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Comment by vconnor | Hacker News Reader

> I think the article could be more accurately titled "A Guide to Gen AI / LLM Vibecoding for Programmers who hate their job"

Given how “vibe coding” is all about explaining clearly the requirements and defining context, it’s for programmers who should have chosen middle management as a career.

To actual programmers that enjoy the craft, using an LLM means ruining the beautiful art of abstraction and mental visualisation of a complex piece of logic, by putting it through the very lossy process of explaining it into words. It would be a bit like a composer or a painter having to use words instead of leveraging their well-honed instinct.

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The reality is that hacking code isn't always beautiful. Most of the time, it is mundane grunt work.

You can always leave the core logic for your to work on and have the AI handle all the bits that you don't like to do. This is what we do for modelling for example, AI helps with the interface and data backends, the core modelling logic is hand-crafted.

> mundane grunt work.

this is my favourite kind of work. i can switch my brain off and just do something repetitive for a bit.

boredom is necessary for good ideas.

Yeah, but what about your productivity? You could commit and have to maintain 40% more code for the same pay if you had used an LLM.

> You could commit and have to maintain 40% more code for the same pay if you had used an LLM.

that ... doesn't sound like a positive argument for using LLMs... was this sarcasm that totally passed me by?

It was indeed sarcasm

Yup. I think programmers are giving themselves too much credit here. I love programming, but let's not kid ourselves, at most organizations at least 75% of the code needed to make something a working product is BS. I'd rather prompt an LLM agent to take care of that while I review it so that I can spend my limited energy on the more interesting bits. I find the exercise of prompting an LLM to generate boring code to my exact specifications far more intellectually stimulating than doing any of that stuff by hand, and the time that I have invested in this area has paid dividends in making the code cleaner, more consistent, and more coherent.

Sounds like you really like code reviews. You must be a unicorn.

I find most programmers don't like code reviews. They do it because it's required by their job and most will just click the approve button. Or I guess in a more dysfunctional org, argue about formatting or something, which should just be done automatically so that nobody has to even think about it.

What they like doing is the coding and problem solving.

And now you want to make programming into code review?

How's that gonna go?

I've been middle management for half my career and the role has never been about explaining or requirements or defining context like I do with an LLM to code...

I choose the tech stack and architect the project.

I choose the language patterns and code organization.

I step in to solve hard problems when agents flounder.

What about that says middle management? It's just getting rid of all the low iq parts of the job.

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