I taught a lecture in my first-semester programming course yesterday. This is in a program for older students, mostly working while going back to school. Each time, a few students are selected to present their code for an exercise that I pick randomly from those they were assigned.
This guy had fancy slides showing his code, but he was basically just reading the code off the page. So I ask him: “hey, that method you call, what exactly does it do?”.
Um…
So I ask "Ok, the result from that method is assigned to a variable. What kind of variable is it?" Note that this is Java, the data type is explicitly declared, so the answer is sitting there on his slide.
Um…
So I tear into him. You got this from ChatGPT. That’s fine, if you need the help, but you need to understand what you get. Otherwise you’ll never get a job in IT.
His answer: “I already have a job in IT.”
Fsck. There is your vibe coder. You really do not want them working on anything that you care about.