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Comment by mbrumlow | Hacker News Reader

The problem is not vibe coding. The problem is the people doing this were never good software engineers before vibe coding.

Simply put you still need good practices to produce working good code with AI.

Oddly what I have found best is patterns that many would cringe and demeans unit test and integration test.

Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test, but more than ever I have to put on my PM and QA hat, even more so with web dev.

For me the only part of the process that has changed is I don’t write the code. I still setup environments to run the code, I still manually poke at things I suspect will be fragile. But most importantly I still always run the software before shipping it.

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> Yes I still vibe unit test and integration test,

False sense of security. What's stopping the agents from doing an elaborate form of "Assert.IsTrue(true)" in some/most/all of the tests since you are vibing it and not reviewing it?

Exactly what happened in a PR from a few months ago, from the beginning it felt wrong, pytest was moved from the dev group to the main import section. Then imported in our models. To add ignores everywhere.

Agreed. If you don’t want to read the code that’s fine, but you have to read the testing code. Otherwise you have no idea what’s going on.

Yeah, you have to have some level of involvement. It's crazy that we are actually talking of 100% dev involvement to literally 0% involvement.

If you're working with agents that severely misaligned you'll probably have issues way beyond fake tests.

It seems to me that chances of misalignment are a function of accumulated usage time. Eventually, it will happen.

> The problem is not vibe coding.

Except that it is the enabler. Without AI there are no 5K lines of code that no human has ever seen. AI introduces a new category of problem that did not exist before.

Yep agree.

As much as I like to put power in the individual, this has become a huge nightmare for those of us who were kind of decent programming.

This was NOT the case 5 years ago. At all.

Well said. The problem is that vibe coding can paper over bad engineering practices for awhile. And results look good, and when you raise concerns people look at you like you're dumb and trying to slow things down.

But the underlying bad practices _will_ bite the same they would have before AI, you just don't know when.

It's a really frustrating state of the industry to be in.

Models are the worst now that they ever will be. Frontier models do a phenomenal job of employing good engineering practices and code style compared to where they were mere months ago. Unassisted programming is dead. Programming as a human activity will be on a timescale of years (along with a vast swath of other knowledge work).

It's like the casino, crypto gambling, or eating junk food. We're wired for that short-term gains and few of us can escape it. I understand that, just sad that the casino slot machine had to hit our craft.

Couldn't have said it better myself. Issue at hand is if you're working in an environment that enables such people and even encourages that behaviour. Suddenly, their voice is the same where it was never even a whisper before, and you can't do anything about it. It is extremely demotivating and I would actually propose a more radical approach to it - either embrace the shit in full and commit to it as well or really do engage into another company where there's a better filter for hiring. The latter are usually smaller companies because they can't afford no to.

I actually quit bigger companies and SV contracts because the amount of hype was way overblown. Nothing could not be AI, really. Think about how crazy it is that Jensen Huang is saying "AGI is here", seriously. I first thought malice, now I think it's just plain religious Zeal.

We're not a company, it's just me and my pal. I keep 50% of the product and profits and he pays me to do that (because I have way more expertise than him)

curious question where you work, the AI craze is not happening?

curious question where you work, the AI craze is not happening?

of course it is. There's no escape IMO unless, as you've said, go solo or with a small team. I just don't know of any company of a notable size that's not into it full force. It's both disgusting and amazing to look at really. Give it a few years and if it fizzles out I'm curious what will happen. If it turns great, I'm even more curious what will happen. Weird times.

Just "yesterday" we were all careful what and how we do stuff, you have now people who barely understand things slopping together OS and people use it blindly (Omarchy), and then shocked pikachu faces when giant gaping holes are noticed in it.. and people still do not care. Amazing trainwreck of a timeline, hah.

I'm seriously considering pivoting myself to security.

if I got $1 for every time me or anyone I know prompted AI, got the wrong answer, and people claimed "you need good practices / get better at prompting" I'd be a millionaire

The problem is these companies literally say "NO NEED TO LEARN ANYTHING JUST VIBE". Ton of ads on social media and YT claiming that.

Like my mom doesn't even know what a PC, a Macbook or a Linux computer is and we're telling her she can make apps?

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