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Comment by feoren | Hacker News Reader

What a hellscape we've created for ourselves. My job is to get out of the way of an AI agent? People were writing bad code before, but at least they were looking at it. It is very difficult to judge whether the code AI spits out is correct or not. My job is to write correct code, and I'm not at all convinced that's easier with an AI. It's a lot easier to write correct code myself than to catch every subtle bug introduced by an AI. I cannot even imagine how awful it's going to be to try to maintain systems that are written like this in the future. And no, Claude is not going to be able to do it for you.

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I think the blog post's target audience were people who already embraced vibe coding. It's not for you (or for me).

But still, between the lines the blog seems to want to picture an imaginary AI agent that has somewhat predictable behavior ("if you do X with your agent, you will achieve outcome Y"), which is definitely wrong expectation.

I was handed a project someone vibe coded with Claude and it took me hours just to get it running to discover it was missing the entire interface and all the queries were for sqlite while the DB to setup for it was mysql. The patch diff file between what claude produced and the functional version I got working was over 11k lines

I'm the OP and this is the exact point of the post. Whoever handed you that project did not have Claude code running it end to end in a production-like environment.

Whether you like the vibe coded app or not, you would have had fewer errors if Claude had been testing it end to end while vibe coding.

definitely better when guided properly. Its like the old art of searching, if you gave it a good search query it would find what you were looking for. Same goes for AI now, how you prompt it makes all the difference

funny enough with my diff and directions even claude recognized how much a problem it created and what it would take to fix it

Tell me about the techniques you use to ensure all the code you use is 'correct'. and then explain why those techniques can't also be used by an AI.

I read and understand the code using my brain, by constructing a mental model and reasoning about it. An AI can't do this because they don't have mental models and don't do reasoning.

I am out of my depth here and don’t know anything about how other people reason and construct mental models, but I mostly talk to myself about the problem and then do something at the end of that. There’s no point where I like have the whole solution in my minds eye (for programming topics, maybe for a drawing or a sculpture or removing a transmission or something I can do that).

Following the output of agent “thinking” simulation lines up pretty good with what I’ve been doing for 20ish years, but of course I may just be a moron who isn’t good at computers.

I don't think I would conclude you're a moron. I don't think you really "hold everything in your mind's eye" when you understand something. I don't know how I do it or how it really works (nobody does). But the fact that the agent logs resemble how I might talk while thinking doesn't really give me much confidence (since chatbots can resemble all kinds of behaviour they're not actually doing).

There is simple correctness but there are also second order effects to consider. How does this particular implementation allow you to grow, and in which directions? What does it prevent? If you don't already have an opinion about this, then the LLM is going to do something and you're going to have to live with it, because it has no idea that it is "making a decision". And now, neither do you!

This is why LLMs do their best work at "leaf nodes", building on existing infrastructure but not designing new patterns on their own.

LLMs can't introspect, reason, or build internal models of the world. You can get very far without that, but there are some subtle ways it will bite you, and it's a fundamental limitation. Hallucinations are one: they are the feature, not a bug.

I hope you're right, but I don't think you are. I think soon the AI will do it for us. We've not yet reached diminishing returns, no matter what contrarians are saying. Just compare using Claude code today vs last year.

People are constantly saying that "it's so much better than it was a year ago!". It has yet to be true. Claude puts out the same slop that it did a year ago.

Claude today is trash vs claude when opus 4.6 came out. Its slow as fuck, goes on cknstant rabbit trails, wont do what you tell it, gets anwers wrkng etc

Thought experiment: what if you used AI in the sort of situation where you would consider adding an external dependency? The differences between the two are obvious, but the level of delegation is not that different.

One difference is that you can (typically) keep on banging the prompt hammer until the problem stops twitching. That might make you want to delegate more.

That in turn might make you refactor the project with more, larger delegated areas. Increased delegation is one recently-added difference between programming and software engineering.

if you can't tell if slop is correct, how do you know your code is correct? starting with a mental model and then writing the code yourself surely makes it feel safer, but it doesn't mean it is

besides, it doesn't even have to be about writing code; finding a bug is more time consuming than fixing it, so you could at least limit yourself to that

When I write the code I know what my intention is with each line. Sure I can (and do) make mistakes, but identifying those mistakes during debugging is relatively easy during debugging because I can clearly see the discrepancy between what I intended and what I did.

With an LLM I must first understand (usually really just infer and guess) its intention, which is much more difficult.

is the LLM not acting on your stated intent? maybe you can find a middle ground, where you can plan and act in small enough chunks that it doesn't start getting its "own" ideas about what to do, or how to do it

a chainsaw is a coarse tool and I liken it to vibe coding. you maintain at least some level of control, but the edges are rough and you might slice off more (or less) than you meant to. I want to model my usage more like a table saw, a precision instrument that can make the exact cut just as I planned it

> much more difficult

as in time consuming or error prone?

if it's just time consuming, it still might be faster than writing it yourself

Hellscape? You mean money train! Fixing all these messes is gonna employ an industry of senior, principal and staff engineers for years.

Good lord! Since when did engineering become making crap then fixing crap as a flex? To just make payroll so some corporate robo moron can make rent? You cannot be in my team. Or my company.

Willy nilly giving an agent more (write) access to figure out a bug ... man you're daydreaming.

I think the idea is that a decent, responsible engineer can come in and fix all the vibe coded nonsense someone else wrote

You completely misunderstood what I was saying.

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