I'm actively watching understanding slip away from developers, code review getting paired down to no comment checkmarks, and codebases go to bloated messes that nobody can read. Axioms like engineers must understand and take responsibility for the code they ship are getting torn down, and the products coming out are reflecting conway's law, becoming impenetrably obtuse and always "so complex there are no obvious deficiencies" (as opposed to "so simple there are no obvious deficiencies" which used to be the aim).
The one thing plan mode helped is for the humans to get an understanding of the strategy, and be able to poke around and look at the design and architecture. You can achieve this with some self discipline and keeping shorter leashes on agents, but it feels like a losing battle. The best devs still put out good code, but the poor devs are learning nothing while their metrics look great. I can't help but think we are racking up immense amounts of debt that will very soon become due.
I’m a big proponent of writing simple, understandable code, so I’m playing devil’s advocate here a bit, but: who cares?
A significant (majority?) portion of developers have been shipping JavaScript/node applications for the last decade that contain hundreds of MB to GB of code from god knows where doing god knows what with dependency trees the size of redwoods. It’s not like your average mediocre dev really knew what was going on behind their gluing of frameworks together - at least from what I’ve seen.
If you have remotely competent tech leadership that enforces relatively intelligent patterns (a good one I’ve found is “write everything backend in rust”) you can make AI churn out monstrous amounts of code that… isn’t all that bad? And if you enforce it writing and updating a docs/API.md on every commit/PR you’re probably doing better than 80+% of devs I’ve ever met. Up until a few years ago it wasn’t uncommon to roll up to a new job that was a “legacy” pile of garbage concocted over 20+ years with no comments or API docs and a readme that tells you to ask for help from someone who has been dead for 5 years. At least AI code is full of comments (some of which might even be accurate) and there’s a finite (relatively low!) cost to figuring out “wtf is this doing and how is it doing it”
When slop code needs to do something different or new or in a different environment but still stay working on the original things, it’s hard to change, sometimes catastrophically so. When your code has concequences, quality means more people understand it which means more people can maintain it.
Arguments against it are sort of like why have devs on staff at all when you build the thing the first time, or why not outsource everything, or why should I care what my code looks like when the code seems to work?
The cost of tokens is not zero, and the bigger the thing you’re doing the more low quality will cost. When your company is the software, you take on an existential risk based on the software working or not.
Pure AI generated code without human curation is full of bad wordy comments but those comments can mislead, be stale, contain duplicates, and drastically reduce the ability to understand things. I watch teams that still care about code understanding ship good products while those vibe coding in the same org just flounder after the initial burst of features. Some problems only come up after the first 90%, and AI can help you solve them but a big ball of spaghetti is still a big ball of spaghetti.
taurath · · focus · HN ↗
The one thing plan mode helped is for the humans to get an understanding of the strategy, and be able to poke around and look at the design and architecture. You can achieve this with some self discipline and keeping shorter leashes on agents, but it feels like a losing battle. The best devs still put out good code, but the poor devs are learning nothing while their metrics look great. I can't help but think we are racking up immense amounts of debt that will very soon become due.
gonzalohm · · focus · HN ↗
jmb99 · · focus · HN ↗
A significant (majority?) portion of developers have been shipping JavaScript/node applications for the last decade that contain hundreds of MB to GB of code from god knows where doing god knows what with dependency trees the size of redwoods. It’s not like your average mediocre dev really knew what was going on behind their gluing of frameworks together - at least from what I’ve seen.
If you have remotely competent tech leadership that enforces relatively intelligent patterns (a good one I’ve found is “write everything backend in rust”) you can make AI churn out monstrous amounts of code that… isn’t all that bad? And if you enforce it writing and updating a docs/API.md on every commit/PR you’re probably doing better than 80+% of devs I’ve ever met. Up until a few years ago it wasn’t uncommon to roll up to a new job that was a “legacy” pile of garbage concocted over 20+ years with no comments or API docs and a readme that tells you to ask for help from someone who has been dead for 5 years. At least AI code is full of comments (some of which might even be accurate) and there’s a finite (relatively low!) cost to figuring out “wtf is this doing and how is it doing it”
taurath · · focus · HN ↗
Arguments against it are sort of like why have devs on staff at all when you build the thing the first time, or why not outsource everything, or why should I care what my code looks like when the code seems to work?
The cost of tokens is not zero, and the bigger the thing you’re doing the more low quality will cost. When your company is the software, you take on an existential risk based on the software working or not.
Pure AI generated code without human curation is full of bad wordy comments but those comments can mislead, be stale, contain duplicates, and drastically reduce the ability to understand things. I watch teams that still care about code understanding ship good products while those vibe coding in the same org just flounder after the initial burst of features. Some problems only come up after the first 90%, and AI can help you solve them but a big ball of spaghetti is still a big ball of spaghetti.