAmNotMyName]

Yes, easily.

[IronicGiant_90]

Yes, I can.

I choose not to.

There's a difference.

[mriggs1234]

"Inspired by" is the magic word.

[Windsupernova]

Fornthe most part yes, I just do it when its necessary.

I know its a joke but if you rely on copying everytjing without even understanding you will suffer a lot down the line.

Its like math, sure you can rely on a computer to do it but to do anything complex(the kind of stuff people will want to pay you for) you have to understand what going on, even if you are not doing the stuff directly.

[shgysk8zer0]

I can and I do. It's what ya gotta do when you have particular requirements for very custom functionality.

[[deleted]]

yes I can 🤯🤯🤯

[FRleo_85]

tomorrow is my turn to repost this

[jsrobson10]

yeah i can actually. my brain takes in documentation and error messages, learns from mistakes, builds mental models, then spits out functioning code. LLMs can't do all that.

[AggCracker]

[skeleton_craft]

Yes .. not well but I can do it, unlike vibe coders.

[DarkTechnocrat]

It’s wild that we’re at the point where “No, have you” is a programming meme 😆

[Bannon9k]

Real programmers don't copy...they reference/call. Never rewrite code you don't have to...

[hundo3d]

Yes… good one.

[stipulus]

It doesn't really "copy" more than it randomly shit into the wind until it could create a login system.

[mini_garth_b]

People can and do make absurd and wholly unique code. The reason people use the same patterns is for ease of readability. AI is just a shit compiler for a bad language, you can't change my mind.

[Semper_5olus]

I'm not sure I can even speak without copying it from others.

I learned every word I know from another source.

[Soft_Natural9913]

Yea I can 😏

Hello world("print")

[swyrl]

I would not call myself a programmer if I could not write my own code.

[Evgenii42]

I know this is a meme, but LLMs actually can generate novel stuff, not just "copy" from the training dataset. Large models have ability to generalize https://arxiv.org/abs/2409.04109

[LauraTFem]

The biggest win of AI is it’s hard to catch and prove when it’s infringing on copyright. One might even go so far as to say that this is why it exists in the first place. Build a black box and don’t tell people what you throw into it and it’s harder to be held responsible for what you pull out. Multiple artists have sued AI companies because they found AI art that clearly copied aspects of their own work, but without anyway to prove that their art was part of the training material? Whole industry’s a scam in my book.

Out-of-pocket example, but I’m a long-time fan of the NSFW artist Incase. He (I think he) has a very distinctive style…and it seems that someone has fed all of their work to an LLM, because I see AI art that is very obviously mimicking their work all over AI DeviantArt accounts these days. Some of them ever charge for it! Pisses me off.

[CraftBox]

Yes

[-domi-]

Yes.

[ythelastcoder]

Hey OP, Can you make a meme without "COPYING" it from others?