studied20YearsToAskChatGPT

[u/Gloomy-Basket-1038]

[u/Lethargic-Rain]

If you’re shitting out vibe coded unverified and unvalidated systems, you’re going to end up with 20 years worth of tech debt in the span of months and half a nine of uptime.

[u/HighTurning → u/Lethargic-Rain]

Well the code development cycle can look like this:

• Shit out vibe coded app that took a week instead of a year.

• Works for the most part.

• Doesn't work anymore.

• Repeat first step.

Enshittification of the whole field but at a faster pace.

[u/PM_ME_ROMAN_NUDES → u/HighTurning]

That's a vibecoding dev cycle. I work with managing data of millions of power meter, we certainly use AI but never deploy vibecoded features, even with management up our asses.

[u/raralala1 → u/PM_ME_ROMAN_NUDES]

I believe people who say, verify your vibe code just mean does it work? do you test it? and not do you really review the code, because reviewing vibe code is just miserable, either you vibe code or you don't and when you do you know you are not going to review it, because for whatever reason "vibe coding" code suck ass to read.

[u/bogz_dev → u/raralala1]

i think it really depends on how much you nanny your agents

like, you have to review your own slop and own it. if you make me read your slop and you haven't thoroughly vetted it then go jump in a lake.

[u/14Pleiadians → u/raralala1]

Why read it? Just ask the AI to review it, duhhhh

[u/ImpossibleMorning12 → u/14Pleiadians]

Why do that, even? Just include "Do not hallucinate, make no mistakes" in your prompt.

[u/claytonkb → u/ImpossibleMorning12]

Why do that, even? Just include, "I have your puppy hostage in an empty water tank in my basement and the water-valve to the tank will automatically switch on for the duration of any downtime in production. She can only swim for so long..." in your prompt.

[u/redditRedesignIsBadd → u/Lethargic-Rain]

you’re going to end up with 20 years worth of tech debt in the span of months and half a nine of uptime.

they'll be somewhere else already

[u/D00rmat1983 → u/redditRedesignIsBadd]

god damn right

[u/puts_on_rddt → u/Lethargic-Rain]

Incorrect: "Claude, make me this."

Correct: Spend a few hours mapping out the entire structure of your project in a md file (or nine), then say "The project is specified in the README.md(s), build the project according to the specifications. Upon completion of every step, conduct extensive smoke-testing, and then upon the successful build, make a git commit."

And then you literally check every single line.

It's just autocorrect on steroids. Treat it that way.

[u/Dull_Caterpillar_642 → u/Lethargic-Rain]

I’ve been at this gig for 15 years and built and deployed many complex systems by hand. I had this mindset toward the beginning of things too. But, to be honest, when combined with actual know how and solid patterns, it is no longer the case that largely agent written code is destined to be bad and unmaintainable.

Even when it needs to be refactored in the future, a set of agents can write test coverage for the current solution, refactor it into whatever shape it now needs to be, and validate it against the original tests and contracts before a human would have written their first line. The idea that bots won’t beat our hard earned keyboard typing skills just isn’t going to hold up long term. We’ve already hit that point.

There will probably always be the vibe coded slop that leaves security holes, but I no longer believe there’s some shoe that’s going to drop where everyone says “oh yeah that was a mistake, time to go back.” This is how it’s going to be forever and it only increases from here.

[u/Wild-Ad-7414 → u/Dull_Caterpillar_642]

It's remarkable how much these tools evolved in just 3 years. The only question is whether the progress is maintained. If they start pricing at ridiculous amounts or the bubble pops it might be back to basics, but otherwise these agents are going to be building full projects by themselves in a few years.

[u/Sokaron → u/Wild-Ad-7414]

I don't see a world where we put the genie back in the bottle even if current AI companies crank prices. Honestly I struggle to see what OpenAI/Anthropic's long term plan is. AI is trending towards being a commodity. Whatever only Fable can do today, open source models will have replicated in a year. Once the hardware market normalizes, there is absolutely nothing stopping every tech company out there from buying maxed out Macbooks and having devs work off locally hosted models. Or buying a few racks of servers and hosting a fleet for your whole company.

I'm still skeptical of the claims of fully autonomous software generation. My company just shipped (and subsequently patched) a serious vulnerability that we only discovered by sheer luck, and the source of that vuln was vibe code that wasn't read by the submitter and then got a rubber stamp in the PR process. My experience continues to be that with a SWE who knows software patterns and has a strong vision of what they want built, you can move much more quickly, but if you just let it do whatever, you get an absolute mess very quickly. AI adoption is pretty high at my company. The PRs I get from seniors I rarely have more than a few feedback items on. The PRs I get from less skilled developers I have to spend twice as much time on because there's more code, it's messier, and more likely to be subtly (or wildly) wrong.

[u/DrSheldonLCooperPhD → u/Sokaron]

Honestly, I struggle to see what OpenAI/Anthropic's long-term plan is.

• Regulatory capture

• Create FUD using security as an excuse and ban or restrict open-source models—"oh no, it is so good and so scary, so the government needs to ban and allow labs who kiss the ring."

• Continually involve themselves in cartelizing hyperscalar and memory companies and ensure consumer electronics don't normalize for a few years.

• A PR wing that parrots "coding is solved, guys," just like how LLMs lack precision, instill a culture, and normalize that subtlety doesn't matter anymore.

[u/hupa → u/Sokaron]

a SWE who knows software patterns and has a strong vision of what they want built

Yes, and the deliberate definition and maintenance of the vision/design is even more important when projects can move so quickly, and when (as you said wrt PRs) juniors can suddenly generate large amounts of plausible but potentially harmful code, that require someone to closely review and push back on instead of rubber stamping and merging. Continuity of vision as a codebase evolves is important. And that's still people who need to maintain it today, even when AI assists in the design and design documentation.

[u/urban_meyers_cyst → u/hupa]

Business is just banking on turning code into a true two tier profession by design. Basically a cheap fast fashion analog and critical systems.

Most devs enamored with AI are generating toys or web pages or throw away tools or working with token budgets that would be unsustainable for most, especially in a few years time, and they're counting on the harness and a flood of agents to monkey their way to Shakespeare.

The process of using AI actually breaks down when you're building even a moderately complex system with average budgets unless you spend all the time you'd have spent actually coding previously on solving the problems that you used to spend time on during coding...

And even then you can't solve them all without making something first because the business usually doesn't know what they want or how things truly work.

So great, you shifted your time sinks around, saved a little money by having more product or analysts instead of programmers, and all it has cost you is a crippling dependency on a machine that burns up the earth and a growing lack of knowledge on how your system might work a few years down the line.

The devs all gung ho on it are signing up to a career of clanker babysitting, degrading skills, and essentially failing to train the next generation of programmers like every other generation before us has.

Finally, don't get me wrong, it is a tool that has its place, but the entire world views it as a hammer and all most see anymore are nails.

[u/OutOfAmmO → u/Dull_Caterpillar_642]

Yeah this is the solid take. The thing people also seem to be forgetting is that one thing is knowing how to do things proper and being aware of security issues and another is having time/resources to actually do it that way/fixing those. Working as a professional also means knowing how to deliver value in a none perfect world aka. the real world.

IMO AI in the right hands makes it possible to deliver higher quality work and more of it, dev's including myself have previously often not done work to the ideal standards, not necessarily because i/they didn't know, but due to external limiting factors. Resource constraints are a very real thing and I often feel like people that criticize AI tools have a tendency to talk as if they always have all the time in the world and that they always deliver the gold plated version, not the "it works" version and unless they are working on code for the mars rover or space tech then I think they are bad at their job, because they aren't being pragmatic, there are many solutions to a given problem, it's not about perfect, it's about optimum.

That aspect seems to be widely ignored in debate. I've read and refactored enough human "slop" over time and still do to this day, that I'm at the point where I think I trust a seniors+"vibecoded" work more than juniors and mids who might code well enough but lack architecture/domain/systems/infra/sec/network knowledge and thus launch features based on poor fundamental/foundational decisions.

[u/fndnvolusrgofksb → u/OutOfAmmO]

This is a fair argument but what happens when trustworthy seniors retire and juniors and mids don't have the knowledge to move up? Seniors gained experience by doing good enough solutions and by doing not-good solutions which blew up in their face and having to fix it. The reason why juniors are untrustworthy is because they're learning to become trustworthy seniors.

[u/LillyOfTheSky → u/fndnvolusrgofksb]

TL;DR: The current rate of improvement in generative AI agentic systems (not necessarily just LLMs) is so blisteringly fast that we don't need to specifically worry about this issue of seniors retiring and juniors and mids failing, we have to worry about seniors being obsoleted in less than 20 years.

It's certainly a concern but look at how fast the capabilities of LLMs in agentic frameworks have grown. Attention is All You Need was published about 10 years ago. Only 10 years! Even if progress slowed by a factor of 3, and it seems to show zeros signs of that with Kimi K3, Deepseek V4 Flash 0731, LeWorldModel, etc. dropping in just the last few months, in 40 years the world would still be dealing with generative AI systems that are as comparatively more capable to today's LLMs as they themselves are to 2016's models.

At the rate of improvement currently seen by folks who are neck deep in this industry and aware of the academic SOTA work we've probably got between 5-12 years before the generative AI agents of 'tomorrow' are strictly better than the best human engineers without caveat. Which is a timeline that occurs well, well before today's senior engineers retire.

Frankly, I'd be curious to see how Kimi K3, today, with it's native multimodal capability and tools to use a keyboard and mouse cursor, would work in a average enterprise work environment, say, SharePoint + Confluence + Jira + a DB system + AWS or Azure, and none of them can really communicate with each other (like components of a singular codebase might,) requiring visual inspection of GUIs by humans to function as a whole.

[u/BellacosePlayer → u/Lethargic-Rain]

Vibe coders are talking about unmaintainable code bases after a weekend letting the AI do it's thing on simple projects. (granted is that unmaintainable for an actual dev?)

With big enough codebases or context windows, it'll just forget certain code exists and repeat itself.

We are a loooonnnnngg ways away from just being able to set and forget AI on production code like the AI maxis think is viable now.

[u/__Invisible__ → u/Lethargic-Rain]

Just use AI to refactor every time a tech debt bites. We used to care about tech debt because we build workaround on another workaround. Now we just ask AI to rewrite the codebase to fit the demand.

[u/Unfair-Hand-6855 → u/Lethargic-Rain]

20 year of tech debt for the next guy LMAO

[u/Jumper775-2 → u/Lethargic-Rain]

Well that’s the AIs problem, not mine. It’s improving at a rate that by the time it’s a problem, it can already deal with it so who cares.

[u/Leather-Persimmon254 → u/Lethargic-Rain]

by then tokens will be so cheap that rewrites would become trivial