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Comment by kierenj | Hacker News Reader

I'd welcome someone pointing out where I'm wrong in my critique of this critique..

"The reason AI is a bad tool is that generally speaking, it is completely opaque."

"The real question is, who can verify that what the AI built is good and true?"

Well, you? The developer? The person responsible for using the tool, no?

Isn't this article just saying, "using a tool blindly and not checking the result" is bad? Which, of course, it would be.

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I think most tools, according to the UNIX philosophy, do one thing (and do it well). AI is a tool that does _a lot_ of things...to various degrees of success. While you can verify that the output of `sed` or `grep` is valid, you can't with 10k lines of code you have no context on (without _significant_ effort).

Same with Gimp, Firefox, and your terminal. Tools, all, do many easily verifiable things. AI isn't verifiable without an existing framework, and that's why it's so "good" at rewriting code from language A to language B, but not at zero-to-one building real world software.

I think this is correct. When I was coming up in software engineering, it was fairly accepted that the "bus factor" of a project should only increase. Any kind of vibe coding makes that bus factor exactly one... and if a service goes down, you're stuck.

I can prompt a fix or a new feature, have it coded in a couple of minutes, and I have enough domain knowledge to look at a diff and understand what's happening pretty quickly. It is ABSOLUTELY faster. And if Claude goes down, I could easily keep working.

Or the users? At some point it either works or it doesn’t. And I can use AI to write 100 api tests and run them in the pipeline on day 1 when that would probably be a year 2 project otherwise. And I can document business decisions in plain english and the AI will read those and almost certainly honor them.

100%. Author's point is more like "don't vibe code if you have to maintain it".

The code is your responsibility, and it's your responsibility to understand it and maintain it (using the tools your have available).

Strange article. If their point was "…but vibe coding is really tempting, so you have to exercise a lot of discipline" I'd be on board.

It is, I think. I published the article on BCN (the preface is me, the rest is a reader submission) and I find I agree with relatively little of the article, but I think it has observations worth looking at, even so.

the problem is that a lot of AI use is done blindly. how much of that bun rewrite in rust was verified by a human?

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