You can’t deny the fact that someone like Ryan dhal creator of nodejs declared that he no longer writes code is objectively contrary to your own experience. Something is different.
I think you and other deniers try one prompt and then they see the issues and stop.
Programming with AI is like tutoring a child. You teach the child, tell it where it made mistakes and you keep iterating and monitoring the child until it makes what you want. The first output is almost always not what you want. It is the feedback loop between you and the AI that cohesively creates something better than each individual aspect of the human-AI partnership.
Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost?
I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that the limited amount of time I get to spend writing code is probably the highlight of my job and I'd be effectively replacing that with more code reviews.
I recently inherited an over decade old web project full of EOL'd libraries and OS packages that desperately needed to be modernized.
Within 3 hours I had a working test suite with 80% code coverage on core business functionality (~300 tests). Now - maybe the tests aren't the best designs given there is no way I could review that many tests in 3 hours, but I know empirically that they cover a majority of the code of the core logic. We can now incrementally upgrade the project and have at least some kind of basic check along the way.
There's no way I could have pieced together as large of a working test suite using tech of that era in even double that time.
If you haven't reviewed and signed off then you have to assume that the stuff is garbage.
This is the crux of using AI to create anything and it has been a core rule of development for many years that you don't use wizards unless you understand what they are doing.
For God's sake that's completely slop.
And maybe child is too simplistic of an analogy. It's more like working with a savant.
The type of thing you can tell AI to do is like this: You tell it to code a website... it does it, but you don't like the pattern.
Say, "use functional programming", "use camel-case" don't use this pattern, don't use that. And then it does it. You can leave it in the agent file and those instructions become burned into it forever.
That's all to say the learning curve with LLMs is how to say things a specific way to reliability get an outcome.
There is obvious division of ideas here. But calling one side stupid or referring to them as charlatans is outright wrong and biased.
The only thing I would change about what you said is, I don’t see it as a child that needs tutoring. It feels like I’m outsourcing development to an offshore consultancy where we have no common understanding, except the literal meaning of words. I find that there are very, very many problems that are suited well enough to this arrangement.
That's a massive generalization.
I care about making stuff. "Making stuff" means stuff that I can use. I care about code quality yes, but not to an obsessive degree of "I hate my framework's ORM because of <obscure reason nobody cares about>". So, vibe coding is great, because I know enough to guide the agent away from issues or describe how I want the code to look or be changed.
This gets me to my desired effect of "making stuff" much faster, which is why I like it.
In real engineering disciplines, the Engineer is accountable for their work. If a bridge you signed off collapses, you're accountable and if it turns out you were negligent you'll face jail time. In Software, that might be a program in a car.
The Engineering mindset embodies these principles regardless of regulatory constraints. The Engineer needs to keep in mind those who'll be using their constructions. With Agentic Vibecoding, I can never get confident that the resulting software will behave according to specs. I'm worried that it'll scewover the user, the client, and all stakeholders. I can't accept half-assed work just because it saved me 2 days of typing.
I don't make stuff just for the sake of making stuff otherwise it would just be a hobby, and in my hobbies I don't need to care about anything, but I can't in good conscience push shit and slop down other people's throats.
Software Developers have long been completely disconnected from the consequences of their work, and tech companies have diluted responsibility so much that working software doesn't matter anymore. This field is now mostly scams and bullshit, where developers are closer to finance bros than real, actual Engineers.
I'm not talking about what someone os building in their home for personal reasons for their own usage, but about giving the same thing to other people.
In the end it's just cost cutting.
