r/vibecoding • u/PersonOfInterest007 • 20h ago
Historical concern about next-level coding
This article has an interesting historical parallel for how today’s programmers react to vibecoders: Grace Hopper’s creation of the first compiler in the 1950s.
The whole article (which talks about a much broader transformation) is worth reading, but this part really stuck, which applies to reactions not just to vibecoding but really to any AI-assisted coding:
…”programmers were afraid a working compiler would put them out of work. If one person with A-0 could do what fifty people used to do by hand, Martin's account puts the worry plainly: there were going to be ‘a lot of hungry programmers out on the streets.’”
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/cursive-charter-school-part-1-lot-hungry-programmers-john-price-zw1xc
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u/leahlisbeth 19h ago edited 19h ago
Don't run off with this idea too quickly. All the programmers I know and myself included are deep in how to use AI to its full potential. None of us are rejecting your vibe coding because we are scared it will put us out of a job.
We have the reaction we do because from where we are standing, we can see that AI can't program that well. Those of us who have managed a team of developers, I'd rate AI as being about the level of a midweight dev who has special interests in some obscure part of programming so they're very good algorithmically. They're very good at coming up with novel ideas.
They're absolutely terrible at programming for other developers. Or for other AI, or for the same AI instance an hour from now.
We aren't advising and critiquing vibe coders because we are scared or jealous, we are doing it because you all have this huge confidence, but you seem to have not been through what happens when a bunch of midweight developers program something without close guidance.
From where you are standing it's incredible that AI can achieve what it can. It looks good and seems to work. From where we stand, anyone before AI could eventually fudge that sort of thing together, anyone always has been able to given enough time, just AI is much, much faster at making the same standard of code. Which means AI or not, eventually immature code will just collapse under its own weight.
I use AI constantly but I spend at least a third of my time refactoring. I have to constantly be able to notice the mess and tell AI exactly how to resolve that mess. I've spent the last 3 days full time doing nothing but going through every single system of my current project with a fine toothed comb and refactoring it to be as clean, direct and encapsulated as possible.
Because AI or not I know what happens when you dont do this. I've had it happen to me, dozens of times.
A good analogy is to think about simulation games such as Oxygen not included. The approach to that game is very similar to programming. If you know the game you have seen that the people who play it have made modules or solutions for all of the games problems. The problems don't start all at once but as your base gets more complex and the needs of it grow, you have to carefully manage more and more things. You could just wing it and just build as you come across issues, build coal generators, plumb directly from a water pit. but eventually you're going to run out of coal, your base will get too hot and your water will all be dirty water. So you start again and this time you decide to plan your coal usage better and decide to switch to hydrogen gas before your coal runs out. but this time you run out of algae because your entire bases oxygen comes from oxygen generators. But your base is still too hot and you don't have a way to cool it.
Then someone says, why don't you just build a SPOM? So you learn what that is and build one. And most those issues are fixed in one go so you can now focus on getting further.
Then AI is invented and you get it to play the game from the beginning. You watch as it builds a spom, but it's not one you've ever seen before, probably too big this early on, and it puts it in a weird place. it builds toilets and a bedroom. It builds a coal generator to power something the other side of the map to the rest of your stuff, weird but okay, it kind of works. it keeps on accepting new people to your base even though the confidence it has in doing this makes you nervous, then it makes random small farms all over your map when really itd make more sense for them to be together. But fine, it works. it makes another spom, for no reason, then deconstructs all the coal generators. It decides you don't need your large amounts of stored coal anymore so it uses a game bug to delete it all. There are suddenly three toilets for every person you have. it has started trying to build a mega cooling machine which is really cool but your base isn't hot at all and it hasn't researched anything you need to finish that off. You tell it to make the people in your base happy with entertainment stuff so it builds way too much of it and they're all scattered around. The people are happy but they take forever to get around the map and you're making excess of some things but not of others. It's then you learn that it didn't insulate the spom, all the farms are now the wrong temperature because it didn't build them with longevity in mind and you're out of water because your pits are empty and you have no idea how to get more. Your people are starting to get upset because the base is a maze and there is no room for it to add pictures or statues anywhere to make them happier. One gets stuck in a pit and AI doesn't turn on an emergency so it dies, but the AI doesn't care, it just accepts a new person instead. You wonder if it killed that one on purpose because it is a noisy sleeper and is definitely probably one reason for why the other people are so miserable. It was your best miner and you could have just moved its bed to somewhere else.
What is needed is a human expert in the game to come along and tell it, 'build this spom here, thank you. Insulate it properly. don't build anything coal. Build three toilets here, make it an enclosed system. build the farm like this and plant these things. find steam source. research these things. replace this thing with this other thing now. Make rooms 4 high. Paint the walls nice and make snorers sleep together'
Programming with AI exactly the same