alt Hacker NewsI get vibe-coders not having a good experience once the honeymoon is over. But I'm fascinated that a professional software developer could have such a different experience than I do.
• LLMs generate junk
• LLMs generate a lot of junkReplies
I've been a software engineer professionally for over two decades and I use AI heavily both for personal projects and at work.
At work the projects are huge (200+ large projects in various languages, C#, TypeScript front-end libs, Python, Redis, AWS, Azure, SQL, all sorts of things).
AI can go into huge codebases perfectly fine and get a root cause + fix in minutes - you just need to know how to use it properly.
Personally I do "recon" before I send it off into the field by creating a markdown document explaining the issue, the files involved, and any "gotchas" it may encounter.
It's exactly the same as I would do with another senior software engineer. They need that information to figure out what is going on.
And with that? They will hand you back a markdown document with a Root Cause Analysis, identify potential fixes, and explain why.
It works amazingly well if you work with it as a peer.
Yeah... don't get me wrong I find a lot of value in these tools. They do help with a lot of the tedium, can be helpful as debugging assistants, and in the right hands (with the right oversight) can indeed generate solid code.
But we are, even as of Opus 4.5, so wildly far away from what the author is suggesting. FWIW my experience is working in the AI/ML space at a major tech company and as a maintainer + contributor of several OSS projects.
People are blindly trusting LLMs and generating mountains of slop. And the slop compounds.
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My question is why use AI to output javascript or python?
Why not output everything in C and ASM for 500x performance? Why use high level languages meant to be easier for humans? Why not go right to the metal?
If anyone's ever tried this, it's clear why: AI is terrible at C and ASM. But that cuts into what AI is at its core: It's not actual programming, it's mechanical reproduction.
Which means its incapabilities in C and ASM don't disappear when using it for higher-level languages. They're still there, just temporarily smoothed over due to larger datasets.