Hacker News Reader

Comment by freedomben | Hacker News Reader

This might be good short term advice, but in the medium and long term I think devs who don't use any AI will start to be much slower at delivery than devs who do. I'm alreay seeing it IRL (and I'm not a fan of AI coding, so this sucks for me)

View on HN

Good news for you then, this idea is less and less born out by the data. The productivity and efficiency gains aren't there, so there's no reason to be compelled by the spectre of obsolescence. The models may be getting better, but it doesn't seem to be actually changing much for programming. The illusion of busywork, perhaps, is swallowing up the decreased mental bandwidth in constant context switching.

Slower in initial delivery maybe, but the maintenance and debugging of production applications requires intimate knowledge of the code base usually. The amount of code AI writes will require AI itself to manage it since no human would inundate themselves with that much code. Will it be faster even so? We simply won’t know because those vibe coded apps have just entered production. The horror stories can’t be written yet because the horror is ongoing.

I’m big on AI, but vibe coding is such a fuck around and find out situation.

Oh yeah, I totally agree. Vibe coding is not (anytime soon at least) going to be a thing.

But using AI tools for things like completing simple functions (co-pilot) or asking questions about a codebase can still be huge time savers. I've also had really good success with having AI generate me basic scripts that would have taken 45 minutes of work, but it gets me a working script in 3. It's not the revolution that's been promised, but it definitely makes me faster even though I don't like it

This. If there's one thing I've found AI to be a huge timesaver for, it's writing things that interact with libraries/frameworks/codebases that have an atrociously large surface area. AI can sift through the noise so much faster than I can and get me going down the right pack in way less time.

(Aside: Hi Ben! If you are who I think you are, we started at the same company on the same day back in August of 2014.)

Plenty of small FAFO stories circulate already. There will certainly be more. Lots of demonstration code out there in the training data meant only for illustrative purposes, and all too often vibe coding overlooks the rock bottom basics of security.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com