[Uehreka]

> Writing and programming are both a form of working at a problem through text…

Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable).

I don’t want to read something that someone didn’t take the time to write. But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do). Really elegant code is cool to read, but many tools I use daily are closed source, so I have no idea if their code is elegant or not. I only care if it works.

[fhd2]

Users typically don't read code, developers (of the software) do.

If it's not worth reading something where the writer didn't take the time to write it, by extension that means nobody read the code.

Which means nobody understands it, beyond the external behaviour they've tested.

I'd have some issues with using such software, at least where reliability matters. Blackbox testing only gets you so far.

But I guess as opposed to other types of writing, developers _do_ read generated code. At least as soon as something goes wrong.

[tptacek]

Developers do not in fact tend to read all the software they use. I have never once looked at the code for jq, nor would I ever want to (the worst thing I could learn about that contraption is that the code is beautiful, and then live out the rest of my days conflicted about my feelings about it). This "developers read code" thing is just special pleading.

[ozim]

Key part is *where reliability matters*, there are not that many cases where it matters.

We tell stories of Therac 25 but 90% of software out there doesn’t kill people. Annoys people and wastes time yes, but reliability doesn’t matter as much.

E-mail, internet and networking, operations on floating point numbers are only kind of somewhat reliable. No one is saying they will not use email because it might not be delivered.

[aeturnum]

> even if no one reads it

I gotta disagree with you there! Code that isn't read doesn't do anything. Code must be read to be compiled, it must be read to be interpreted, etc.

I think this points to a difference in our understanding of "read" means, perhaps? To expand my pithy "not gonna read if you didn't write" bit: The idea that code stands on its own is a lie. The world changes around code and code must be changed to keep up with the world. Every "program" (is the git I run the same as the git you run?) is a living document that people maintain as need be. So when we extend the "not read / didn't write" it's not using the program (which I guess is like taking the lessons from a book) it's maintaining the program.

So I think it's possible that I could derive benefit from someone else reading an llm's text output (they get an idea) - but what we are trying to talk about is the work of maintaining a text.

[williamcotton]

Correct me if I’m wrong, but if you wrote a dependency-free recursive descent parser in C89 thirty years ago it should still compile and return the same AST.

[1shooner]

>Code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have

But isn't this the distinction that language models are collapsing? There are 'prose' prompt collections that certainly make (programmatic) things happen, just as there is significant concern about the effect of LLM-generated prose on social media, influence campaigns, etc.

[JohnMakin]

Sometimes (or often) things with horrible security flaws "work" but not in the way that they should and are exposing you to risk.

[rescripting]

If you refuse to run AI generated code for this reason, then you should refuse to run closed source code for the same reason.

[nicbou]

It makes sense. A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job, just like some cheap Chinese-made widget. Not every task requires hand-crafted professional grade tools.

For example, I have a few letter generators on my website. The letters are often verified by a lawyer, but the generator could totally be vibe-coded. It's basically an HTML form that fills in the blanks in the template. Other tools are basically "take input, run calculation, show output". If I can plug in a well-tested calculation, AI could easily build the rest of the tool. I have been staunchly against using AI in my line of work, but this is an acceptable use of it.

[Brian_K_White]

"A vibe-coded tool can sometimes do the job"

How do you know it ever does the job?

I don't know either for most code that I use, but I do have reason to trust that the author does know. I don't really trust any code itself, only the people and processes (organizational, not computer) that generated it.

I have no reason to trust that ai generated code is doing the correct thing. I know enough about the way code works to know that merely observing it seem to work in a test case means absolutely nothing at all. Multiply that zero by a million more test cases and it's the same zero.

The only thing I trust is that someone actually understood a problem they were trying to solve, and cares about avoiding edge cases, and tries to develop logic to make unintended outcomes impossible etc...

It's not possible for an ai to do any of that regardless what the prompts are. But what they can do is emit stuff that some person once wrote which did exhibit these qualities, and so looks ok, and causes idiots to think they found the cheat code to life, and worse, foist that shit off on everyone else.

My mom does not have my awareness that any of this is going on. She's just out there in the world running into this crap blindly as an unwitting end-user who has no idea how badly she's being served these days when she uses basically any app or service. Thanks for that vibe coders of the world.

[notanastronaut]

There is a sentiment around tools and a particular business sells perfectly fine, cheap, one use tools, for those jobs that you'll only need to do once, maybe twice. But if you want a good quality tool, you spend money on it and buy it elsewhere.

That's how I perceive vibe programming. A small one-off job that it would literally take me longer to write than to have generated? Perfectly fine. For anything else, there are professionals who get it done.

[onel]

I am a software engineer, but I think code pales in comparison to the impact of every book, speech and essay had on our society throughout history.

[arscan]

> But I’ll gladly use a tool someone had an AI write, as long as it works (which these things increasingly do).

It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use? I think a common blind spot for software engineers is understanding how hard it is to get people to use software they aren’t effectively forced to use (through work or in order to gain access to something or ‘network effects’ or whatever).

Most people’s time and attention is precious, their habits are ingrained, and they are fundamentally pretty lazy.

And people that don’t fall into the ‘most people’ I just described, probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need. UNLESS it’s something very novel that came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of. But that bit isn’t what we are talking about here, I don’t think.

[josephg]

> It works, sure, but is it worth your time to use?

This is something I like about the LLM future. I get to spend my time with users thinking about their needs and how the product itself could be improved. The AI can write all the CSS and sql queries or whatever to actually implement those features.

If the interesting thing about software is the code itself - like the concepts and so on, then yeah do that yourself. I like working with CRDTs because they’re a fun little puzzle. But most code isn’t like that. Most code just needs to move some text from over here to over there. For code like that, it’s the user experience that’s interesting. I’m happy to offload the grunt work to Claude.

[mindcrime]

probably won’t want to use software you had an LLM write up when they could have just done it themselves to meet their exact need

Sure... to a point. But realistically, the "use an LLM to write it yourself" approach still entails costs, both up-front and on-going, even if the cost may be much less than in the past. There's still reason to use software that's provided "off the shelf", and to some extent there's reason to look at it from a "I don't care how you wrote it, as long as it works" mindset.

came from a bit of innovation that LLMs are incapable of.

I think you're making an overly binary distinction on something that is more of a continuum, vis-a-vis "written by human vs written by LLM". There's a middle ground of "written by human and LLM together". I mean, the people building stuff using something like SpecKit or OpenSpec still spend a lot of time up-front defining the tech stack, requirements, features, guardrails, etc. of their project, and iterating on the generated code. Some probably even still hand tune some of the generated code. So should we reject their projects just because they used an LLM at all, or ?? I don't know. At least for me, that might be a step further than I'd go.

[bigbuppo]

Yeah, sure, you could create a social media or photo-sharing site, but most people that want to share cat photos with their friends could just as easily print out their photos and stick them in the mail already.

[pixl97]

Hell, I'd read an instruction manual that AI wrote as long as it accurately describes.

I see a lot of these discussions where a person gets feelings/feels mad about something and suddenly a lot of black and white thinking starts happening. I guess that's just part of being human.

[zahlman]

> it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable).

"One" is the operative word here, supposing this includes only humans and excludes AI agents. When code is executed, it does get read (by the computer). Making that happen is a conscious choice on the part of a human operator.

The same kind of conscious choice can feed writing to an LLM to see what it does in response. That is much the same kind of "execution", just non-deterministic (and, when given any tools beyond standard input and standard output, potentially dangerous in all the same ways, but worse because of the nondeterminism).

[panny]

>but many tools I use daily are closed source

I wonder if this is a major differentiator between AI fans and detractors. I dislike and actively avoid anything closed source. I fully agree with the premise of the submission as well.

[layer8]

I don’t think so. With closed source, it depends on whether you trust the authors. As someone who grew up with shareware (which is generally closed source), you learned to trust authors based on their documentation and reputation. AI-generated code you simply can’t trust as-is. You have to trust whoever reviews it. Of course, with open source you can be the one who reviews it. But typically few people do, and usually almost no one does as thoroughly as the original authors and maintainers — except if they are an AI.

[ethmarks]

I guess it depends on whether you're only executing the code or if you're submitting it for humans to review. If your use case is so low-stakes that a review isn't required, then vibe coding is much more defensible. But if code quality matters even slightly, such that you need to review the code, then you run into the same problems that you do with AI-generated prose: nobody wants to read what you couldn't be bothered to write.

[josephg]

There’s lots of times where I just don’t care how it’s implemented.

I got Claude to make a test suite the other day for a couple RFCs so I could check for spec compliance. It made a test runner and about 300 tests. And an html frontend to view the test results in a big table. Claude and I wrote 8500 lines of code in a day.

I don’t care how the test runner works, so long as it works. I really just care about the test results. Is it finding real bugs? Well, we went though the 60 or so failing tests. We changed 3 tests, because Claude had misunderstood the rfc. The rest were real bugs.

I’m sure the test runner would be more beautiful if I wrote it by hand. But I don’t care. I’ve written test runners before. They’re not interesting. I’m all for beautiful, artisanal code. I love programming. But sometimes I just want to get a job done. Sometimes the code isn’t for reading. It’s for running.

[jpfromlondon]

>Whoa whoa whoa hold your horses, code has a pretty important property that ordinary prose doesn’t have: it can make real things happen even if no one reads it (it’s executable).

When your boss (assuming you have one) tells you to do something, do you just ignore it?

[NuclearPM]

AI is excellent for helping to write things like tech specs, procedures and manuals.

[djeastm]

As long as we're all aware that it'll probably mostly be AI reading them...

[rubslopes]

I agree with your sentiment, and it touches on one of the reasons I left academia for IT. Scientific research is preoccupied with finding the truth, which is beautiful but very stressful. If you're a perfectionist, you're always questioning yourself: "Did I actually find something meaningful, or is it just noise? Did I gaslight myself into thinking I was just exploring the data when I was actually p-hacking the results?" This took a real toll on my mental health.

Although I love science, I'm much happier building programs. "Does the program do what the client expects with reasonable performance and safety? Yes? Ship it."

[exit]

similarly, i think that something that someone took the time to proof-read/verify can be of value, even if they did not directly write it.

this is the literary equivalent of compiling and running the code.

[morgoths_bane]

> I only care if it works

Okay but it is probably not going to be a tool that will be reliable or work as expected for too long depending on how complex it is, how easily it can be understood, and how it can handle updates to libraries, etc. that it is using.

Also, what is our trust with this “tool”? E.g. this is to be used in a brain surgery that you’ll undergo, would you still be fine with using something generated by AI?

Earlier you couldn’t even read something it generated, but we’ll trust a “tool” it created because we believe it works? Why do we believe it will work? Because a computer created it? That’s our own bias towards computing that we assume that it is impartial but this is a probabilistic model trained on data that is just as biased as we are.

I cannot imagine that you have not witnessed these models creating false information that you were able to identify. Understanding their failure on basic understandings, how then could we trust it with engineering tasks? Just because “it works”? What does that mean and how can we be certain? QA perhaps but ask any engineer here if companies are giving a single shit about QA while they’re making them shove out so much slop, and the answer is going to be disappointing.

I don’t think we should trust these things even if we’re not developers. There isn’t anyone to hold accountable if (and when) things go wrong with their outputs.

All I have seen AI be extremely good at is deceiving people, and that is my true concern with generative technologies. Then I must ask, if we know that its only effective use case is deception, why then should I trust ANY tool it created?

Maybe the stakes are quite low, maybe it is just a video player that you use to watch your Sword and Sandal flicks. Ok sure, but maybe someone uses that same video player for an exoscope and the data it is presenting to your neurosurgeon is incorrect causing them to perform an action they otherwise would have not done if provided with the correct information.

We should not be so laissez-faire with this technology.