Truly one of the statements of all time. I hope you look at the code, even frontier agents make serious lapses in "judgement".
It's sad to think we may be going backwards and introducing more black boxes, our own apps.
Offloading your thinking, typing all the garbled thoughts in your head with respect to a problem in a prompt and getting a coherent, tailored solution in almost an instant. A superpowered crutch that helps you coast through tiring work.
That crutch soon transforms into dependence and before you know it you start saying things like "Once you vibe code, you don't look at the code".
Most of it is rather terrible, but a lot of the times it really doesn't matter. At least most of it scales better than Excel, and for the most part they can debug/fix their issues with more prompts. The stuff that turns out to matter eventually makes it to my team, and then it usually gets rewritten from scratch.
I think you underestimate how easy it is to get something to work well enough with AI.
To the AI optimist, the idea of reading code line by line will see as antiquated as perusing CPU registers line by line. Something do when needed, but typically can just trust your tooling to do the right thing.
I wouldn’t say I am in that camp, but that’s one thought on the matter. That natural language becomes “the code” and the actual code becomes “machine language”.
And therein lies the problem
I've worked places where junior made bad code that was accepted because the QA tests were ok.
I even had a situation in production where we had memory leaks because nobody tried to use it for more than 20 minutes when we knew that the app is used 24/7.
We aim for 99% quality when no-one wants it. No-one wants to pay for it.
Github is down to one 9 and I haven't heard them losing many clients, people just cope.
We've reached a level where we have so much ram that we find garbage collection and immutability normal, even desired.
We are wasting bandwidth by using json instead of binary because it's easier to read when have to debug, because it's easier to debug while running than to think before coding.