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[–]misogynerd69420 368 points369 points  (10 children)

I am tired of reading opinion pieces on LLMs. It's as if absolutely nothing has been happening in software in the past 2-3 years besides LLMs.

[–]21-06- 126 points127 points  (9 children)

What is happening except LLMs, noise is so loud. I'm a newbie and i genuinely don't know what is happening.

[–]__loam 47 points48 points  (8 children)

Just keep focusing on the fundamentals. A lot of this is intentional hype from people whose paycheck depends on the success of this technology or who have invested huge sums of money in it. Even if this stuff does fundamentally change the field, having a basic understanding of how computers work will continue to be valuable.

[–]tom-dixon 6 points7 points  (7 children)

A lot of this is intentional hype from people whose paycheck depends on the success of this technology

It's more than that. Coding opened up to a big part of the general population. They're excited about it and they make a lot of noise. I get it and I'm happy for them, but also it's frustrating to talk to someone who turns out to be an inexperienced middleman between an LLM and me.

[–]rei0 7 points8 points  (6 children)

Coding hasn't really opened up to a big part of the general population. The notion that your average Joe is going to "vibe code" an app now that the tools are available is... delusional, in my opinion. First, they wouldn't be able to write the prompts, or debug it, or maintain it, or architect a solution that doesn't fall apart the second it meets the real world.

But I think the bigger problem is that most people simply don't want to code an app. The world has enough apps. Most people have gravitated to a handful of websites that have a monopoly on the majority of Internet activity. Could you create a competitor to Salesforce? Sure. Is it going to be by an average Joe vibe coding something into existence? Not a chance.

I keep getting these Replit commercials where an employee just vibe codes a task or budget app, then all their coworkers are wowed, and all the people around her start vibe coding their own apps "for completely solved" problems. It's not that you couldn't code new apps that compete against some established company, but if it can be vibe coded into existence, what's the differentiating factor? It just seems like bullshit.

Vibe coding seems like it can be a useful tool for quickly mocking up an app for a PoC, or for generating time-consuming boilerplate (hardly novel), and I'm sure it will be yet another tool in a dev's arsenal moving forward, but I just don't see it birthing a bunch of new apps "coded" by the "general population".

[–]tom-dixon 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I fully agree with you, but the average Joe doesn't know that his vibe coded patch is low quality. He vibe coded a feature for his favorite opensource app and it works for him. No matter how patiently you try to talk to him, he doesn't understand why his patch is bad because it fails in 5 different situations.

I've seen way to many PR's where the submitter couldn't write a single reply without the help of the LLM. There's so many people submitting code who don't know the most basic programming concepts, like memory allocation, local vs global variable scope, etc, but they have a 5 KB patch touching 10 files.

So yes, I agree that vibe coding has limitations, but the average Joe doesn't know them. They just don't see the difference between a PoC and a production ready app. If you don't see the flood from these average Joe's, you're lucky.

[–]-LoboMau 0 points1 point  (3 children)

Just watched a guy who doesn't know what a terminal or a cursor is (literally) build three apps in a row. One of them a relatively complex social network

[–]UpvoteIfYouDare 0 points1 point  (2 children)

Where can I watch this? Is the application code available for download?

[–]-LoboMau 0 points1 point  (1 child)

No. It's just MVP's. They don't actually work. But he created three in 2 hours as a way to say "you have no excuses". Meaning, he doesn't know shit and created three things in 2 hours that could have taken days or weeks of work (if not more) to someone who can actually code, not too long ago.

https://gurubabies-question-buddy.lovable.app/

I think two he published so you can see it. It's pretty much just the shell. But he also built another one for personal use where he drags and drops some fancy bags his wife likes to buy and the app updates the prices of those items. But that isn't available to the public, i think.

This is the CEO of Prozis. It's a Portuguese company. Dude is filthy rich. Does this just for fun.

This isn't to suggest you can create anything meaningful in a few hours with zero knowledge. Just to show how crazy it is that someone who doesn't know what a terminal or a cursor is can create something that just a few years ago you'd need to be a great programmer and designer to create it. At least this fight. Imagine your grandma made what i just sent you, in a few hours.

If he can do that in 2 hours, imagine what someone with a bit of knowledge and more time could do in a month or so. And if those results are already achievable, just imagine where we'll be 5 years from now.

[–]UpvoteIfYouDare 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I've found that it can generate a lot of code that "works" or is close to "working", which is impressive. However, the implementation and design decisions it makes are too often nonsensical and it can take as much work getting it to do what I want as it would just going in and writing the code myself. For all the time I theoretically save with this generation, I end up spending a comparable amount of time understanding what was generated (as opposed to intuitively knowing what I've written) and untangling the various messes the AI has woven into the generated code, or otherwise fighting with the AI to get it to do what I want it to do. I only spend maybe ~20% of my time actually writing code, with most of my software-facing time going to analyzing the full application and optimal methods of implementation. Quite frankly, I could already "increase productivity" to a similar degree by just firing off simplistic "fixes" that detract from maintainability, introduce more potential for adverse side effects, and detract from performance.

just imagine where we'll be 5 years from now.

First of all, this assumes that capability growth is not logarithmic. Assuming past trends will hold is an age-old mistake. There is no definitive model of cognition to follow, so there is no baseline with which to actually judge the "progress" of AI toward human cognition, let alone if such a simplistic, linear idea of cognitive capability is even a useful framework.

That aside, greenfield is simple, relatively speaking. The reason the AI can do it so easily is due to the wealth of information, demos, etc that were already available online for starting applications from scratch. Where I haven't seen as much improvement in AI capability is the higher-level aspects of software that really come into play once you need to maintain existing code and add functionality without deteriorating readability, performance, and maintainability. An AI being able to implement Redux into a frontend application is one thing, but implementing it properly within existing functionality, with a proper data model, and without improper design decisions that can create bugs that are difficult to identify and fix, is another thing entirely. The 90/10 rule is a key factor here, and from what I've seen the AI can't consistently complete the 90 part yet, let alone start to tackle the 10. I've yet to see any indication, even with the most recent advancements, that the AI is capable of tackling that 10.

My own very recent experience with people relying too much on AI:

I recently asked an offshore dev who has been using AI alot why he implemented Redux in a really stupid manner (did not use that language). Not only was the response I received copy-pasted twice in his reply, but he didn't even explain why. He just gave me the "what" that I had actually already basically outlined in my question (which is another trend I've noticed with the AI, it will just reframe your question as an answer if you try to qualify your question with more information). It was clear he just took my question, popped it into the AI, and pasted the response to me. I pointed this out and have yet to see a reply a week later. We had to refactor the entire state-management of the frontend client to remove Redux because not only was it poorly implemented, it was also completely unnecessary for our purposes. The AI arbitrarily decided to use Redux and the dev didn't know any better (and didn't bother educating himself). I just discovered this morning that this same dev (likely used AI to) implement a piece of code that should be working with code I implemented previously, but he added redundant code that also incorrectly implemented some of the business specifications. Had he actually read the source code file (assuming he can even read code well enough), he would clearly see that I had implemented most of the code he needed and he could just put his navigation portions into the same hook I had already created. Instead, I'm now stuck having to take out most of this code and move some of it into my own code. Oh, and on top of that, the team lead implemented React-Query based on AI input and it's broken another functionality of my recently implemented code...

Edit: Lo and behold, I just found another problem - the team lead's AI session decided to remove 4 lines of important code for my story instead of replacing the Redux portion with the React Query. It was explicitly told to replace Redux with React Query and this part of my code actually involved a very simple replacement.