I’m sorry but I’m frustrated by the blatant misuse of AI by my students and colleagues alike. It’s so obvious when they don’t understand what they’ve written.
Good analogy as most people don’t understand how a microwave is working either.
That being said, at least microwaving isn’t on fast track to pollute our entire ecosystem so…
Does anyone here actually cook in their microwave? I don’t mean reheat things or defrost and heat a pizza pop, but like actually cook something with the varying temperatures and all that shit they can do. Like is anyone making raw meatballs, saucing them and cooking them in the microwave?
I remember my parents cooking onions with butter in the microwave to put on subs, but I’ve never done anything like that.
From time to time, just some veggies to go along with air fried chicken.
But that’s because I don’t own a stove, all of my cooking is handled by an air fryer, rice cooker, and the microwave
I do so many things with my air fryer, such a great appliance.
Vibe coding is to coding what ordering takeout from a shady ghost kitchen is to cooking
I would say it’s more accurate to say that vibe coding is to coding what microwaving a ready meal is to being a restaurant chef.
No, “coding” to “cooking” is accurate because an unfortunate minority of people make code that makes the “microwave meal” look appetizing. Vibe coding can look like code and not work, while I’ve seen code that neither looks nor, in fact, is “edible”.
You clearly haven’t eaten my wife’s cooking and most ready meals might look like food but don’t have a lot of nutrition and have now salt than you need in a week.
Microwaving is cooking. Vibe coding is to microwaving what staring at the food and pretending you have heat-ray vision is to microwaving.
More like vibe coding is chucking the wrong ingredients at a fire and hoping the end result is edible.
lol thanks, you made the BOTW cooking jingle play in my head
Or, pretending that the food is delicious, then opening a restaurant and immediately getting shut down because people keep finding bits of glass and nails in their food.
And because the food was frozen and is thawing because of the ambient heat, people will point and shout: “SEE! It is working! I am actually heating the food with my heat-ray vision!”
vibe coding is when you promised your boss a nice steamed ham but you get some burgers from the greatest fast food instead and call it your cooking. and at the end you end up burning your house.
That’s unfair to microwave ovens because they have established uses, even in some fine dining establishments. So-called AI has none of that just yet.
AI has many very well established uses
So many you didn’t list one.
Also OP didn’t talk about AI broadly, just vibe coding.
Not really, it has a couple of niche uses mainly because people externalised the cost of coming up with a good analytical solution to their data processing problem (e.g. medical imaging analysis) which would be vastly more efficient and give insight into the underlying mechanisms, but that would cost grant money rather than VC capital and further externalised energy and environmental costs which are finally born by us, the taxpayers. Ultimately the technology as a whole is delivering very little value and like all hype bubbles mainly serves as a way of further enriching billionaires. But text generator go brrrrr
don’t understand what they’ve written
Well first of all, they didn’t write it.
I’m of two minds on this.
On the one hand, I find tools like Copilot integrated into VS Code to be useful for taking some of the drudgery out of coding. Case in point: If I need to create a new schema for an ORM, having Copilot generate it according to my specifications is speedy and helpful. It will be more complete and thorough than the first draft I’d come up with on my own.
On the other, the actual code produced by Copilot is always rife with errors and bloat, it’s never DRY, and if you’re not already a competent developer and try to “vibe” your way to usablility, what you’ll end up with will frankly suck, even if you get it into a state where it technically “works.”
Leaning into the microwave analogy, it’s the difference between being a chef who happens to have a microwave as one of their kitchen tools, and being a “chef” who only knows how to follow microwave instructions on prepackaged meals. “Vibe coders” aren’t coders at all and have no real grasp of what they’re creating or why it’s not as good as what real coders build, even if both make use of the same tools.
One of my co-workers, maybe oversold his capabilities and experience. That or whoever told me what he was capable of oversold him. Doesn’t matter at this point. Not that long ago, he basically was never submitting any merge requests, and when he did there were a ton of issues. Then one week, everything changed. He was writing code and a style that didn’t match what he had done the week before, there was an excessive amount of documentation where before there was none. It was co-pilot. He had gotten access to copilot, which we all have. But it was obvious that he’s been leaning heavily into it.
And a short-term yeah it looks like he’s doing really well. But I fear he’s not actually learning anything by doing this. Which means if there’s a mistake, for a major change that needs a happen, He’s not going to get there on his own. One time he tried to submit a merge request and I was like, there’s an obvious flaw here because this could be null and you’re not handling that. If the company ever decides that we’re not going to use co-pilot anymore, cuz I think we’re still on a trial run, He’s going to find himself right back where he started. And that’s going to hurt his career in the end.
I’m asking for more extensive documentation these days. Helps show the author themselves understand the code they’re asking me to review. The code itself I just skim.
is vibe coding just using an llm to assist or whatever?
It’s not just using an LLM to assist. It’s more generating the whole source with an LLM, running it once to check if it seems to work (if it “vibes” good) and then publishing it without even trying to read through and understand the code.
Edit: just to clarify, the odds are that the generated code performs awfully, doesn’t handle even the simplest edge cases and has security problems.
I’m only a casual coder (although I hope to get better in the coming years), but this is how I feel in the office when someone farts a half formed, semiliterate speech to text little dingleberry into ChatGPT, and then sends as a professional email the full bodied thing it whips up based on it. I’ve got a colleague who used to be in “LD” classes when they were young and they’ve come a long way to being a near 30-year business professional in this department, and they have always struggled with reading and writing and so tools like Grammarly and now ChatGPT help this person take a fully-formed email and give it the once-over before sending, and I don’t judge that and that isn’t what I’m describing; what I mean is my boss (for example), who can’t string more than five written words together, or read a sentence any longer, and certainly isn’t interested in learning how to, who now uses ChatGPT to send page-long emails or “cook up” long and supposedly philosophical LinkedIn posts about leadership.
I cannot conceive of how a person does that, and sends it with a straight face, totally shameless. Why should I even bother to respond to something like that? Who am I responding to? It certainly isn’t the supposed author. My college program mentor was doing the same thing near the end of my degree program and it was so fucking obvious. He went from never responding to me to suddenly sending these long and enthusiastic emails that recited back to me every point I had made as though they were all worth reiterating (they weren’t), the way one might show one was actively listening (which itself only adds to the irony). And it is such a deep insult to receive one of these emails because it says at once that you both 1) don’t respect me enough to put your own thoughts in writing for me, or to have enough thoughts to write down to begin with and 2) that you think I’m a complete fucking idiot who either won’t notice your ruse, or am also a vapid creature, too vapid to care because “aren’t we all just doing it this way now?”
The philosophical argument against vibe coding seems pretty self evident although the most compelling “argument” I’ve seen against it, I saw on Lemmy, maybe a repost from BlueSky where someone pointed out that it’s the tech bros trying to take this one last manual tool from the hands and minds of users and turn it into a subscription for which our skills (like writing and composition) will inevitably atrophy to the point we cannot do it without the subscription service anymore. Pure evil.
It appears like that is what it ha become but i used to interpret it as just quick and dirty programming for fun rather then trying to code well.
I found that while i love to code for creative fun i hate being a developer and being told what and how to code.
Exactly.
Yes basically
So a tool that is largely useless for people with training, experience, and time. But invaluable for others who figured out how to incorporate it into their work flows as well as those who have no time and simply need to eat something.
You’re right, in principle. But I think “invaluable” is stretching it, for most of us.
I call it convenient, but foolish and detrimental. Both of microwaves and current AI.
Whether I’m judging someone for it depends mostly whether the quality of the result is my problem, or not.
Yeah, I don’t see AI as invaluable, at least not as it is now, but microwaves? I personally would not want a kitchen without one.
Yeah, I don’t see AI as invaluable, at least not as it is now, but microwaves? I personally would not want a kitchen without one.
Good point.
I don’t feel great about my microwave cooking, but I miss it immediately when it breaks.
It’s useless for people with experience and actively detrimental for those without
