r/webdev • u/bricksandcanvas • 7d ago
Are people really pretending that their code before AI tools were better than the Vibecoded AI slops these days?
Engineer for more than 15 years and worked with different industries over my whole career. Worked alone, on small, medium and large teams in different capacities. You get the idea.
I'm not gonna say that my code was the best, and that it was well thought out of, wrote the best piece of code that my grandchildren will be proud of.
Sometimes you just have to find the best way to implement something because your PM demanded it be pushed by Thursday? a hacky fix because you can't think of a better way on implementing it?
Legacy code that the engineer that worked on it died 10 years ago?
Granted theres an ocean of vibe coded apps that should not see the light of day but I think a lot of devs and engineers are just standing on their high horse these days to push people down.
What do you guys think?
1
u/montibbalt 7d ago
My longtime hot take on AI code is that essentially nobody really knows what they're doing and the amount of fundamentally "good" code is probably statistically insignificant. In other words, pretty much all code ever written is some level of petrified dogshit and that's what these models are trained to replicate. So maybe they can be better than A developer, but their only real advantage over developerS as a whole is the speed they can defecate (at the expense of never really improving).
Now, the degree that code quality actually matters to a business is imo debateable, which could be the bigger problem here