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Comment by totalslop_ai | Hacker News Reader

Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. Reviewing AI code is fast but you're accumulating blind spots. Both the human cost (this article) and the codebase cost are growing together.

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"Writing code was slow but you understood what you built. "

Yes. Definitely. I never did try and error with code snippets from the internet until something sort of worked.

I never hacked things together like this till the sun rose and had no idea 2 weeks later who wrote that hacky mess and why like this. Or well, years later.

And as the code piled up and side problems took over, I certainly did not reimplemented the same functions again and again, because I forgot I did the same already 3 years ago. And that module (and that part and this), that works great as long as you don't touch anything? Yeah, I certainly know how that works in detail. All in control. Gotta fight to keep AI away from my code to stay in control!

You do realise this is your experience, and just outs you as a mediocre engineer and doesn't prove that slow and steady doesn't win the race, right?

Or did you write your comment with an intentional self-demeaning note, and not a sarcastic tone?

Let me put it like this, I believe there are holy sacred programmers out there, who always are in total control of their code, I just have not met them yet.

And no, not all my code is written at 5 am when I am close of passing out. But I say those who never experienced that flow to also do hacky things to get something done and if it takes till the morning, maybe did not capture the full spirit of a hacker site?

"holy sacred programmers" and writing "the same functions again and again" are two extremes. There's a point in the middle where you implement the same function twice perhaps and then on the third time feel like such a thing should already be there and so go look or maybe perhaps add some documentation or centralize functionality to a utilities library etc.

I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness" that vibe-coding introduces.

"There's a point in the middle where you implement the same function twice perhaps and then on the third time feel like such a thing should already be there and so go look or maybe perhaps add some documentation or centralize functionality to a utilities library etc."

Yes, my point was exactly about the middle ground. (And the double implemented functions were of a rather small kind, where rewriting them was faster than looking for the old ones. And it was hyperbole of course, I don't routinely do the same again and again for no reason. I remember maybe 2 or 3 instances of that happening)

I wrote bad code and good code in my life, depending on the project and depending on myself.

And where I wrote bad code in the past, AI is actually great with helping that. Finding duplicates, documentation out of order, etc.

"I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness" that vibe-coding introduces."

The point I was discussing is that code is not automatically understood, or good, just because a human wrote it.

So all in all, sure, Vibe coding enables a new universe of bad code (that pretends to look good). But if done right, it can also raise the bar. It is a powerful tool and up to us on how we use it.

Since we out here doing ad hominems: if you don't think the code you wrote a few months ago is shit, you're already cooked, and judging by that comment, I'm betting you're crispy.

Even the best code I've ever written rots, not because it changes but because I get better. Now... I know thinking out of the box is hard... but one can get better a lot of different ways, and call me an optimist, but I'm betting folks can get better at producing tool-assisted code, too. Assuming how we do it now is how it will be forever is silly.

We're in the middle of figuring out the next level of mediated engineering. You-know-what or get off the pot, but stop pretending being a dinosaur is still in vogue. It's gauche, and trust me, we've seen it all before...

... back in my day we didn't have that fancy IDE autocomplete; we memorized every function in a library. IDEs?! ... Back in my day we didn't even have debuggers; we just knew how the code worked. Pish posh, back in my day the compiler didn't even produce error messages that made sense. Compilers? The faux luxury of it all! Back in my day, if you actually cared about your code, you wrote the assembly by hand.

The code I write is pretty good, and it stays good throughout the years because it was already good. If you're frequently finding month old code to be shit, your code is just shit to begin with.

Or .. you are working in an unstable environment. If the system you take as a base changes frequently(like the web), your code becomes bad, outdated code, no matter how shiny it was before. But if it was good, migration and maintaining it is easier.

React is 13 years old

So?

Are you implying I should have switched to react 13 years ago, when it was just another framework who come and go?

And then my experience would have been stable?

(I kind of doubt it, when my unstable web experience was caused by changes into how canvas works, webrtc, indexeddb, webgl, webgpu. I don't make simple UI's)

Or well, just that "let" was introduced makes all my beautiful old code with only "var" bad code by modern standards.

"let" is 11 years old.

My point is that the web is not really an unstable platform anymore, it's just something people say that used to be true. Also using var and other superceded constructions doesn't make the code bad; that's not what bad code is. I think you know this.

I think I know that different people have different metrics what bad code is.

My main metric is, if it is readable. So yes, I also don't consider my old code with var bad. But other people do.

If you haven't had this experience, I would rather think yóu are junior

Yes. Definitely.

I didn't necessarily know everything about my code at all times before.

And that justifies my gleeful embrace of not knowing anything about my code now.

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