It’s about the same for AI coding, I just get better results.
With AI coding we're talking about people producing abstract artifacts that most people do not understand and do not know how to test. These aren't just strips of board. They are little machines. So you shouldn't be asking whether you'd trust a table saw to cut your boards, you should be asking whether you'd trust someone who has never cut boards to build your table saw.
People like you are an anomaly, not the norm. "I wrote an entire production quality SaaS without knowing what a function is" is the norm.
Most developers were shit before, and now they’re just faster at that shit.
AI isn’t the cause, it’s a tool being misused. Misused at a grand scale, indeed. I don’t care, that’s literally not my problem. I can’t do anything about it, so I don’t complain, I use the tool the way that helps me without producing garbage. I can only control myself and what I do with this tool, why would I get anxiety about what others are doing? Some guy is probably driving his car too fast and killing someone this instant, and vibe coding isn’t doing anything near as bad.
Yet. Cars probably didn't kill random members of the public in the first two years of existence either. Even after their obvious dangers were understood it would be decades before pollution and the effects of roads everywhere, urbanisation and sprawl would be understood. Even though the externalities are now acknowledged we still struggle to do anything about it, over a century later.
Is it too much to ask to learn from our mistakes and not let the same thing happen again and again?
What are you going to do when your government insists you use some vibe coded app to get access to healthcare? How do you feel about your family having to live in a world with vibe coded cars and drones flying around?
This is too big for us to just bury our heads in the sand. Our industry is already immature considering the impact it has on people's lives. Building regulations exist to ensure you can get a house built without it falling down. How are you going to get software built? You can't just do it all yourself.
I am open to suggestions, I’d like to find more effective means to fight back.
Another analog is using power tools to make jigs for hand tools. I’m constantly rigging up test or data wrangling harnesses to improve my ability to verify and refine solutions. It’s so ridiculously useful for improving outputs, even if it isn’t writing the code that makes it to production.
I have no idea what the frontier will look like in a few years but I don’t doubt local models like qwen will still be a staple of my workflows.
And for what it’s worth, there are people out there who lose their sawing ability because a safety brake totals their blade and needs to be replaced for something like $100. Sometimes we pay extra for features we value. We can always pull out the hand tools if we have to. In the mean time, make hay I guess.
Your table saw does not randomly cut sideways because it “feels” like it. AI might.
Because that's what every AI usage I've experienced has been.
Faster, yes. Useful, yes. Not better "finish".
I spend more for wood and tools than I do tokens.
You guys are really not understanding the difference between a professional using AI tools properly and vibe coding.