“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.
Nah, bullshit tests that pretend to be tests but are essentially “if true == true then pass” is significantly worse than no test at all.
Sure. But, unsupervised developers who: write the code, write their own tests, change companies every 18 months, are even more likely to pull BS like that than AI is.
You can actually get some test validity oversight out of AI review of the requirements and tests, not perfect, but better than self-supervised new hires.
You also will get some bullshit out of it. If you’re in a situation when you can’t trust your developers because they’re changing companies every 18 months, and you can’t even supervise your untrustworthy developers, then you sure as shit can’t trust whatever LLM will generate you. At least your flock of developers will bullshit you predictably to save time and energy, with LLM you have zero ideas where lies will come from, and those will be inventive lies.
I work in a “tight” industry where we check ALL our code. By contrast, a lot of places I have visited - including some you would think are fairly important like medical office management and gas pump card reader software makers - are not tight, not tight at all. It’s a matter of moving the needle, improving a bad situation. You’ll never achieve “perfect” on any dynamic non-trivial system, but if you can move closer to it for little or no cost?
Of course, when I interviewed with that office management software company, they turned me down - probably because they like their culture the way it is and they were afraid I’d change things with my history of working places for at least 2.5 years, sometimes up to 12, and making sure the code is right before it ships instead of giving their sales reps that “hands on, oooh I see why you don’t like that, I’ll have our people fix that right away - just for you” support culture.