There’s no way I could do what some of these “vibe coders” are doing where they allow AI to write code for them that they don’t even understand.
Basically, what's worse? "Vibes" code that no one understands or a cascade of 20 spreadsheets that no one understands? At least with the "vibes" code you can stick it in git and have some semblance of sane revision control and change tracking.
That sort of makes sense, but then again... if you run some analysis code and it spits out a few plots, how do you know what you're looking at is correct if you have no idea what the code is doing?
Does it reaffirm the biases of the one who signs my paychecks? If so, then the code is correct.
Considering the hallucinations we've all seen I don't know how they can be comfortable using AI generated data analysis to drive the future direction of the business.
> Basically, what's worse? "Vibes" code that no one understands or a cascade of 20 spreadsheets that no one understands?
Correction: it's a "cascade of 20 spreadsheets" that one person understood/understands.
Write only code still needs to work, and someone at some point needs to understand it well enough to know that it works.
I think this is a great use case for AI, but the analyst still needs to understand what the code that is output does. There are a lot of ways to transform data that result in inaccurate or misleading results.
From the boasting I've seen, Vibe coders are also using AI to slop out their tests as well.
You can for spreadsheets too.
There's always been a group of beginners that throws stuff together without fully understanding what it does. In the past, this would be copy n' paste from Stackoverflow. Now, that process is simply more automated.
A lot of these vibe coders just have a much lower bar for reliability than you.
For example, while I feel the need to understand the code I wrote using pytorch, I don't generally feel the need to totally grok how pytorch works.
We just need to be better about making it clear which code is that way and which is not.