Maybe it’s worth actually listening to what these people are saying, or you may find yourself increasingly frustrated and confused as these debates intensify and AI becomes more
politically and socially toxic.
* Writing code is a form of communication, as well as a process through which complex systems are thought through, understood, and formalized.
* Complexity is managed by building on top of robust, deterministic abstractions.
Vibe-coders deny the need to understand complex systems and pretend that AI is a new layer of abstraction. I think that both of these perspectives are dead wrong. This remains the case even if LLMs are marvelously good at generating code.
Put another way, software engineers who mostly deal with code through their agents have switched careers from engineering to some form of management, even if they deny it to themselves. In no way does this deprecate the field of software engineering.
And then there are the externalities which have been discussed ad nauseam at this point, and remain as true as they ever were. (Economic, environmental, political — take your pick.)
As someone with years of FAANG experience, reviewing code competently was actually more strenuous than writing it in the first place. In fact, I'd estimate that truly understanding a codebase required a similar time commitment to writing the amount of code in that codebase. So I don't see how unprecedented speedups are possible with a human in the loop unless the reviews are only being skimmed.
The key to productivity and increasing complexity is inventing solid, thoughtfully designed abstractions and building on top of them, not taking shortcuts by way of a code extruder. If code is constantly getting duplicated or falling into the same patterns, figure out how to abstract or encapsulate it.
AI coding is only going to increase. Eventually coding is going to join several other fields where it is much more about verification than the building of the code. I predict that eventually most programmers are not going to be looking deeply at the internals of the code, but are going to be spending most of their time on the verification.
You can only superficially “verify” what you do not fully understand.
Unfortunately, shittiness in and of itself does not cause business failure. Otherwise, the industry would have moved on from Electron long ago.
It seemed to consist of a bunch of unconstrained and disjointed lies, and whenever the other side tried to point out they were lies, they were told they just weren't listening.
You were right about one thing though, it was increasingly frustrating.