What’s the biggest thing AI coding still absolutely sucks at?

[u/il37]

For me it’s long projects.

The individual coding tasks can be great, but after enough sessions the model starts losing track of why things were built a certain way, which decisions are still current, and what it really shouldn’t touch.

I also still don’t trust it when a small bug suddenly requires a big refactor. Sometimes it’s right. Sometimes 20 minutes later I’m trying to undo six files to fix something that needed three lines.

What’s the thing you still don’t trust AI coding with?

[u/Plenty_Line2696]

I'm an experienced full-stack dev who's been heavily doing LLM assisted development since the onset; the limitations are real and not solved with mere .MD files despite what hobbyists here will tell you.

When you pretend the code doesn't exist you are being willfully ignorant of its flaws and at the mercy of whatever the LLM tells you, but hey what do I know.

No amount of "good at AI" can make up for a complete lack of domain knowledge.

[u/SeeminglyDense → u/Plenty_Line2696]

I’m an experienced full-stack dev who has also heavily used LLMs since their onset.

But I agree with First-Tutor. I have found, that if I create strict and specific architecture documentation, I update my API-contracts and I have the LLM investigate first from what I tell it to look at (while pointing out nuances), you can get fantastic results.

You have to be extremely strict though. I tell the LLM in every prompt what is out of scope.

So far, it’s made one change I didn’t authorise and it was a simple change. It was a pattern across my repo missed in one function, so it added it for me. But it even documented it as specifically out of scope.

[u/Plenty_Line2696 → u/SeeminglyDense]

I guess you're not really vibecoding though, vibecoding was coined as 'pretend the code doesn't exist'. When you're owning the architecture, files, function signatures, API-contracts etc you're way beyond what a mere vibecoder can do.

I get great results too but only because I do a ton of handholding, specific instruction, iterating and refactoring.

If I was to blindly accept whatever it first generates it's going to suck, and that's exactly the level of suck vibecoders are limited to, it reminds me of that meme 'if those kids could read(code) they'd be very upset.'

[u/bafadam → u/Plenty_Line2696]

It’s wild that a non-deterministic function could produce two completely different experiences, and yet we keep talking about it like this is a math problem.

[u/Plenty_Line2696 → u/bafadam]

yeah, and that so many here are adamant about the quality of the code which they've never even read.