[forsakenharmony]

The cost of maintaining code has absolutely not gone down and every line of code is tech debt

The big issue with AI coding is that is kills the fun part of software development (actually writing code) and just becomes reviewing and understanding code you didn't write

[amrangaye]

“Kills the fun part of coding” - absolutely not! Coding is a lot more fun now that I can move from idea to working prototype in an evening without having to figure out individual libraries, research and learn them etc. The last time I felt this excited / into tech was when I first discovered Ruby on Rails and started using it for projects.

I’ve done several projects that would take months to complete otherwise with “vibes coding”, including: an African fairy tale generator for my daughter, a farm management system for the ministry of agriculture in my country, a Gambian political comic strip creator, a system that generates ten minutes summary podcasts of all my country’s news etc. I’ve also had great success with clients - and got them to sign on much faster - by just putting together a quick demo now that I show them instead of sending a proposal and pitch deck describing what I’ll build for them. It makes them so much more excited and we can make changes almost in realtime.

I’ve noticed a lot in the industry and even on hn, that coders - especially long time ones - tend to “look down” on vibes coding, the same way they did with scripted languages back in the day, and I imagine the same way with compilers. I think this will generally fade out as it becomes industry standard, but in the meantime sometimes I see comments on hn that are so discouraging and cynical it makes me wonder if the person actually tried it out or had just pre judged it. I also think the phrase “vibe coding” is a terrible name, cause it makes it sound like a lazy way of doing things. It’s so much more than that, and lets you think and plan at the idea level. Things like planning your system before you ask it to implement also help a lot.

[ramraj07]

Keep your manual Porsche for weekend drives. Get a adaptive cruise lane assist camry for real work.

Every line of code is tech debt, true. Every integration is orders of magnitude more tech debt. The only time an integration wasn't tech debt was when I set up new relic logging.