Guy at work did a whole mini project with just LLMs and prompting. I asked him some questions about how it works and some implementation details, and he had no idea. Great. I’m going to have to maintain this thing, probably.
A guy vibe coded something and said to incorporate it into my work.
Now it was a feature that people had asked for so I had to try it out.
It failed 75% of the things it was supposed to do and for the other what usually was a near instant interactive task took 5 minutes. I kicked it back saying he needed to fix the problems and improve performance. The end of the next day he answered that the infrastructure must be broken because the AI couldn’t get results and the performance problem was just the nature of the things the software had to interact with. I say “he”, but pretty sure his comment was LLM generated, long and useless.
But it was the impetus to get that function done now, as his “substantiative” work meant we could technically provide a customer request, lower priority as it may have been. So I spent a morning implementing the same thing it did but the old fashioned way, 100% worked and the unavoidably slow thing took less than a second.
If you’re technical, spec kit helps with this a lot.
You define the spec, and declare everything important about how it needs to work.
Then let the ai loose on developing the code. Then I have another ai check for accuracy to the spec, and have it walk me through the code at a high level.
I understand it about as well as I do most projects where there is a team working on something.
Works great if you are already a competent coder. If I was new to coding though, I don’t think I would be learning a ton
I feel like most of the time saved is by skipping the part where you learn stuff. Like, the AI fills out how you do a left join with this ORM library. Cool. Now I don’t know how to do that.
You know how a lot of managers are annoying and don’t know anything about how shit works? That’s down the road using LLMs like this.
I don’t disagree. That’s why I feel for new developers. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I have some stuff still to learn, but not all that much on a vibe coded saas app.
If I had to learn like this when I was new though, I probably would have never learned anything
Guy at work did a whole mini project with just LLMs and prompting. I asked him some questions about how it works and some implementation details, and he had no idea. Great. I’m going to have to maintain this thing, probably.
A guy vibe coded something and said to incorporate it into my work.
Now it was a feature that people had asked for so I had to try it out.
It failed 75% of the things it was supposed to do and for the other what usually was a near instant interactive task took 5 minutes. I kicked it back saying he needed to fix the problems and improve performance. The end of the next day he answered that the infrastructure must be broken because the AI couldn’t get results and the performance problem was just the nature of the things the software had to interact with. I say “he”, but pretty sure his comment was LLM generated, long and useless.
But it was the impetus to get that function done now, as his “substantiative” work meant we could technically provide a customer request, lower priority as it may have been. So I spent a morning implementing the same thing it did but the old fashioned way, 100% worked and the unavoidably slow thing took less than a second.
Just use a LLM to maintain it. Duh.
If you’re technical, spec kit helps with this a lot.
You define the spec, and declare everything important about how it needs to work.
Then let the ai loose on developing the code. Then I have another ai check for accuracy to the spec, and have it walk me through the code at a high level.
I understand it about as well as I do most projects where there is a team working on something.
Works great if you are already a competent coder. If I was new to coding though, I don’t think I would be learning a ton
I feel like most of the time saved is by skipping the part where you learn stuff. Like, the AI fills out how you do a left join with this ORM library. Cool. Now I don’t know how to do that.
You know how a lot of managers are annoying and don’t know anything about how shit works? That’s down the road using LLMs like this.
I don’t disagree. That’s why I feel for new developers. I’ve been doing this for 25 years, and I have some stuff still to learn, but not all that much on a vibe coded saas app.
If I had to learn like this when I was new though, I probably would have never learned anything
I feel this way to.