Adequate often means done and cheap
It really, REALLY depends what you're working on. If you're throwing together an internal tool or simple dashboard, it doesn't really matter what the code looks like. But if you're writing software that other programs will depend on, bad design choices ripple out and affect another generation of software. Imagine slop in the linux kernel, in google chrome, or in your compiler or runtime. Its not acceptable.
I know a lot of people spend their careers writing end user software and web UIs. AI is increasingly a good choice for this sort of code. But that's not all of us. And its not all of the software being written.
It’s really eye opening to work with these tools on a codebase you know deeply because these problems are everywhere.
However if I opened an unfamiliar project in another language and I wanted to add a little feature with no intention of maintaining it, I’d happily accept the changes and loop until it worked well enough for my temporary needs.
The scary middle is when you’re dealing with coworkers who don’t care about anything other than closing tickets and collecting credit. With enough of a token budget you can now wrap loops around an LLM and have it try things until the program appears to work. Ask it to do a code review and then submit the PR without having understood what it was doing. There are a lot of workplaces where there isn’t a good mechanism to push back on this and the tech debt just keeps growing.
I'm not making an argument in favor of people using LLMs for this, but people were doing this before we had LLMs it was just usually a bit slower. I can't even say it usually doesn't work out long term because I worked with a lot of guys who did this and took a ton of Adderall while working practically around the clock. Every incentive structure in the organizations rewarded it along with social credibility from more junior engineers. (The last cowboy I worked with who pulled this shit ended up becoming the most senior engineer in the company, a multi-millionaire and worshipped like a god by 90% of the mostly fresh grads we were hiring).
The problem is when invariably these people burn out eventually and leave, they leave a massive vacuum in their stead. Not from load they were carrying but creating.
I think the larger the organization I've been at, the more they reward the people making huge commits on nights and weekends. Worse, they could get away with TBRing their shit and merging it without review.
LLMs are often all of the bad habits and organizational problems that we already carryied just being speedrun. There are some places doing it right, but they already were.
If the "big ball of spaghetti" theory holds, where software companies who can't manage the debt stumble over themselves as they continue to add to the big ball of spaghetti code, I guess we'll see a row of companies declaring "software bankruptcy" or something in some/many months, depending on how well these workspaces learn to care slightly more and get better at pushing back against slop.
_wire_•1h ago
How do you verify that it works?
p1024k•58m ago
However, if AI provides a solution, as the person using AI, one should conduct research before making a decision. This is not in conflict with or hindered by the use of the ideas provided by AI.
andyfilms1•40m ago
The obvious counterargument is "well, just ask the AI for those answers," but the AI lacks the context and experience that you have. Sometimes, genuinely, the user really is just "holding it wrong," but none of the current AI models would ever admit that, and you'd spend hours trying to solve an unsolvable problem.
Grombobulous•26m ago
For example, I use a vibecoded internal tool written in Go. I don’t even know how to write Go. Haven’t read a single line of the code. I just wanted to move from bash scripts to using cloud SDKs for performance reasons.
But the internal tool is a convenience tool, and you can do everything it does using alternative methods. So if it break, there is no real negative impact besides personal convenience of anyone using it. There’s some documentation on how to do everything manually if needed.
Here’s another example: you’re making a static website. No JavaScript, no interactivity. Truly, what could go wrong? And while I do understand HTML a lot better than Go, it wouldn’t really matter if I didn’t.
serious_angel•42m ago