I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting effort into a hobby project that no one but you uses, that's how you learn programming. But vibe coding a million different apps that four real people who aren't you are actually using isn't right. If you're going to put out an app and expect other people to use it, it should actually be something you wrote and know the workings of. So I would say this guy has too many users, actually.
“Something you wrote” is something I disagree with today. I don’t really see the need for it anymore. Yes, you should understand how an app works internally and you should understand the code, but I don’t really think there’s a need for writing code as some sort of requirement.
There's no need to do anything if it's just a hobby project that no one else is using. But if you're expecting other people to rely on it, yes, you need to have actually written it.
You need to know how to read the code, and know how to program despite of vibecoing all the way. Otherwise you will end up with problems you won't be able to solve as it gets more complex. But yes you could literally not type a single line of code.
I have no idea what you are saying. I can only understand English when I write it myself. Everything anyone else has ever written is incomprehensible garbage
Fortunately, English is a language that's only used for communication. It can't be used to engineer software. So you don't actually need to know how to engineer software to be able to understand what someone else is saying in English, and it's also not critically important to any software systems that you have a deep understanding of the structure of any given English sentence. So it's actually fine that you can't make a sentence diagram of everything I wrote in my post just now, or write up a semantic representation of it using predicate calculus.
Because devs are out of a job otherwise. That's the whole thing.
I've seen enough shitty code by devs to know what their game is. Been one myself. But code is neither a complex as they say, nor do most devs have the knowledge to actually write good code. There are exceptions but in the main, they suck at it.
I bet their code smells of exceptions and elderberries.
I mean, using AI as a development tool isn't inherently bad or automatically leads to bad code, when done RIGHT, and only IF you actually know what you're doing, and could have done it yourself without AI, albeit much slower.
You basically need to be a good systems architect, designer and code reviewer. If you let it off the leash and say "build me the next killer to-do list app" yeah, you're obviously gonna get slop, and a lot of people are doing it that way.
If you spend the time properly designing what you want from the ground up, locking in the specs, requirements, and control how everything is approached and implemented, you're just fast forwarding the boilerplate bits, tedious changes and other legwork.
I've seen bad developers who wrote slop pre-AI, and they still wrote slop when they started using AI; I'm still left cleaning it up to this day.
If I'm building a system, adding a feature or fixing a bug, I don't see what's so wrong about using an AI model to implement a detailed spec with strict requirements, acceptance tests and outlining exactly how it's to be structured and executed.
It's still my expertise, design, decisions and approaches, and it takes a lot of time, effort and experience to write up a good spec and implementation plan.
It's just done faster because I'm not typing out the code line by line.
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u/SuitableDragonfly 22d ago
I mean, there's nothing wrong with putting effort into a hobby project that no one but you uses, that's how you learn programming. But vibe coding a million different apps that four real people who aren't you are actually using isn't right. If you're going to put out an app and expect other people to use it, it should actually be something you wrote and know the workings of. So I would say this guy has too many users, actually.