alt Hacker News> so if it doesn't work then I have to figure out why.
But it's built on top of things that are understood. If it doesn't work, then either:
• You didn't understand the problem fully, so the approach you were using is wrong.
• You didn't understand the language (library, etc) correctly, so the computer didn't grasp your meaning.
• The code you wrote isn't the code you intended to write.
This is a much more tractable situation to be in than "nobody knows what the code means, or has a mental model for how it's supposed to operate", which is the norm for a sufficiently-large LLM-produced codebase.
> My series of accidental successes
That somewhat misses the point. To write working code, you must have some understanding of the relationship between your intention and your output. LLMs have a poor-to-nonexistent understanding of this relationship, which they cover up with the ability to regurgitate (permutations of) a large corpus of examples – but this does not grant them the ability to operate outside the domain of those examples.
LLM-generated codebases very much do not lie within that domain: they lack the clues and signs of underlying understanding that human readers and (to an extent) LLMs rely on. Worse, the LLMs do replicate those signals, but they don't encode anything coherent in the signal. Unless you are very used to critically analysing LLM output, this can be highly misleading. (It reminds me of how chess grandmasters blunder, and struggle to even remember, unreachable board positions.)
Believing you know how LLM-generated code works, and why it works, is not the same as that actually being the case – in a very real sense that is different to that of code with human authors.
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Just like there are some easy "tells" with LLM generated English, vibecode has a certain smell to it. Parallel variables that do the same thing is probably the most common one I've seen in the hundreds of thousands of lines of vibecode I've generated and then reviewed (and fixed) by now. That's the philosophical Chinese room thought experiment though. It's a computer. Some sand that we melted into a special shape. Can it "understand"? Leave that for philosophers to decide. There's code, that was generated via LLM and not yacc, fine. Code is code though. If you sit down and read all of the code to understand what each variable, function, and class does, it doesn't matter where the code came from, that is what we call understanding what the code does. Sure, most people are too lazy to actually do that, and again, vibecode has a certain smell to it, but to claim that some because some artificial intelligence generated the code makes it incomprehensible to humans seems unsupported. It's fair to point out that there may not be humans that have bothered to, but that's a different claim. If we simplify the question, if ChatGPT generates the code to generate the Fibonacci sequence, can we, as humans, understand that code? Can we understand it if a human writes that same seven lines of code? As we scale up to more complex code though, at what point does it become incomprehensible to human grade intelligence? If it's all vibecode that isn't being reviewed and is just being thrown into a repo, then sure, no human does understand it. But it's just code. With enough bashing your head against it, even if there are three singleton factory classes doing almost the exact same thing in parallel and they only share state on Wednesdays over an RPC mechanism that shouldn't even work in the first place, but somehow it does, code is still code. There's not arcane hidden whitespace that whispers to the compiler to behave differently because AI generated it. It may be weird and different, but have you tried Erlang? You huff enough of the right kind of glue and you can get anything to make sense. If we go back to the Chinese room thought experiment though. If I, as a human, am able to work on tickets to cause intentional changes to the behavior of the vibecoded program/system that results in desired behavior/changes, at what point does it become actual understand vs merely thinking I understand the code.
Say you start at BigCo and are given access to their million line repo(s) with no docs and are given a ticket to work on. Ugh. You just barely started. But after you've been there for five years, it's obvious to you what the Pequad service does, and you might even know who gave it that name. If the claim is LLMs generate code that's simply incomprehensible by humans, the two counterexamples I have for you are TheDailyWtf.com, and Haskell.
> "nobody knows what the code means, or has a mental model for how it's supposed to operate"
> Believing you know how LLM-generated code works, and why it works, is not the same as that actually being the case
This is a strawman argument which I'm not really interested to engage. You can assume competence. (In a scenario where one doesn't make these mistakes, what's left in your argument? It is a sufficiently strong claim to say these cannot be avoided such that it is reasonable to dismiss the claim unless supporting evidence is provided. In other words, the solution is as simple as not making these mistakes.) As I wrote up-thread, including the code is a choice and one should be mindful of it.