alt Hacker NewsIn my personal use case, I work at a company that has SO MUCH process and documentation for coding standards. I made an AI agent that knows all that and used it to update legacy code to the new standard in a day. Something that would have taken weeks if not more. If your desire is manageable code, make that a requirement.
I'm going to say this next thing as someone with a lot of negative bias about corporations. I was laid off from Twitter when Elon bought the company and at a second company that was hemorrhaging users.
Our job isn't to write code, it's to make the machine do the thing. All the effort for clean, manageable, etc is purely in the interest of the programmer but at the end of the day, launching the feature that pulls in money is the point.
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How did you verify that your AI agent performed the update correctly? I've experienced a number of cases where an AI agent made a change that seemed right at first glance, maybe even passed code review, but fell apart completely when it came time to build on top of it.
It's not just about coding standards. It's about, over time, having a team of people with a built-up set of knowledge about how things work and how they're expected to work. You don't get that by vibe coding and reviewing numerous PRs written by other people (or chatbots).
If everyone on your team is doing that, it's not long before huge chunks of your codebase are conceptually like stuff that was written a long time ago by people who left the company. Except those people may have actually known what they were doing. The AI chatbots are generating stuff that seems to plausibly work well enough based on however they were prompted.
There are intangible parts of software development that are difficult to measure but incredibly valuable beyond the code itself.
> Our job isn't to write code, it's to make the machine do the thing. All the effort for clean, manageable, etc is purely in the interest of the programmer but at the end of the day, launching the feature that pulls in money is the point.
This could be the vibe coder mantra. And it's true on day one. Once you've got reasonably complex software being maintained by one or more teams of developers who all need to be able to fix bugs and add features without breaking things, it's not quite as simple as "make the machine do the thing."