Vibes Don't Maintain

fk202611

I can only read code at a basic level, so I am in the same position as the author of this article.I built a diagnostic app using AI. With my initial prompt, I was able to get it to generate diagnostic results.However, when I ask AI to make changes, something else sometimes breaks. Every time this happens, I have to ask AI to check the code again.

CrimsonCape

The anecdote the author gave is already kind of outdated, since Claude will write tests and debug itself as it progresses. It doesn't take much insight to realize that the maintainers are going to be AI. Houses are still standing built with hand saws and elementary-school level tools; we don't tear them down, just cut new pieces with power tools and bolt on new additions built with new pieces made from advanced tools. Isn't AI just another purity test? nasty VSCode users instead of pure elite Vim users? While the maintainers surely will be AI, the last bastion is the architects. Claude can write the scaffolding, but does Claude know how the parts go together? Even the concept of fuzz-testing existing means that even humans can't envision all the failure paths, so it would be unfair to hold the metric against AI. What we are going to see more of is the architectural failures: massive data breaches because the architecture aroung the breach will be reveaed to be laughably simple, from prompts that just didn't know what to ask.

BubbleRings

> "...or the parts that have never once executed in production because they’re there for a worst case someone sat down and imagined." Good stuff. > "It’s the record of what the code was supposed to do ... written down somewhere a human or an agent can read them back. Ours are markdown files in git..." I keep getting surprised how many quite technical people I know are doing real work with AI but have never touched markdown. If you are one of those people, allow me to offer a suggestion: Stop. No more sending questions to ChatGPT or Claude until you do the following: - Install Typora on your Windows or Mac machine. - Write a .md (markdown text) file a full page long using Typora (or another editor that understands markdown, but Typora will do just fine). Make use of Heading 1, Heading 2, and underline formatting, at least. - Make the one page file be a complex request to an AI. Something like "research x, compare it to y, make a guess what will happen in the future, here are some of my opinions and guesses, make your replies short, provide references". Hand that .md file to your favorite AI. (Bonus points for using drag and drop or pointing the AI at the dir the file is in.) Look at your results. Make a change to your .md file. Hand it to the AI again, see the different results. In my opinion, if you work on a keyboard and you've been making use of AI for the last 8 months, you should have done the above 4 months ago. Until you do, you will have a hard time understanding how drastically AI has changed almost all developer's lives, and how it is changing more and more fields that are not software development.

t1234s

were in the slopocalypse

DonsDiscountGas

Decent points, but at this point if the restaurant owner could articulate their needs at a non technical level, I bet Claude or Codex could do a good job. Which is harder than it sounds but not exactly rocket science: * Make an app for scheduling shifts for my staff. * Needs to handle multiple users with intelligent reconciling of edits * Needs to adapt to both English and Spanish speakers. * Needs authentication * Need 99.9% reliability This gets most of the way there. Presumably the restaurant owner will need to iterate, but isn't that always the case? Iterating now doesn't require hiring external help.

sashank_1509

This sounded like AI slop and Pangram agrees. If it actually is AI slop, cue the irony.

bill10

Vibes are vibes lol