It's pleasant to read an article that genuinely seems written by a person; warts and all. It doesn't matter that it repeats some of its points. Actually maybe that's the point. I hope more people try this.
Interesting piece - reading it I found myself skimming, the point being made was being made repeatedly, albeit showing that as the author grew as a developer so did the complexity of the software they were using.
There was one thing that screamed in my head, though, whilst reading it, was, yes we can have a look at the library being used, read the code, and understand what its actually doing (this is one of the reasons I like Go so much, no matter who the upstream author is it's generally clear what they're doing [caveat: there are always going to be authors that obfuscate the f*ck out of code, no matter the language], the one thing, though, is systems like Netflix, hundreds of microservices running together in ways that people have NFI what it's all doing.
It just doesn't fit into one person's head anymore.
So, a single head can manage the data pathways for some subset of the system overall, and they might even get right down to the metal, the sheer size of the system means they only have a partial view, and abstractions (in the form of C4 diagrams) only show how complex the beast has become.
The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can let the agent code and you review it, or vice versa. No different from being a team lead where you don’t write all the code, or even review each and every line of code, but you have a very firm grasp of the code base.
By that I mean, it's fabulous for taking the input I give it, processing it, and returning a collection of tokens that it has found in its training data that do what is being asked.
It's regurgitating fragments of prior work - I have zero complaint about that, just as a developer you now need to understand what those fragments combined do, and whether that really fist with your actual desire - or not.
To put it into old people's terms "You got the answer from Stack Overflow? Was that the code from one of the answers.... or the question?"
It's pleasant to read an article that genuinely seems written by a person; warts and all. It doesn't matter that it repeats some of its points. Actually maybe that's the point. I hope more people try this.
Interesting piece - reading it I found myself skimming, the point being made was being made repeatedly, albeit showing that as the author grew as a developer so did the complexity of the software they were using.
There was one thing that screamed in my head, though, whilst reading it, was, yes we can have a look at the library being used, read the code, and understand what its actually doing (this is one of the reasons I like Go so much, no matter who the upstream author is it's generally clear what they're doing [caveat: there are always going to be authors that obfuscate the f*ck out of code, no matter the language], the one thing, though, is systems like Netflix, hundreds of microservices running together in ways that people have NFI what it's all doing.
It just doesn't fit into one person's head anymore.
So, a single head can manage the data pathways for some subset of the system overall, and they might even get right down to the metal, the sheer size of the system means they only have a partial view, and abstractions (in the form of C4 diagrams) only show how complex the beast has become.
I can't imagine programming without understanding aka vibe coding. Hence I will never vibe code.
The two don’t have to be mutually exclusive. You can let the agent code and you review it, or vice versa. No different from being a team lead where you don’t write all the code, or even review each and every line of code, but you have a very firm grasp of the code base.
-- me, two months ago
After vibe coding: I can't understand how I could deal with coding before.
In the world that the AI bros want for us, understanding has become a hobby.
The problem with that is - AI isn't a developer.
By that I mean, it's fabulous for taking the input I give it, processing it, and returning a collection of tokens that it has found in its training data that do what is being asked.
It's regurgitating fragments of prior work - I have zero complaint about that, just as a developer you now need to understand what those fragments combined do, and whether that really fist with your actual desire - or not.
To put it into old people's terms "You got the answer from Stack Overflow? Was that the code from one of the answers.... or the question?"