this post was submitted on 06 May 2025
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Fuck AI
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Having been a coder for decades before AI came on the scene, I don't understand how inexperienced programmers could possibly write a serious amount of working code with AI.
It's wrong, like, at least half the time, but as an experienced coder, I can look at the "code" it generated and know what it was trying to do, and then write it correctly. I do find AI useful when I'm not sure how to go about solving a particular code-related issue, but ... it just gives me something to think about, not an answer I can use directly.
It's like google-coding in 2010; nothing you search for is exactly what you need, but it could help you see why your code isn't working.
Yeah like if you start coming across snippets that aren't even properly indented, you know you're digging the real bottom of the barrel (been there while struggling to fix email templating I knew nothing about back in the day). Now, the code you get from the LLM looks totally legitimate to the untrained eye, and it may even generate a convincing explanation.
You won't have any indication when it's dead wrong until you try to run it. And even then, it may be "working" in a way unintended because you don't actually understand what you copy+pasted, because neither does the LLM ofc.
I can't even imagine the spaghetti bowl you can get yourself into if you just keep vibe coding yourself deeper and deeper, while understanding nothing.
The spaghetti bowl is the real problem. You can make something that works, but it's so fragile because the solution is rarely general and never elegant. The snippet might be surprisingly elegant, but it will reimplement the same code 3 different ways in 3 different places and the whole thing turns into a mess
You can see the quality if you're an experienced coder. My comment lacks personal context in that I was in school in 2010 and there were plenty of my classmates who would plug snippets into their projects without fundamentally understanding what it did or learning what the project was supposed to teach us. Similar to a shortcut with AI in 2025.
There are definitely people who cut & pasted from stack overflow in the work environment, too. The difference is that I, as the clean-up crew, could google their code and find the post it came from ... and then I could read the comments and figure out wtf they thought they were trying to do. When they paste LLM-generated code in, there's no trace of where the dumbfuckery came from.
Just thinking about it makes me glad I'm near retirement.
I tried using chatgpt to write a basic batch file, it ended up such a horrendous mess that i gave up halfway through. Fucker got told four times, still kept putting the REM on the same line as actual code.
So glad to see others that do that. Still haven't really tried to understand what vibe coding is, as I try and ignore passing terms, but I was starting to think it was just using the AI assistants in any way. I use it in the same way as you and find it perfectly fine for that purpose but I can't imagine using it for anything more.