cross-posted from: https://lemmy.zip/post/49954591
“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.
The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.
Then there’s the issue of finding an agreed-upon way of tracking productivity gains, a glaring omission given the billions of dollars being invested in AI.
To Bain & Company, companies will need to fully commit themselves to realize the gains they’ve been promised.
“Fully commit” to see the light? That… sounds more like a kind of religion, not like critical or even rational thinking.
In other news, water is wet.
They say the same about scrum.
“It doesn’t work in you company, because you haven’t fully implemented all aspects of scrum”
Coincidentally it costs about a gazillion dollars to become fully Scrum certified.
Scrum works because of 2 things.
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Projects get simplified or abandoned much quicker
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Tasks are assigned to the team, not the individual
Everything else is entirely optional.
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I have to say that I am surprised by how many people are bashing on AI coding.
I personally use AI tools like cursor and claude code to help me with code, and I have to say that they are incredibly helpful with managing huge codebases and fixing repetitive elements. Obviously, I have to know a lot about coding and system design and whatnot, and I have to write many instructions, so it can’t ‘replace programmers’ or anything. But in the hands of those who already know their stuff, it really does speed things up significantly.
I have no idea how other people are using it that is inspiring all these reports on how awful AI coding is. Do non-programmers just enter Claude and write “make program!!!” and then expect it to work?
Do non-programmers just enter Claude and write “make program!!!” and then expect it to work?
Unironically, yes. The main proponents of this tech absolutely DO just do that, because they’re Business Idiots who are fully happy and content with code that looks “”“good enough”“”, even if it does nothing useful. You can see this in all the credulous articles detailing tech CEOs who decree “All workers shall now use AI!!!” while vibecoding a bunch of slopware. They have no idea what the fuck they’re actually doing, and they don’t care. All the other Business Idiots have decided that this is the new hotness, so they either fall in line and “do AI”, even at massive financial loss to their company and themselves, or they stop being part of the “In” crowd.
And to the Business Idiot, there is no fate worse than being irrelevant.
Kinda wild that someone would do this and send it to prod, like it is destined to break everything and you won’t even know what broke it because it was made by AI without and human guidance, and the next time you turn on Claude it’s not gonna know this, so you will have to waste so much time trying to figure out what is wrong.
Crazy that everyone is apparently okay with this, like I can see the business people trying to sell the hype and the whole narrative of “AGI is around the corner!!!”, but it’s silly seeing business people actually believing those narratives created by other business people.
That’s the truly hilarious part - NOBODY is okay with this! EVERYONE knows it sucks! The ONLY reason it’s still relevant is because Business Idiots are so goddamn pervasive and stupid. Any rational society would’ve taken GenAI out back and shot it years ago, that’s how bad it is. If you want to get into the real nitty-gritty of JUST HOW TRASH things are, I recommend more of Zitron’s work; it’s a common topic for him to rip apart in a well-researched rage.
What type of projects do you work on?
There was a similar study / survey
by Microsoft(idk anymore if it was really them) recently where similar results where found. In my experience, LLM based coding assistants are pretty okay for low level complexity tasks, creating boilerplate code, especially if it does not require deeper understanding of the system architecture.But the more complex the task becomes, the harder they start to suck and fail. This is where the time drag begins. Common mistakes or outdated coding approaches are also used rather often instead of newer standards. The deviations from the given instructions are also happening way too often. And if you do not check the generated code thoroughly, which can happen if the code “looks okay” on first glance, then finding bugs and error sources due to this can become quite cumbersome.
Debugging is where I have wasted most of my time with AI assitants. While there is some advantage in having a somewhat more capable rubber duck, it is usually not really helpful in fixing stuff. Either the error/bug sources are completely missed (even some beginner mistakes) or it tries to apply band-aid solutions rather than solving the cause or, and this is the worst of all, it is very stubborn about the alleged problem cause (possibly combined with forgetting earlier debugging findings, resulting in a tedious reasoning and chat loop). I have found myself more often than I’d like to arguing with the machine. Hallucinations or unfounded fix hypotheses make this regularly worse.
However, letting the AI assistant add some low level debug code to help analyze the problem has often been useful in my experience. But this requires clear and precise instructions, you can’t just hope the assistant will cover all important values and aspects.When I ask the assistant to logically go through some lines of code step by step, possibly using an example, to nudge it towards seeing how it’s reasoning was wrong, it’s funny to see, e.g. with Claude, how it first says stuff like “This works as intended!” and a moment later “Wait… this is not right. Let me think about it again.”
This becomec less funny for very fundamental stuff. There were times where the AI assistant told me that 0.5 is greater than 0.8 for example, which really shows the “autocorrect on steroids” nature of LLMs rather than an active critical thinking process. This is bad, obvio. But it also makes jobs for humans in various fields of IT safe.
Typing during the whole conversation is naturally also really slow, especially when writing more than a few sentences to provide context.
Where I do find AI assistants in coding mostly useful, is in exploring APIs that I do not know so well, or code written by others that is possibly underdocumented. (Which is unfortunately really common. Most devs don’t seem to like writing documentation.)
Generating documentation for this or my own code is also pretty good most cases but also tends to contain mistakes or misses important mechanisms.Overall in my experience I find AI assistance useful and see a mild productivity speed boost for very low level tasks with low complexity and low contextual knowledge requirements. They are useful for exploring code and writing documentation, but I can not really recommend them for debugging. It is important to learn and know how to use such AI tools precisely in order to save time instead of wasting time, since as of now they are not really capable of much.
I have a friend that is a professional programmer. They think AI will generate lots of work fixing the shit code it creates. I guess we will see.
I actually think a new field of “real” programmers will emerge, in which they are specialized at looking for Ai problems. So companies using Ai and get rid of programmers, will start hiring programmers to get rid of Ai problems.
AI generates really subtle bugs. Fixing the code will not be a nice job.
Idk, that was basically 90% of my last job. At least the ai code will be nicely formatted and use variable names longer than a single character.
I’m a dev at a tech startup. Most devs at the company are pretty impressed by claude code and find it very useful. Hence the company has a pretty hefty budget allocated for it.
What I need to do is think trough the problem at hand and claude will do the code->build->unit test cycles until it satisfies the objective. In the meantime I can drink cofee in peace and go to bathroom.
To me and to many of my coworkers its a completley new work paradigm.
