Technology

It's going to get even more dangerous over time because the LLMs are coming out of the uncanny valley but still have subtle problems, they are just getting harder to see. I just did a bunch of AI training at my company and on the one hand, some of it was already out of date, and on the other hand, the language used to describe it gave it a lot more credit than it deserved.

People are already thinking it can do things it really can't. Like think or analyze.

I've been in this cycle since the first time I've interacted with an LLM or AI coding system where at first it looks impressive and I'm not sure what its limits are and then I slam into a wall that makes me realize in horror that it's capabilities are far less than it seemed at first, then improvements come out and I'll repeat the whole process because the previous wall seems to be dealt with and it becomes hard to argue with the people who are gung ho for AI.

Fun story from this week, we had a chore for the frontend to refresh to a new version of the UI framework. Fairly simple task, so off to a junior developer. Within a couple hours there was a merge request ready to go. Ok, a fairly normal amount of time to change version and at least do a sniff test and find nothing changed so I go in assuming I'll look at a few version bumps, maybe one or two tweaks... I see the junior dev was proposing over 1,000 lines of code to be added... WTF...

I crack it open and there was just a firehose of css rules, all marked '!important'. Looking at one examlpe, it repeated the same classifier with the same exact bunch of rules 5 times in a row. It was like it found every possible derived css class combination with tag and defined !important CSS for most everything about it.

So I find out that the junior dev asked it to rebase and it did what he expected, just change some version and went. He tried it and due to a framework change, one element was misaligned by a little bit. So he gave the feedback to the LLM and tried again... and it failed, and he tried again and it failed and after 5 rounds, it finally got the element aligned and hit 'merge request'. For fun I opened up his proposed change and just so much was just a bit dodgy css wise because it screwed with so much stuff, but the junior dev only concerned himself with the page as it opened.

So I said screw it, I'll do it myself, and added the singular rule that was needed to adapt to the framework change, making it overall about a 5 line change including versioning and such.

Depressingly, I suspect an executive would consider me far less productive because I only did 5 lines of change and the junior dev would have done thousands...

We inadvertently let two Jr's vibe code a project. They used their own Cursor subs and did not tell anyone. They are no longer with us. Now there is this project with no documentation, they removed the LLMs comments, and then ran a linter. I checked the git history. Nobody can make sense of the code base. We can't even empirically show that it is cheaper to rewrite than start over, so we just stare at it everyday. Nobody can add any features. When you debug you end up in abstraction hell and work through the most buggy nonsense code.

Yeah, the big thing is that management has no sense how little coding you actually do in a software engineering role. You spend so much more time understanding requirements, understanding how you can resolve roadblocks within your organization and understanding what the hell the code does that was previously written.

In particular, the last part is something that will most definitely take longer for vibecoded programs.
The code is often needlessly complex, because:

• folks throw in additional features with no restraint,
• the AI will gladly generate a second implementation for stuff, you already solved in the codebase, and
• AI-generated code tends to just be noisy, because you need rigorous logical reasoning to find the most minimal solution.

But you also just don't have human beings that made all the detail decisions and can tell you why they're important. In vibecoded code, all of these detail decisions are accidental and only 'proven' in so far as the given accidental state that the code is in, happens to not explode in reality. If you need to tweak anything about it, you're completely blind as to what's actually important and what's just in there, because the AI figured, it's the most likely thing to autocomplete there.

So Ian Malcolm was right the whole time

Good article. Any company doing any of those examples deserves to die.

The companies that will pull ahead in the next 24 months are not the ones that adopt fastest. They are the ones whose judgment systems are mature enough that adoption does not break them.

Yeah, judgement doesn't seem to be a high priority for the a.i. addled mind.

The real vibe coding is a bottle of beer and a lotta fuck it

Yeah but not until the next financial quarter so it's all good right?

Oh no i'm terrified to lose my "learning velocity."

holy corporate word salad

I agree wholeheartedly with this article, however, it’s giving vibe-authored