elvis10ten

I was vibe coding a prototype some nights ago. In between, I ran out of my AI budget.

I felt stuck. I didn’t know what the AI had done so far or how to continue. There was nobody to message for a budget increase (it was night).

Luckily I managed to get more budget.

But that left me scared for the future. One day something is gonna fail, and nobody can do anything because the AI providers are also down. Or what if I can no longer afford paying for the frontier?

I have made some modifications to my vibe coding practices since then. I don’t want to live in this future that the author describes.

Good luck!

Even in the best case scenario, normies wouldn’t want to build everything themselves.

Aside: When did you start studying for nursing? And have you written about your experience so far?

I agree with you! And I’m not trying to romanticize the past! Humans/me wrote slop too.

I think we are over-indexing on speed of delivery. I think this is a mistake. The alpha is in speed and quality.

Currently, my experience is that human + AI can write software faster and with better quality than either party can do alone.

No where did I say we don’t do agentic dev!

Years of experience doesn’t mean much! I will challenge you on ideas. And the idea you are sharing is dangerous and unprofessional.

Especially at scale. e.g., we process more than 3.5 billion orders annually! This is serious business. Edge cases are common.

I work as a professional app developer. And I find this take to be naive.

Most of the time when I review code from AI, there is always something to improve.

It’s either a maintenance issue. e.g., Opus recommended and implemented a fix for a database corruption crash. This was ~400 lines of code with many moving parts. I reviewed, and found out Android Room library already handles this recovery case, and all I needed was a 10 liner PR that catches this exception and ignores it.

The maintenance is not only the burden on the human and LLM. With too many moving parts, it becomes harder and harder to build and verify the correctness of future features. Yes you can write test for this and that, but it didn’t need to exist in the first place.

The second problem is correctness issues. Especially the edge cases. You cannot just manually test out a race condition on a phone! Sometimes it happens! Sometimes it doesn’t! If it leads to a visible signal like a crash, then yes, you can try to reproduce it. But there are a lot of these that are “silent” and would just lead to bad experiences.

We already had a software quality crisis! And I think such views only exacerbate the situation! Quality matters!

And this is not an anti-AI stance. I vibe code personal projects where I don’t even look at the code. But when I use AI as a professional engineer, I act like a professional. Because these products do have an impact on people’s lives.

> But do you know all the communication your laptop is doing? Do you really claim it is all for you, or all for your benefit? Or is it just something the laptop does that isn't really for anyone in particular?

Hmm, why would anyone add comms to a laptop if there wasn’t some benefactor in some way? The way I see it is that it’s either benefiting me or benefiting the company which ends up benefiting some individuals (and sometimes me again).

In your examples, I can still find the “for whom”, even if that is several layers deep. I’m trying to understand your position: are you saying the same will be true in the ongoing case, just that we don’t know the connections yet?

> Your own job, assuming you're in the software industry, is to automate and eliminate people's jobs. How many jobs do you think it has eliminated? Do you feel you are responsible for your products?

This is a common trope from the LLM crowd. Places I have worked for as a software engineer have created more jobs (gig economy) or improved the human condition (edtech in emerging markets) or helped people in refugee camps in Kenya stay connected.

Even in questionable companies, I focus on work that makes sure the technology is accessible to any and everyone. I became a programmer because I thought I could help make the world a better place.

> The hope is that it will be net plus for the society.

Unfortunately, hope is not a strategy.

From my experience using HN, this feels made up. HN sentiment on AI seems to have only gotten better: with more overly pro-AI or nuanced voices plus more AI topics.

The hype is in what AI delivers (at least so far). I would never create a PR without an AI review. I will ask an AI to write code for me from time to time.

But it still has huge gaps in quality. And from time to time, it shows me that it doesn’t really understand things. You might point out that how is that any different from your mediocre engineer. But for most people skilled enough, you can easily know the difference when someone doesn’t really know something.

With AI, you discover this after reading several pages being dumped on you by people being “more productive” with AI.

> with the exception of firing those that don't adopt the technology.

This is a crazy take. Even if said people are matching or exceeding the outcome of those using the technology?

I’m not in this group. But the closest analog to what you are saying is firing people for not using a specific IDE.

I just had a relevant experience. I asked Claude to add “trace(‘$FunctionName’) {}” to all Composable functions in my app. Claude spent some time doing something. In between, I was like shoot, I could just do a deterministic regex match and replace.

Even CRUD programming: you can’t get very good at it with just reading.