The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
Thread
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
The problem is not AI code, but not knowing about system architecture or intent
Unofficial Hacker News client; not affiliated with Y Combinator.
andy_ppp · · focus · HN ↗
Dealing with legacy messes I used to get frustrated and bored of making the improvements, now it's easy to clean up code bases and write loads of tests. I asked Astra to come up with a plan for Playwright testing the whole App, I have not built it yet but the flows suggested were fantastic as was the ephemeral database we plan to create for CI.
I built my friends portfolio website almost entirely vibe coded in 4 hours and it looks unbelievable, we added so much slickness (he's a designer) just prompting together. I used a CMS I had never used once before and it was so so easy to do without any of the usual need to read docs about everything.
I've done so much devops now I'm actually fairly confident that me and an AI can do anything you want in terms of deployment/infra and scaling from AWS to Terraform to whatever.
Anyway my main concern about this technology is not that it is crap at coding it's that the improvements in how it codes and thinks are absolutely dramatic which is extremely scary - it has come so far in a year I wonder what the next year will bring.
Maxatar · · focus · HN ↗
While these criticisms were technically true, they were stated mostly out of a sense of insecurity from people whose jobs were basically spending years and years just glueing code together and mixing APIs to display some CRUD apps rather than out of a genuine concern for whether LLMs were actually producing poor products.
Nowadays those concrete criticisms don't really work anymore, LLMs are pretty good now and surpass most developers when it comes to writing the majority of shovelware that people have been employed, and so the narrative is changing from concrete criticisms about how LLMs were genuinely not capable of writing software... to these kinds of abstract and philosophical arguments that are really hard to argue against because they make no concrete claims.
If you say an LLM can't implement a feature, we'll we can test that claim concretely and LLMs are getting much better with every new release. If you say its code is slower, buggier, or less maintainable, those claims too can be measured and once again they're getting really good at these. If you say it takes longer to complete a task or requires more human intervention, we can compare it and measure etc...
But now the objection has shifted not to LLMs are incapable, but people are now incapable and LLMs represent a degradation of the "craft". And here there is nothing left to test or falsify. The argument has stopped being about whether the LLMs work, because that's verifiable and they are now at a point where it's hard to argue against their ability to actually produce functioning software, so now the argument is about whether people are morally, culturally, or intellectually permitted to use it.