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Comment by mixdup | Hacker News Reader

The worst part of vibe coding, and developers as managers of "agents"

AI is at best a good intern or a new junior developer. We're locking in mediocrity and continuing enshittification. "Good enough" is codified as good enough, and nothing will be good or excellent. Non-determinism, and some amount of inaccuracy on the margins continually, no matter the industry or task at hand including finance, just so we can avoid paying a person to do the job

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We’re not locking in anything, “at best a good intern or new junior developer” was maybe true at like sonnet 4 and earlier. Code is not codified it’s living. Models of tomorrow will correct the model outputs of today. At some point alarmingly soon, no one will read code just like nobody reads the assembly output of a C compiler.

Non determinism and inaccuracy are also very real features of human programmers.

yeah a lot of people are just coping. If someone wants to become better or more productive, invest in engineering guardrails and verifications validation layers.

There are thousand of examples where tech became obsolute and frankly it’s given. No coders opinion will change it, but everybody is free to do what ever hobby the want. Author does seem to accept it, but commentor above not.

However if the 'non determinism and inaccuracy' of LLMs is more pathogenic than that of humans, then we have a problem. Pathogenesis is inherently a system level effect, so it may take a little time (and money!) to become evident.

The good thing is that now instead to spend 6 months - 1 year working on your app and making sure the code is just perfect you spend just a 1 or two , generate some garbage code but at least publish your app before you burn out. Once it gains some traction like it or not you gonna have to "fix the code" as well. I feel that AI is really a blessing for good programmers/coders because they start to focus more on the business of what they build than on the code.

That's not even remotely close to true anymore. Agents are far better than any intern or junior developer.

They most certainly are not.

CC got my dev env set up and running in 20 min. It had to fix my local node setup and a ton of other dependencies. A junior dev cannot do that in 20 days (unless they just asked CC to do it)

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