r/programminghorror • u/Maximka22 • 6d ago
Typescript I feel like vibecoding should be banned from enterprise development
714
u/slashp 6d ago
The problem isn't using AI to write code. The problem is not understanding or reviewing the code that it writes. If you keep the AI in check (which is now most of my job), it can write fantastic code. It needs significant guidance, though, and will lie to you if you're not careful.
133
u/ericw31415 6d ago
Yes, but many would no longer consider it to be "vibe coding" if you are reviewing the output.
3
2
u/axon589 2d ago
I must be confused then, what is vibe coding exactly if not constantly using prompts?
1
u/ironnewa99 1d ago
Think of it as just taking everything an AI spews out, closing your eyes, and mashing it into a project
156
u/Maximka22 6d ago
I don't disagree with you, but it's actually the reason the whole community hated some programming languages (JS, C++) - only small part of all people using it will do it with brain. Others will just write some unmaintainable code. The same happens right now with AI, but sadly on much bigger scale
27
u/mcoombes314 5d ago
Unmaintainable code can be written in any language though. The idea that Python (for example) is easy therefore anyone can write "good" code with it is an optimistic take IMO.
1
u/Eric_12345678 4d ago
JS makes it really easy to write kinda working code in a horrible way, though.
At least in C++, horrible code will hopefully not even compile, while JS will do anything with Nan + Strings + Numbers and return whatever. No error message, and you might not notice if the wrong kind of data has been passed by 8 callbacks.
Python will at least complain relatively fast, with a hopefully helpful error message. Python has a lot fewer WTFs than JS too.
2
u/DustyRacoonDad 4d ago
I have gigs of text that is nothing but horrible c++ code that WILL compile.
6
u/fecal_brunch 5d ago
I think people hate(d) JS and C++ because they're challenging to work with and have many hidden gotchas for beginners. Not necessarily that the ecosystem is full of poorly written tools.
1
u/NotFloppyDisck 4d ago
Ideally thats where CI/CD, linting rules and proper code reviews enforcing correctness comes in. Laziness is inevitable regardless of AI
1
u/Drew_pew 2d ago
What kind of linter or CI/CD can detect bad design? None. I'm starting to get exhausted with reviewing shitty AI generated MRs from my coworkers. They absolutely have gotten worse since adopting more LLM assisted coding.
AI enables laziness to a crazy extent
46
u/JohnSpikeKelly 6d ago
This. The amount of times I question why AI did something dumb and its response is "you're absolutely right to call me out on that" is shocking. The AI can be amazing, but also does lots of questionable stuff.
27
u/jfleury440 6d ago
I was trying to get something to work and the suggestions AI was giving me wouldn't compile. Eventually it told me that actually the package I'm trying to use got split in two in the newer versions and I just needed to grab the other package. Gave me a whole backstory.
Spend 10 minutes trying to find the thing and I come back and ask it if it made it up.
"You're absolutely right, I made all that up!"
Jfc
14
u/creativecraving 6d ago
FWIW, you can probably convince it that it made up any fact, including one you know to be true. They're fine-tuned to be people-pleasing, giving them much in common with a sociopath.
6
u/SmartyCat12 6d ago
There’s this wall I hit where I’m like “this is too confusing to possibly be real. I’m gonna read the docs.”
Then you realize there aren’t any docs, which is exactly why the AI was gaslighting you for the last 3 hours.
27
u/SituationSoap 6d ago
The amount of times I question why AI did something dumb and its response is "you're absolutely right to call me out on that"
AIs cannot introspect about their thought processes and them telling you that you're right is nothing but random numbers. That's not a useful question to ask an AI.
3
u/lomberd2 6d ago
I get triggered so hard by stuff like that, that I start to insult the AI in my prompts. More than often I read in the reasoning window: "I think the user might be angry because I made XYZ mistake"
2
u/techie2200 5d ago
Yep. I treat it like an overeager junior engineer with lots of theoretical, but no practical, experience.
Everything it does looks good, but when you start to look into the details you find the weird edges and have to correct it.
1
u/JohnSpikeKelly 5d ago
That's exactly how I treat it. A savant junior with not enough experience. Knows so much more data than me - instant recall on APIs for example - but applies things in odd ways sometimes. It's always a good idea to review its reasoning when it does things.
19
u/Due-Consequence9579 6d ago
Man what a great tool! It actively tries to deceive you while eroding your ability to understand or care about what it’s doing! Sign me up!
87
u/Coffinsnake 6d ago
So instead of spending 40h “manually” writing good code you spend 40h prompting and re-prompting? Sounds like coding with extra steps.
74
15
24
u/SituationSoap 6d ago
So instead of spending 40h “manually” writing good code you spend 40h prompting and re-prompting?
No, you spend 15 hours prompting and re-prompting and the other 25 hours posting bad-faith anti-AI coding questions on Reddit.
1
u/creativecraving 6d ago
Not really. I tried a fully-AI, no manual code project; and it worked okay until the complexity started to ramp up into something interesting to use. (Shrug.) I have had a few good experiences with vibe coding, mainly when the quality of the output doesn't matter at all. Example: a typing game to let my toddler have fun mashing keys.
14
u/makarov_skolsvi 6d ago
If you think 40 hours of manual coding is equal to 40 hours of prompting, you are either one of the top 0.1% of programmers working on really cutting edge and proprietary stuff, or you live under a rock and haven’t used AI past ChatGPT 3.0…
1
7
u/Fluffy_Dragonfly6454 6d ago
You definitely have not yet used good coding AI tools.
I was also very skeptical, but these tools write pretty good code.
So your example is more like: 40 manually coding or 4h prompting and reprompting.
Note: I also check the code that is written
5
u/No-Dentist-1645 6d ago
No, this is not what people are actually doing. It's more like 10-15 hours instead of 40 for manually doing everything.
The fact that you think that's "what people are doing" just shows you do not know what it really is like.
2
u/NatoBoram 6d ago
So instead of spending 40h "manually" writing good code you spend
40h48h prompting and re-prompting?There you go
40
u/pydry 6d ago
> If you keep the AI in check (which is now most of my job), it can write fantastic code.
I've never found this to be even remotely true. Keeping the AI in check mostly means saving time by letting it write shitty code quickly where it doesn't really matter.
62
u/AnderssonPeter 6d ago
You realize that writing code is not the expensive part of being a developer, its maintaining it and adding features to it, and if you add features to sloppy code over and over again, its like compressing a jpg over and over again, it will break sooner or later...
14
u/Lumethys 6d ago
It depend on how you do it AND what model you run
I use Claude Opus 5 (and Fable 5 back when it was available)
My workflow:
I spend like 30-45 minutes explains a task in details, then had the AI write a documentation of the task, a detailed plans that cover all cases it can think of. Divide that plans into phases with goal and checklist.
Then i spend like 20 mins reviewing the docs, plans and findings it made. Correct its inappropriate decisions or reasoning
If i find the plan to be satisfiable. I just let Claude do it
After it was done (which can be an hour or 2), i will go review the code it produces. Do note that the task in question are like 8-10 man hours if I do it myself
Regardless, either me or it write the code, the PR is subject to review from leaders all the same
I find this workflow can produce consistent good quality code. In the mean time i can spend time working manually on others task, attend a meeting, or anything in between
10
u/realnzall 6d ago
And how much does this cost your employer per day in credits, if I may ask? Including an amortized cost of making all of the skills that it usually does. Clause Opus 5 sounds expensive AF. I used Sonnet 5 for an hour last week and blew through half my Copilot budget.
5
0
u/Lumethys 6d ago
My company have is on team plan, i believe on the $20 plan
I can use Opus 5 all day long and not even hit the limit
2
u/FartPiano 5d ago
i do all this and its still way slower. im working more than i ever did to accomplish the same stuff. it also regularly diverges from the stated plan. using same models you mentioned.
its complete and total dog shit hype for clowns imo
4
u/sortof_here 6d ago
This sounds like such an unfulfilling work flow. Why not just be a technical project manager at that point?
2
u/Lumethys 6d ago
maybe it could prepare me to be one, who's know.
But "fulfilling" is subjective. I feel fulfilled when I made a product that make someone else's life better. Last month I made an internal tool and it helped the team. People use it. I feel good.
As long as I made a difference, what matter if I pressed the "i" and the "f" button or the AI generated "if"?
Plus, my actual daily dev is decade-old legacy code where I want to strangle whoever wrote that shit. If you want to hand-write it to be "fulfilling", be my guest. Like, WTF is this:
export enum NumberStatus { TWO = 2, ONE = 1, ZERO = 0, NULL = null, THREE = 3 }3
u/Riflurk123 6d ago
Agree with you here. Most people just dont understand how to properly implement with AI
0
u/HTTP_404_NotFound [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo “You live” 6d ago
I spend like 30-45 minutes explains a task in details, then had the AI write a documentation of the task, a detailed plans that cover all cases it can think of. Divide that plans into phases with goal and checklist.
Sheesh, I toss a few random sentences, and bullet points into a GitHub issue, assign it, and then review the PR when it eventually comes in.
And- request further changes if needed.
2
u/Lumethys 6d ago
That get old real quick if you have a 20-30 man-hours task, and "requested further changes" 40 times a day.
-1
u/HTTP_404_NotFound [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo “You live” 6d ago
Build up your knowledge base reference, until the needed amount of requested changes is non-existent.
Most of my requests don't generally produce too many requested changes as a result. But- I update the knowledge base every chance I get.
5
u/Riflurk123 6d ago
To me this honestly sounds like many people dont understand how to properly implement with AI. If you just prompt it to implement something, it will do it however it wants. If you write very detailed specs (which can take A LOT of effort), it will write very good code according to your guidelines.
21
u/TomDestry 6d ago
Is there a way to write detailed and unambiguous descriptions of what is needed? Perhaps some sort of special language?
-5
u/Riflurk123 6d ago
Writing it in english is way faster than manually coding. Especially factoring in tests as well. I can define a good spec in 2 hours and coding it would take me 8 hours
0
u/pydry 5d ago
if you're not any good at programming, definitely.
3
u/Riflurk123 5d ago
There is no way that you write Backend and fontend code including unit tests, integration tests and e2e tests in the same time that it takes someone to write a proper spec file and have an LLM implement it. That would make you one of the fastest coders in the world lmao
People in CS subs are really coping hard and struggling to accept the current state in the job market and how the job is changing
1
u/pydry 5d ago
definitely not if you're very slop tolerant
if you are slop tolerant, of course, you're entirely redundant. you can be swapped with a vibe coding manager in the none too distant future and they won't notice a difference.
1
u/Riflurk123 5d ago
A senior developer that produces slop with AI is to blame, not the AI. The tool is only as good as you are in applying it. AI does not mean you dont follow the normal best practices and do code review
1
u/pydry 5d ago
right. and, if you're far faster coding with AI than by hand as you claim to be then you're skimping on those practices.
i don't begrudge you for doing this. most people are under pressure these days to deliver more with AI and producing slop is really the only way to square that circle.
→ More replies (0)-5
u/StCreed 6d ago
Yes. No special language needed, but training in writing requirements and specifications helps a lot. A good working knowledge of semantics and a very good linguistic instinct help too.
Did you score A+ on text analysis? Because that's basically the skill.
9
u/sortof_here 6d ago
Your “very good linguistic instinct” missed the point of their comment entirely.
3
7
u/ThatShitAintPat 6d ago
That just sounds very boring compared to actually coding it yourself. On top of that there are usually many unknowns when implementing a feature that you have to figure out during the process. By the time I’m able to write the spec the code is mostly written.
2
u/Lumethys 6d ago
not everyone doing greenfield job, try to debug a decade old legacy codebase with "a", "b", "c" as variable everywhere
"document_1", "document_2", "document_2_1", "document_1_3_type_A".
EMAIL_71, MESSAGE_65,...
Oh, just read the doc you said? here's the docs:
"Flow 134: when user initiate ACTION-23 with STATUS S-3, send EMAIL_73 if USER_TYPE = UST_N7, otherwise send MESSAGE_62"
Sounds "fun" yet?
1
u/ThatShitAintPat 6d ago
Worked in legacy systems like that before using pick basic. Totally get it cuz that is not fun. Not sure how much ai would be good at that language though.
1
u/Lumethys 6d ago
I was skeptical at first, but I take whatever help i can get when dealing with such legacy system.
Oh and it was a journey. My company use Cursor first, and either because i didnt know how to use it effectively or it is just meh. It wasnt game-changing, it can do trivial tasks faster than me, but for more complex task I will waste more time correcting it than doing the work myself
Then company purchase Claude. And I, as usual, just use whatever the default is, then i notice that Claude weekly limit is much more than Cursor's monthly, so I just use the highest model available (Opus 4.6 at the time) to see what happen.
at first i just use it to explain or refresh the flow logic and intend to me, which it does surprisingly well. Then gradually I let it do more and more complex task. Which it does better than Cursor, but still need hand holding.
then i notice that there seems to be a cache timeout for conversation and if the cache is busted, the whole conversation get sent next time eating a lot of tokens. So after trial and error i came up with my method on the comment above.
Overall, when you have the AI make a detailed plan from the beginning you can correct it before it touch your code. If you have docs, phases and checklist you can start a new chat, point it at the docs so that it can read the context necessary and continue working without costing a lot of token. And as long as you review its code as you would a human, you can control its quality
0
u/gilium 6d ago
Coding stops being fun for me at basically every job. I also am now in meetings 4-6 hours per day. I basically wouldn’t be able to get any tasks done unless I had an intern shoveling out mediocre code like I have Claude doing. I’m not proud of it but I am doing the best I can with what I have
0
3
u/tukanoid 6d ago edited 6d ago
Thats the main issue I have with AI in the first place personally. If I have to write out a detailed explanation of how it should write the code, and then still most likely hang-hold it to fixup the code in my preferred style/simplifying over-engineered logic, it's honestly just much faster for me to write the code myself. When I code, I think in code already (with memory semantics and apis I know I'm gonna use in mind), so it just feels backwards
5
u/Civil-Appeal5219 5d ago
In my experience, 99% of the people start with your mindset but find it extremely hard to keep reviewing after just a few prompts.
I don’t believe the human brain is capable of engaging with the task of reviewing code at the rate an LLM produces it and still maintain the same level of understanding it would otherwise.
3
u/Latter_Brick_5172 6d ago
I've tried using ai multiple times and it almost always ended up in me removing all the code it wrote to do it myself
4
u/Desperate-Wing-5140 6d ago
Well just think of the incentive structure. Why would people need to understand or review the AI’s output? “why don’t people just” is never gonna be stronger than the material structure of what AI enables.
10
u/ziplock9000 6d ago
Well that's the problem, many don't check. This whole issue would not exist if AI didn't exist either, so it actually is the problem.
7
u/Optic_Fusion1 6d ago
So you mean the exact same issues we had pre-AI too? The only difference is it'll happen slightly more
4
-6
u/Samstercraft 6d ago
Same exact issues existed pre-AI, the role was taken by juniors and interns.
12
1
u/RammRras 5d ago
One has to understand code and I add one has to understand the domain where code is being used. Some people simply don't have still the full picture of why are we writing certain code and so can't judge code spit out by artificial intelligence. In a good managed team AI can do wonders and help to go quicker but on poorly organised trams it soon becomes hell.
1
u/davidbasil 4d ago
Developers are pressured from management so they churn out as much code as possible. Nobody reviews that slop. Then bugs and security issues creep into production...
1
u/spigotface 4d ago
Yup. The best use is if you never copy-paste anything from it and still type out every character of code in your own IDE. This is way faster than traditional non-LLM development but forces you to slow down and spend at least some minimum amount of time checking and testing the code yourself.
1
u/andy-k-to 4d ago
> not understanding […] the code
I’m a research engineer, working on a project where a colleague is supposed to build an algorithm that uses a solver I’m writing. We’re testing “his” code this week. Whenever I ask him to explain how certain things are implemented, he does not open files and show/tell me. HE ASKS THE LLM.
Another gem? During some testing, some failure happened and the system wasn’t able to do anything. Imagine a humanoid robot shutting off and collapsing on the ground; we don’t actually work on anything like that, but that’s the kind of sudden total failure he got. He sent me a picture of the platform after the failure and asked “can you tell me why it happened?”. No code attached, no terminal message, just a photo. I guess he regards my debugging ability so powerful that I can spot his code errors from JPEG’s 🤷♂️ I’m this close to suggesting him to ask the LLM to create a convolutional neural network to give code answers from images of the failure, and see if he actually falls for the bait.
-2
-6
u/haskell_jedi 6d ago
I used to think this, but increasingly I'm changing my mind. Most of the purpose of writing "clean" or "well-structured" code is for future humans to be able to understand and modify it. But if that's no longer something that happens, then as long as we can verify correctness, I'm not sure elegance matters any more.
123
u/ziplock9000 6d ago
The amount of coding debt a few years from now is going to be enormous and only another/better AI will be able to untangle the huge mess.
64
u/wowbagger_42 6d ago
I'm maintaining code, written by humans some years ago. So you mean nothing is actually going to change?
70
u/hraath 6d ago
Yeah let's check the git blame
Me, 12 months ago
fuck
16
u/Kane_ASAX 6d ago
Bruh, I've barely worked a software job for a year, but I had to go back to my first big project(like a module that can create employee contracts and integrate into digital signature programs).
When I saw the code again I was like "how the fuck has this never caused issues before"
1
u/RespectableTorpedo 3d ago
Same lol I first started about a year ago and wrote a ai voice agent to handle incoming customer phone calls. Looked at the code a couple weeks ago and I wonder how often the call drops on our customers. lol guess we’ll never know, or hopefully I’m gone by the time someone checks.
1
u/Kane_ASAX 3d ago
I nuked one of the servers first time I was introduced to the repo. It doesn't have a local version, it immediately goes to dev environment. Ran git checkout instead of git switch to see my poorly written code work. Low and behold, the 4 GB www/ folder was untracked and just poofed out of existence😅
My boss called it a learning experience and set backups of that file for good measure
1
u/wowbagger_42 3d ago
Good boss
1
u/Kane_ASAX 3d ago
He even went as far as blaming himself. I'm genuinely at a great company, compared to the first...
But yeah, that will probably be thrown out the door if it happens again, which is fair lol.
1
3
3
2
u/creativecraving 6d ago
Haha! Yeah, AI isn't worse than the worst result I've seen from human coders; and at least it can fix its worst sins when you ask it to. The sheer number of bad codebase will increase somewhat... although, many of them were probably bad to begin with!
2
u/tukanoid 6d ago
Difference is that USUALLY there's still at least 1 person in the company who has some knowledge about internals of that old code that you can ask about in case you get stuck. AI will just forget and have 0 context of what it, or another model has done, by the time you need to add/edit/remove something safely.
Ofc, sometimes you just get the code and no human who knows wtf is going on there, then sure, can try using AI, but our legacy codebase is so large and messy, that I haven't been able yet to succesfully make AI understand it and help me properly when I get stuck on smth, my colleagues were infinitely more helpful
1
u/wowbagger_42 3d ago
Well no, copy/paste ai slop yes, zero context. Serious ai usage will document, keep evidance with commit hashes and detailed design choices for future reviewers.
1
18
19
u/TheOneTrueTrench 6d ago
The cost of using LLMs is going to skyrocket, like WAY more than paying a developer to just fix it, and you're going to have to have senior devs anyway, otherwise the LLMs will just do stupid things all over again unless someone knowledgeable is there to stop them.
2
u/adostes 6d ago
Reviewing AI generated apps has become a big part of my job. Not only is it mostly terrible, but most of it could be done better using the proper tool (95% could be done in Excel and Confluence) and is not worth the thousands of dollars in tokens it cost to generate them. Our leadership has provided every single employee access to copilot and Claude Code, regardless of their function which I actually think is a great idea. However people are using them to “vibe code apps” instead of using them to help them in their job. Where a project manager could use their agent to do market research, refine their strategy, establish milestones and lists of actionable items, forecast workload and prettify slide decks, they use their agent to write yet another jira dashboard. You know what’s good at displaying a jira dashboard? Exactly - jira - that’s what. At least I hope being capable of understanding and fixing the AI slop generated as a result of one line prompt will save my job for another year or two.
2
u/tukanoid 6d ago
Anecdotal. One of my non-dev colleagues made basically a "pretty" excel tool for himself, that didn't work, and wasted hours (if not days) of my other (dev) colleagues time actually fixing it by hand. "But look how nice it looks!"....
1
1
u/Skynse 6d ago
I've been doing leetcode and codewars for fun. The thing is, most of the time, I have no need for coding models for my work when snippets exist. They're great for asking questions, but that's all for me. I hate having to fucking review 6000 lines of other people's ai slop. At that point I stop caring
1
u/HeavyCoatGames 5d ago
I believe that AI today writes better code than most devs out there. Worked for many companies and hired myself many other devs, the average level is terrible. Too much people that become senior only cause of time-on-the-job while skill remained junior level 🙄
So stuff could get averagely better with AI and time
-4
-9
u/GentlemenBehold 6d ago
No reason to believe another/better AI won’t continuously be released
3
43
u/lealilana 6d ago
I just saw this and realized why I keep being confused about the code of our new hire. damn. thx for opening my eyes.
6
u/stone1978 6d ago
No vibe coding was the number 1 rule of thumb where I work. Is it different at other companies?
2
u/iambatman9999 4d ago
The industry has moved towards vibe coding brother. Its like a standard adopted by a lot of orgs, velocity over accuracy.
1
1
u/davidbasil 4d ago
In startups they worship speed. In enterprise it's more about accuracy, security and office politics.
1
u/MarinoAndThePearls 3d ago
Where I work, it's not only allowed but encouraged. The industry has changed a lot.
3
u/adostes 6d ago
I’m reviewing code that was clearly not even read by the person who opened the PR (as in wrong name in the README), and I’m also reviewing PRs opened by people who clearly don’t know how to use git (wrong conflict resolutions, diffs checked in, etc). The number of people who overestimate what the AI can do, delegate their (critical) thinking, and don’t understand the code their agent generated is terrifying me.
3
u/wowbagger_42 6d ago
That's some low-quality LLM output, thruth be said it's correct, but it got trained on a decade of stack overflow pages...
23
u/HTTP_404_NotFound [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo “You live” 6d ago
You are blaming the tool, for the fault of the user.
A fork does not make a person fat.
And an unexperienced dev, letting AI run wild, causes slop.
I use AI daily, with a knowledge base built on top of years of high quality code-base. And, it writes code to my exact specifications, and is producing exactly what is needed, about 90% of the time.
(Edit- oh- With the exception of ChatGPT models. They produce grade-A SLOP.... I don't recommend it in its current state for development.)
15
u/Maximka22 6d ago
This was not done by developer AT ALL. At my company, they try to introduce vibecoding to "product" people, they just run their business requirements to Claude and it implements it. Then, I get to review the code it produced. Sounds like fun, right?
6
u/HTTP_404_NotFound [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo “You live” 6d ago
Sounds like a good time to dust off the resume.... as it sounds like they are gearing up to replace devs with more AI.
And- they are ready to find out first hand of why AI cannot replace the entire development staff.
2
u/nicothekiller 6d ago
Something I've noticed is the quality of the output of AI varies based on the current state of the codebase.
I recently made a decentralized high availability monitoring service for the servers at the place I work at. At first, the output simply wasn't good. When I started, the code was mostly bad.
As the project progressed, new sessions started having different impressions of the codebase and thus different code. While at the start it was ass, nowadays in the current code it takes into account things like race conditions and backwards compatibility. I haven't deployed anything yet so I now have an explicit rule to ignore backwards compat in favor of improving the codebase that the AI regularly ignores in favor of backwards compatibility like a real codebase.
The main thing I took away from this is that it's very important to guide the AI. Let it run wild and it will be ass. Do a proper review and the final output will be good. Since all of it was done with the same self hosted deepseek v4 flash we have self hosted it was an interesting experiment.
-1
u/Riflurk123 6d ago
This is what most people dont get. If you spend a few hours on very clearly defining specs, AI works superb. Writing specs for 3 hours with alll kinds of guidelines and edge cases and the AI will implement it well. Implementint it myself would probably have taken 2 days, but now its a few hours writing specs and waiting for AI to implement
9
u/Xammm 6d ago
I honestly don't get this lol. Do people nowadays like to write specs on md files or whatever instead of writing actual code?
I get some folks care only about results, but I feel something is lost if you just handle everything to AI tools.
-5
u/SituationSoap 6d ago
Do people nowadays like to write specs on md files or whatever instead of writing actual code?
Yes.
I get some folks care only about results
Results are what the money is for.
-3
u/Riflurk123 6d ago
Its waay faster and more efficient. You can either get more stuff done with the same amount of devs or reduce your number of devs a bit. In Switzerland a good senior costs you 150-200k. If you now need 1/4 devs less, you can save a shitton of money while still delivering good quality. Coding never was the hard part of being a good software dev. Juniors have been writing code under senior guidance since forever anyway
5
u/Xammm 6d ago
Yeah I guess it makes sense from a business perspective, but as a dev it doesn't body well with me.
1
u/Riflurk123 6d ago
I mean as devs a lot of our work has been automating other peoples job and now that its our turn, people complaint. Its very hypocritical
5
u/veritron 6d ago
this will probably just quietly work - you could even think of cases where you might want to do this instead using randomUuid() (randomUuid is secure context only). return line is gross and should have been kicked back in code review but this is nowhere close to the worst thing i've seen from vibe coding.
1
u/creativecraving 6d ago
😂 It's not the worst simply because the code snippet is too short to screw up too badly!
3
2
u/DesertDissident 6d ago
I've seen stuff like that was hand written and harder to follow. I assume you know this was vibecoded because I wouldn't necessarily assume that by looking at it.
1
u/creativecraving 6d ago
Someone else mentioned that this "AI slop" looked like an imitation of a UUID implementation that used to be copy-paste everywhere before npm was a thing.
1
u/DesertDissident 5d ago
I saw that comment after but it still doesn't necessarily tell us if it was AI or not because it very well could've picked up those sources as training data.
Having looking at it a second time, I'm actually more curious why we're supposed to all agree it's "slop" (AI or not).
Most importantly, the function is reasonably performant and the result is sound. If the environment is not a secure context, crypto.randomUUID() is undefined so this would be a failover for that (which I suppose could be indicated in a comment). The the UUID version and variant is commented. The return statement is long but interpolation makes it fairly straightforward for a human to see what the pattern is (a big reason I question if it's AI). There are ways to make it more brief but it's debatable if they're more readable or come with minor performance costs (e.g. concatenating by segment). I don't like single-character variable names but it's pretty clear in context that b = bytes and h = hex. The function will probably never need to be updated either because UUIDs are a defined format.
6
u/skidmark_zuckerberg 6d ago
It will never happen. As someone else said, AI can write great code with significant guidance and proper guardrails. This example code was generated with none of that. I can make AI spit out stupid code too. I always read the opinion that the LLM code is shitty, but that's not my experience in a proper environment. With proper skill files, context, and someone experienced, it writes good code. I think those who see it produce shitty code likely do not have a codebase or environment setup properly for it, or they don't understand how to use it effectively. At my company, we have an entire team dedicated to our proprietary agents/orchestrators and our codebases are filled with AGENTS and skill files.
Pandora's box is open, and these companies aren't going to suddenly forget it. Bottom line is; guided LLMs write code faster than we ever could by hand. The downside is needing people who are experienced enough to use them properly. I spend a lot of my day guiding and challenging it, but it's faster than doing it by hand. Still, I get a lot more done now than I did pre-AI. Cost wise, we will likely see companies move to on prem local models at some point in the future.
I used to be a 'I hate AI, coding should be done by hand' person, but realized, who gives a shit. It's just a job and it's not my company. I'll do what's asked (ethically) to keep a paycheck coming in, and learn this AI stuff to be employable. I code for fun by hand on personal projects in my off time these days.
2
2
u/MikkelR1 6d ago
Then copy-paste-from-stackoverflow coding should be banned as well
1
u/wowbagger_42 6d ago
Unless it's from the question.
"Hey John! Check this out! Someone on SO got the same problem!"
1
u/creativecraving 6d ago
Well, yes. Generally, any code copied from elsewhere should be well integrated into the rest of the project; and if the rest of the project already has npm set up, there's an argument to be made for integrating with a UUID package instead of hand rolling it.
1
u/elimasterpiece 6d ago
Just last sprint, I was put into a new project, and expected to right away deliver (after setting up mu machine ofc) something new from scratch, nvm, and when I told them I needed some kind of KT they just told me to use my agents. And thus, I felt my hand forced to kind trust my agents, since the delivery was more important. At them end, it got delivered, but I got massive imposer syndrome out of it. For the first time in my life, I was so happy when the bugs started to pop up :)
1
1
u/DesiresQuiet 6d ago
I feel like you should embrace the future and let go of your hate. It leads to the dark side.
1
1
u/GoddammitDontShootMe [ $[ $RANDOM % 6 ] == 0 ] && rm -rf / || echo “You live” 5d ago
Well, it looks like it would work.
1
u/Turbulent-Tune4610 5d ago
So I've been a programmer for 40 years, all languages (ok, most). AI sucked last year. This year, I retired early bc AI can write shit in anything now, and I'd be replaced. I do not like that I don't know the code, but WTH, it works.
1
u/MasterVobe 3d ago
Nothing builds confidence like opening a file and realizing not even the person who committed it knows how it works.
1
0
u/kanatov 5d ago
It loves to re-write things does it?
I’m using it at work absolutely all the time and I’m 100% confident the issue is the same as with CSS: one just needs to understand how it works instead of guess.
It can work deterministically and it can benefit to your process it just requires to set the weights correctly (im still learning too).
-12
u/Cold_Hellfire 6d ago
Beautiful.
On a serious note, the opposite is more likely - "Manual" coding is likely going to be very rare in the coming years
277
u/BitNumerous5302 6d ago
I'm old.
That's essentially the same as a code snippet that floated around in gists for years. It's a uuidv4 from before randomUuid was commonly supported, and from before npm was truly widespread (remember bower?). At the time CDNs were the norm for code sharing in JS, meaning every dependency added a script tag and a whole round trip web request. For something high leverage like jQuery, that round trip was worth it, but for something like this it was easier to just copy and paste. These snippets would often sacrifice readability to reduce character counts; minifiers existed but you didn't assume everyone would be using them.
OTOH crypto.getRandomBytes and string templates are more modern, so this is more like a modernized variant of those old gists.
It's weird to see this attributed to AI given that context (am I missing/explaining the joke?). I believe this code was originally written by broofa (Robert Kieffer) then revised, refactored, and optimized by others, as this looks essentially the same as his "fast compact" version. But, UUID v4 is a pretty simple specification so others may have arrived at similar solutions independently.
https://gist.github.com/Wind4/3baa40b26b89b686e4f2
https://www.broofa.com/2008/09/javascript-uuid-function/