“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.
The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.
A crazy number of devs weren’t even using EXISTING code assistant tooling.
Enterprise grade IDEs already had tons of tooling to generate classes and perform refactoring in a sane and algorithmic way. In a way that was deterministic.
So many use cases people have tried to sell me on (boilerplate handling) and im like “you have that now and don’t even use it!”.
I think there is probably a way to use llms to try and extract intention and then call real dependable tools to actually perform the actions. This cult of purity where the llm must actually be generating the tokens themselves… why?
I’m all for coding tools. I love them. They have to actually work though. Paradigm is completely wrong right now. I don’t need it to “appear” good, i need it to BE good.
Exactly. We’re already bootstrapping, re-tooling, and improving the entire process of development to the best of our collective ability. Constantly. All through good, old fashioned, classical system design.
Like you said, a lot of people don’t even put that to use, and they remain very effective. Yet a tiny speck of AI tech and its marketing is convincing people we’re about to either become gods or be usurped.
It’s like we took decades of technical knowledge and abstraction from our Computing Canon and said “What if we didn’t use that anymore?”
This is the smoking gun. If the AI hype boys really were getting that “10x engineer” out of AI agents, then regular developers would not be able to even come close to competing. Where are these 10x engineers? What have they made? They should be able to spin up whole new companies, with whole new major software products. Where are they?