AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You

CharlieDigital

> Fact is, vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess. The reason is simple, yet hard to fix: code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply, because it takes months, years even, to notice the effects of bad architecture or of unmaintainable code. > > For one, AI is not trained on what it means for code to be maintainable. For instance, any reinforcement learning done needs a reward signal that can be measured immediately, not in months or years. Sad to say, but this is no different from human written code. Human written code just takes even longer to realize the mistakes because the pace is slower. I think at the end of the day, it is not impossible to have AI write "good" or "high quality" code. If anything, once the patterns are established, AI will be more likely to adhere to the patterns and rules than any human team . It requires the most experienced engineers on the team to split their time writing the core patterns and documenting them in references/skills. But it takes a lot of "taste" and a willingness to slow down a bit with AI (to create necessary artifacts), something teams find hard to do when you can ship so fast now. My experience has been that there is a camp of very senior engineers that are unwilling to adapt to reality and focus on documentation and writing (effectively producing skills and agent guidance which multiplies their effectiveness); they will cling to their knowledge thinking coding a sacred art.

someguynamedq

> AI isn't good at software maintainability We're a few years into a new technology that is still improving. This is a point-in-time critique.

davidee

There are already consequences. We (collectively) were unprepared for a machine that presents itself in human forms. We were the frogs that boiled ourselves. We built a world of images and words on a screen. And then we built a machine that can (increasingly) mirror that world; it does so in a way which most of us are incapable of disambiguating. It feels like there is indeed a ghost in the machine. And there is, but that ghost is us. And that ghost is fading surprisingly quickly.

catchnear4321

too doom and gloom. has the author not started to develop instincts with regard to ai usage and pitfalls?

hypfer

Tbf, at this point, this has been said ad-nauseam. At least I did not find a new thought in that (granted, relatable) rant. "This is bad and you are bad" requires people to not defend their reality through rationalization, but the point we're at with AI right now is driven by exactly that. So this is at best highly ineffective at reaching the people it claims to want to reach. That said, the underlying emotion of "you all suck and I hope you lose your jobs you frauds" is relatable and worth screaming from the rooftops of Linkedin dot com for the catharsis alone.

davedx

There's a continuum between "vibe coded by someone with no technical knowledge or inclination" and "hand written domain driven design development". You can absolutely use coding agents AND have maintainable code. But yes, the coding agents will not magically make everything maintainable if you don't tell them to. "Code maintainability and good architecture don’t have good measurements that we can apply" Who has no wisdom? There are dozens of ways to measure code maintainability. Cyclomatic complexity is just one. Nothing stops you from wiring up something like SonarQube metrics to your agentic coding workflow.

mohamedkoubaa

>vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess The author seems to be confusing "I didn't write any code" with "I don't care about software design and maintainability". There exist maintainable and thoughtfully designed software systems for which the designer did not write any code and didn't read most of it. It's not the median, but the median software project has always been unmaintainable before agents.

mccoyb

Here's the one simple trick that fixes everything: - Use the code that your agents write in anger. There you go. Do I know when my agents fuck up? Yes, I absolutely do -- because I'm a user of the code I have my agents write, and I ask things like "why is it taking 50 ms to start this program ..." and then I go in and find stupidity, and excise it. I do this over and over again. Is it faster than writing it out by hand? Maybe! It's definitely a different perspective. Start behaving like a baby "why, why, why" and then do a bit of reading, and you'll be fine. A lot of these blog posts seem like they're aimed at software written by B2B companies who don't even use their own software ...

sobiolite

> Fact is, vibe-coded projects devolve over time into an unmaintainable mess. We've had strong coding agents for less than a year. Anyone making such a definitive statement about how vibe-coded projects progress over time is basing it on guesswork, not evidence.

addag

As much as I'd love to believe it, it is now a conservative take. Sure, having a solid architecture in mind still matters right now, but manually writing code is completely unnecessary and, before long, even designing the architecture is going to be completely automated.

donatj

I'm not quite a doomer. I use AI every single day. I also take a fairly negative view of AI generated code, but I think it's unavoidable while remaining employed these days. A fact I find pretty depressing. I absolutely agree with the author that humans need to be in the loop reviewing and understand the code they're merging, and generally take a "Hey, build X like Y utilizing Z" approach when using AI to build instead of the "Hey, solve this problem" approach. Our PE overlords actually mandate the latter, but I'm not doing it. However , a point the author misses is that with AI, major refactors become relatively quick. Hours instead of months/years. Yes, AI can and probably will land you with major foundational and architectural problems, but your architecture isn't set in stone anymore. Your entire codebase bends like a leaf in the wind.

simianwords

> In the future we will see more and more companies proudly boasting their “NO-AI” policy as a competitive advantage. And they will be right. Counter prediction: using AI attractive even for employees. Do you really think you’d wanna join such a company? No way.

bklosky

> "except that the software industry is special" This is the labor theory of value; consumers don't care if the code is hand-made, they want the cheap goods (software) that are the output.

amelius

AI labs should produce AI that can take support calls. But let it stay away from the fun jobs like coding.

brlebtag

I have more than 15 years in the industry. I have worked in some of the most horrendous codebase someone has ever conceived. Honestly? Humans can do worst than AI. Let's stop overvaluing human work. Sure, I don't want AI to write the entire codebase without I know what the fuck it did. But AI is on an equal footing with an average dev.

FinnLobsien

To me, the problem is not about what AI is good or bad at, but about institutional knowledge. If AI is doing the coding, writing, designing, or whatever else, you slowly lose the ability to a) learn from others in the org because nobody knows what you need to learn anymore and b) actually improve stuff because there's no more "what good looks like"

peterpanhead

Man.. just code, let people build, design, adjust. Who cares? Who are these people writing these posts? Why should we give anything they have to say warrant? These posts are getting old, very quick.

t43562

Forgetting about AI for the moment I do like this paragraph very much: > The proficient developers, the experts, rely on their intuition built with sweat and tears, working long hours trying to debug and fix production issues, swearing to never again be so foolish as to repeat past mistakes. It’s the kind of intuition that can’t really be made into a list of rigid rules, because everything is context-dependent. Experts are incompatible with the same rules and recipes that make beginners more productive. Experts don’t follow the rules, they make the rules. .... because I have found the same thing - that there's nobody more zealous about some paradigm than those who are recently converted to it and who haven't come to find that everything has its trade-offs. Design is always about evaluating the trade-offs and seeing which ones most suit the given situation.

brunooliv

"There will be consequences" And, so what? Software as an engineering discipline has long lacked standardization and regulation to be on par with other engineering disciplines, and the fact that code and all its surrounding ecosystems are not "visibile" or "malleable" makes this extremely hard. You can use terraform and yaml to define infrastructure that literally spins up machines _somewhere_ in the internet. With all its issues, bugs and associated consequences mostly being ignored. I just don't understand the difficulty in KNOWING what needs to be done: NO LLM usage in university/grad/high schools, NO LLM usage in the first 3 years of your professional career. Once the basics are solidly grasped, then they can use it at will. The problem has never been about wisdom, knowledge or LLMs writing good, bad, maintainable or terrible code. It has always been about the skill level of people using it AND on the fact that people start off-loading basic things to these models that they wouldn't before. If you have the knowledge and "suffered" through experience to learn the fundamentals, than not using LLMs becomes more deterimental than beneficial. You just CAN NOT skip the trial by fire of learning and absorbing knowledge on your own. That's all.

_usefulcat

> I’m going to make a prediction of my own… In the future we will see more and more companies proudly boasting their “NO-AI” policy as a competitive advantage. And they will be right I'm going to make my own prediction: this isn't going to happen