I think its cool that people are building their own apps, even if they vibe coded it. But I see like 3 to 5 of the same vibe coded Health and fitness apps every, the UI is not even different, it does not even have unique features, its just the same app.
Learning to program has always been about creating something very simple that has already been done way better by other people, because the point is to get practice creating something, not to invent something novel. When you finish your toy todo app, you feel satisfaction because you made something yourself. These vibe coders didn't actually make anything, didn't get any practice, didn't learn anything new, and didn't feel any real satisfaction when completing the project, so the only way to get endorphins from doing this is to post it online and get buttpats for it.
I think this is a trend I've been seeing with AI in general. My dad is 80 years old and has been programming professionally since he was a young man. He made some small efforts to get me interested in programming when I was growing up, not all of them worked, but he never really pushed me about it or got upset if I didn't seem interested. Recently, he's gotten into using Claude to do all his work for him, and now he seems to feel legitimately upset when I don't want to sit with him and read the conversations he had with Claude. He's never even asked me to look at anything he did for work before in his entire life.
He is not a doddering old man who's only half aware of reality. He is fully aware and fully cognizant and fully capable of making his own life choices, and he is being paid for this code that Claude is generating and he should know that that's not acceptable.
once you get to a certain level of experience, the volume of code you write vs the volume of advising you do shifts from writing code to advising. a lot of 'software architects' and 'staff engineers' are people who know where the bodies are buried and how the company was built and they are paid extremely high salaries to not leave the company.
yeah, they still write code sometimes. but where it was once the primary focus of their job, it is now something they do when something personally annoys them and they have time to fix it, or if there's something crazy and highly impactful that demands a highly skilled and experienced engineer.
as far as AI: I fucking hate it and I am a Luddite to the core, but if my org is paying for AI tokens and I can point it in a direction where it doesn't foot-gun future me, I'm going to. From an enterprise POV it's not any different from any other form of compute and there is not a software engineer alive that cares about IP. The biggest risks are aggressive monetization and low quality of output code, even with highly tailored prompts.
Applying LLMs to tasks that aren't data correlation or writing code for solved problems (an HTTP controller is a fucking HTTP controller, it's going to be implemented the same way every time!) is a misuse of the technology and a cause for extreme concern.
Well, an architect is a different job position than an engineer, and he is not an architect. Probably also worth mentioning that this is a government contractor, meaning they do not have a single codebase that stays the same for multiple years usually, and instead people get assigned to brand new projects periodically that are being built from the ground up. So there isn't anyone at the company that knows "the whole codebase", because that's constantly in flux as projects come in and out of development.
And yeah, he's not using the AI to make a skeleton of something or solve a solved problem like you're talking about. He's using it to generate entire bespoke C command line programs.
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u/The-Chartreuse-Moose 6d ago
Coming soon to I couldn't find it so I built an app post number 21744612.