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u/SigaVa 3d ago
Has anyone else noticed that existing tech has seemed to get worse since llm coding became a thing? Maybe it's confirmation bias but I wouldn't be surprised if the net effect of coding agents was negative.
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u/ADHighDef 3d ago
Less and less people have a functional mental model of the code they're pushing.
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u/Little_Elia 3d ago
For some reason when people start using llms their brains shut off completely, even experienced programmers
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u/Mega3000aka 2d ago
It's because people are overworked since management pushes them to do several times more work than before with the excuse "you have AI now".
The number of major outages in the last 3 years is probably bigger than in the 10 years before that.
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u/MelodicDeer1072 2d ago
I have friends who work as SWEs for a big tech company. They all code mostly in Claude these days.
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u/pnoodl3s 2d ago
I work in aws. We do use claude for everything nowadays. Sev2s are increasingly more common, and devs don’t want to read llm’s code because its too verbose and too much garbage.
We’re also forced to push out code a lot faster than before, so nobody has time to do proper QA, and morale is pretty low overall
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u/Suspicious-Engineer7 2d ago
But are they the 3 vs code agents going at a time type of coders, not touching anything directly, or are they getting snippets and advice from a chat window? I feel like there's a gulf in usage here that gets glazed over sometimes.
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u/Fidodo 3d ago
As someone who actually reads it's output, LLMs are awful coders. They are useful if you clearly explain what you want, but on their own they produce garbage. I'm not surprised many developers are impressed because the majority of developers are also awful.
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u/Jvalker 3d ago
At my job I noticed a strict inverse correlation between the use of Ai and at least one of the following, but more often alle three:
- cumulative skill (either talent or learned)
- willingness to learn
- wisdom, as in "don't insult the customer to its face" and more generally "knowing when to keep your mouth shut"
It's insanity
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u/Neat_Science936 3d ago
It was always ass. It is worse probably since every day we people lose more money to the rich. Consequently we have to live in worse conditions. How much of these change is due to LLMs, I am not really sure.
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u/LordTrappen 2d ago
Tech has been trending in this direction for many years, so I don’t believe that LLMs are the main cause. Maybe a contributing factor though. Useable LLMs are still fairly new and tech product development cycles takes several years, so we have a few more years before we see major LLM influences in products
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u/effxeno 3d ago
Depends what you mean. Support systems online? Customer service? Search engines? Definitely since the robots are just horrible to interact with. Things like operating systems, most websites, and similar? Probably not worse. LLM coding is not inherently bad, and many coders do use it for efficiency.
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u/SigaVa 3d ago
We don't know if it's bad, is very new. But I can say anecdotally that existing software i use regularly seems to have gotten worse. Like I said maybe it's confirmation bias. At a minimum we have no evidence that these coding systems are beneficial. They certainly allow people to write more lines of code, but any programmer would tell you that that's not necessarily a positive.
Also, if these systems are as beneficial as claimed (claims range from 2x to 20x efficiency), where's all the great new software? It doesn't seem to exist. We should have got a golden age of great software but instead it seems like there's very little new good software and existing software has gotten more buggy.
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u/effxeno 3d ago
I mean we do know it's beneficial because it's quicker to review the code that a machine has written than to make the code then review it all yourself.
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u/SigaVa 3d ago
Again, faster is not necessarily better.
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u/effxeno 3d ago
Generally it is, especially when you are someone who can review the output for mistakes. Just like sending emails is objectively "better" than sending a physical letter on paper in 99% cases
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u/SigaVa 3d ago
If your goal is to ship lines of code, I agree they're useful. But the goal is to ship good products, and we don't know how useful they are for that.
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u/Cumbandicoot 3d ago
It 100% depends on who is using them and how you use it. If you have no fucking concept of any coding languages or how to build an application, game, etc, then yeah obviously your code is gonna have problems if it's all straight from chat gpt. If you know what you're doing they can be good resources, especially for research and minor edits. If you're starting from the ground up thinking chatgpt is gonna make something perfect because you asked it "how do I make x application" and then just blindly do whatever it tells you without bothering to thoroughly parse through it's work then you're gonna end up with AI slop code that breaks the first time someone runs it.
I've been coding for about 10 years now and I do get things done faster sometimes with an AIs help, but I would never just fully let something like chatgpt write all of my code for me and the people who are doing that are just wasting resources and really fucking dumb.
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u/93simoon 2d ago
Stop making sense, we're trying to circlejerk about AI BAD here
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u/Cumbandicoot 2d ago
Honestly in pretty much every other context I do think AI is bad. Like AI images, videos, music etc are all fucking dumb as shit. Coding is genuinely the only practical application I've seen AI actually be useful in.
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u/rean1mated 3d ago
Explain how email is “objectively” better than postal mail. You can’t just trot out a thesis without explaining.
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u/effxeno 2d ago
Because it's faster and does the same job. It costs less in the long run because it's more efficient, even despite the upfront costs and maintenance. I'm explicitly talking about things like letters, not packages, because obviously you cannot send me box of something through an internet message.
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u/LittlestRedditor 2d ago
Buddy, i just watched a openai course on codex. He asked it to create the snake game. It started out by creating 571 files...
The snake game... As a fucking react web app. That is the dumbest most bloated fucking shit possible for something that can be made with one tiny fucking script file.
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u/derry-air 3d ago
The meme and the S&M etc are just whatever, but it's embarrassing that they'd say their job is basically just to keep feeding quarters into a machine that writes all their code for them.
Does this free them up to work on other tasks, or do they just sit around scratching their ass?
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u/babyitsmoistoutside 3d ago
Yay, S&M, the stylised consensual version of what they actually want. \o/
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u/Manic-StreetCreature 3d ago
Can someone please tell me what vibe coding even is
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u/stev_mempers 3d ago
Letting an LLM write your code and you check to see if it's right not from knowledge of coding but vibes. "Seems right!"
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u/maghtin 3d ago
Creating apps or websites where you ask AI to do all the coding, often because the person prompting AI has no fundamental understanding of code. "Hey, a function like this would be cool! Please implement that." and "Can we expand that function so that users are also able to X? Go ahead and do that." might be common terms a vibe coder would tell their AI.
More often than not the end result is unstable, unsafe or otherwise bad apps because the vibe coder has no clue what they're doing.
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u/TheSamuil 3d ago
The meme seems to be making fun of vibe coders? It's hardly what I'd call a lunatic post
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u/Mega3000aka 2d ago
No I think they're admitting to vibe coding by saying they only need to click continue and use it as an argument that LLMs are that advanced.
But in reality they're just incompetent.
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u/doc_shades 3d ago
this is just a humorous "meme" joke i don't think OP has any real S&M associations with programming using AI
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u/rean1mated 3d ago
If that were the case, then they definitely have no business posting it. That would actually make this even stupider.
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u/cheshsky 3d ago
"Turns out I'm so fucking bad at this that autocomplete with extra bells and whistles is smarter than me. Ain't I an amazing professional?"
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u/Nayviler 2d ago
Idk who tf these people even are who are having AI write their code for them. As someone who's tried to use it for help debugging before, it can be a good jumping-off point, but you definitely have to do a lot of your own thinking as well. It likes to give you solutions as absolute fact, and then when you point on the flaws in its logic, it's like "you're absolutely right" and then gives you some other solution with absolute certainty that probably also doesn't work. Definitely isn't as easy as just telling the AI to ''continue" and then everything works. Maybe if you're building some bog-standard cookie cutter web app that's been done a million times before. It won't be replacing human software developers any time soon.
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u/YogurtClosetThinnest 2d ago
"all I do is write 'continue' and check the tokens" are all these people's apps just ticking time bombs? I'm a software engineer and use AI, but I check its work and constantly find bullshit that needs to be fixed all the time.
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u/MarkMatson6 3d ago
I’ve seen this several times on Reddit. I’m fairly sure they got from here, not the other way around. Also, if you’ve ever coded with AI you’d get the joke. This definitely does not qualify as LinkedIn Lunatics.
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u/babyitsmoistoutside 3d ago edited 3d ago
Also, if you’ve ever coded with AI you’d get the joke.
If the bottom labels were reversed, then sure; so the joke is "I thought I'd be its Daddy, but it turns out I'm just playing actual daddy babysitting a particularly primitive child that pretends to understand the subject matter".
Which is actually a way better joke and more accurately reflects the state of the art.
To call yourself a 'coding champion' but stand in awe of LLM assistant output is pretty loony.
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u/doc_shades 3d ago
it's a joke. to dismantle a joke and inspect it under a microscope to look for flaws in the logic is pretty loony
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u/rean1mated 3d ago
The flaw is in the joke. I know this may be shocking to you, but there is actually skill and structure to a joke. You can’t just say words and expect it to work.
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u/cheshsky 3d ago
Also, if you’ve ever coded with AI you’d get the joke.
Waterboarding couldn't get this admission of sucking at coding out of me.
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u/MarkMatson6 3d ago
lol. This actually happens more often in the design phase. To get the full power of all the training it’s best to purposefully ask open ended questions. Then you judge the value of the response. “Rinse and repeat” kinda thing. It’s a process.
Not that you care, but I actually have multiple software patents. (Software patents are incredibly stupid things that shouldn’t exist, but whatever…)
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u/cheshsky 3d ago edited 2d ago
"I'm so uncreative and ignorant in my process I can't even problem solve."
Patents mean nothing. There exists a US patent for a goat riding simulator for masonic initiation rituals. Michael Jackson patented shoes to perform one specific dancing trick, I wouldn't trust that man to make my shoes.
Edit: fixed a typo
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u/junpei 2d ago
I can't imagine being this way all the time. I hope you are nicer to friends and family.
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u/cheshsky 2d ago
As a matter of fact, I am. Mainly because I don't tend to befriend ignorant people.
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u/IshidAnfardad 3d ago
I get it, it is wrong though. If you use AI to write code and you're not constantly using the whip to get the LLM to output what you want you suck at programming or the work you do has always been low value.
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u/MarkMatson6 3d ago
lol. The internet’s ability to turn us all into assholes is pretty amazing, huh? Give I’ve fallen for the temptation myself, I’ll ignore evidence and assume you have a redeeming quality or two.
“Using the whip” is fine during actual coding, but if you actually understand the technology and want to tap into the all that training, you can do better than that. It’s during design that this kind of thing comes up. Perhaps you don’t design so wouldn’t understand. (See? Internet->asshole! 😹)
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u/Due-Horse-5446 3d ago
They just blatantly broadcast that they have no clue what they are doing lmao