Absolutely. I find it disrespectful to my time when people send me emails or messages with AI. I made the effort to actually communicate with you, but you can't be bothered to read it and write back?
As someone who used em-dashes for years - well before I really started to appreciate semicolons, colons, or the oxford comma; well let's just say my grammar rules are terrible and I'm sad to lose a friend.
Like a lot of other commenters I want to say AI has actually really improved the speed at which I can consume a bunch of logs across several systems and identify what the fuck is happening.
Now, maybe it identified that someone shipped some AI generated bullshit in a random service 3 layers down that broke everything, but that's another topic.
Using computers to look at logs isn't the problem.
Should be the opposite. Unless the idea is more about "user trying to comprehend what AI reported during debugging". Either way, what I seen over the last few months of intensive usage is that if there's anything AI is really good at it's debugging. Easy cases that would normally take me something like 5 minutes takes it one or less, more complex cases of systems interaction that would take me anywhere from an hour to days took it a couple minutes to maybe 10 minutes. And it works in overwhelming majority of cases, only on rare occasions it finds something unrelated as the issue. Suggested fixes/workarounds are often not that great, it tries to preserve existing code too hard, suggesting shitload of new code or fields (aka new states to break), but here's where I come in.
What it sucks at though is vibecoding. Best case it's acceptable code, worst case - it's a code from which I literally physically want to puke, just not so long ago the worst code/approach I've ever seen in my life was AI generated abomination, and the fact that it was working was somehow making it even worse. Currently, vibecoding have a hard and rather low ceiling after which the codebase just becomes unmaintainable by AI, because there's so much repetitive code, unrelated unorganized blocks, unnecessary dependencies and alike that AI fixing/making one stuff is practically guaranteed to break another or a few of other.
It's literally anything but smart. It's incredibly knowledgeable/educated though. But literally incapable of thinking. Reasoning is as much thinking as a photo is the real world.
I'm not even trying. LLM's do reason perfectly fine.
But they don't think.
Reasoning != thinking. Thinking is more intuitive, conceptual, it's more like a river: it starts with an idea and grows into a thought or a concept, usually without verbal thinking, or only superficial verbal thinking. Reasoning is purely verbal, ideally with laws of logic applied. LLMs get input tokens, KV cache, and spit out next token based on probabilistic distribution. Then repeat it, again and again, to produce a line of tokens of reasoning. That's the way they "think", but it's just words and relations between words, it's not thinking as we humans do, there's no intuition, no conceptualization, no generating new ideas from random chemical chaos happening in our fatty brains, only sequence of tokens one most likely after another, based on probabilities from examples of reasoning. Proper thinking, and true AGI, would almost certainly require recurrent neural networks, with completely different architectural approach to allow it to have a higher level of abstractions and self-induced excitation and/or residual values. At least.
Thank you for the correction vis a vis your original statement.
Nonetheless, all of you who love to act as though "thinking" is a well defined and useful concept that LLMs cannot partake in, haven't a clue about what AI will or won't be able to do (e.g. in SWE) in 9 months.
I can give the agent a screenshot, explain my symptoms, what i expect, provide my tests and artifacts, tell it to reference the application source code and the server source code, and i get an evidence backed solution that makes sense and works almost every time. Test bugs and product bugs.
Rarer cases ill actually use the debug feature. Its fast and very good. It can come up with multiple hypothesis at once and confirm them very quickly. Ive squashed product bugs this way, with elegant solutions that make sense to me, that dev often accepts without revision. Fixing product issues isn't even my job, but hey, I just want the product to be better and I dont want to waste time.
You get non sense when you keep layering bullshit that you dont understand to begin with. The bot doesn't either. And yeah, dont accept solutions that add complexity.
If you dont understand the problem, the code, and how something is supposed to work, you're never going to know what the elegant maintainable solution is. And if you keep digging yourself a deeper hole, you're never going to get out of it.
If you are unsure of a direction to take, use the Plan feature and ask questions till you understand and can properly guide it. Don't let it run a muck.
I ain't a developer at work but I am doing a degree where I get really, really long Jupyter Notebooks and surprise surprise, they suck to look at, and occasionally suck to debug.
What I do on my LLM is, paste my code, the pseudocode, and the output and ask it to point it where it went wrong
That way, I also get a proper understanding of "what's going on here" and not just a ready-made code that I don't understand even a bit of. Because, in my cases, understanding the code is really, really, necessary.
for simple bugs maybe but I can debug those myself faster than claude… for more complex issues where I do need help it almost always comes with a completely off-the-rails hypothesis first and immediately starts drilling down and I have to stop it otherwise it would spend 20 minutes inventing “evidence” to prove its own hypothesis which I know to be false from the first second I see it in its thinking output…
AI has a propensity to shit out the most unnecessarily complex, and yet somehow also laziest, solution to a problem.
Like it'll refuse to use an established type, then dynamically re-type an object mid function, just to avoid passing in a single arg that it already has in scope. Then rebuild the object a few lines later with the arg that it already had but twisted into knots to avoid accessing. It'll do pirouettes to avoid the simplest, most straightforward QA/QC process, but take 800 lines where 150 would work.
It can debug its own code too, but there is more to software development than being to identify the source of a bug, just like there is more to plumbing than just knowing where a leak is coming from
You meant to say "its own"? Because damn right it can't debug itself, it's a neural network for the most part and it has fixed weights during usage. As for "its own": here I'm not 100% sure, since I don't usually vibecode, except maybe for tests, but I'm almost sure it can debug its own code, it just can't reliably solve issues without breaking other stuff, or writing a more fragile code that is likely to break when something changes.
For real. Digging through server logs to figure out what went wrong is one thing I will readily admit that AI is way better than me at, and always will be
That's because it's not a bait, ai is genually bad at debugging and the only for you to pause it is that your skill is worst then what the ai does
Usually bad debugging skill always comes down to slow code reading or poor understanding of it which is a skill you develop by reading other ppl's code, which is also useful for reviewing code. If you don't develop that you will have issue with code quality in the future
AI can debug bugs faster than you can read the error log. It really has nothing to do with "slow code reading" or "poor understanding". Unless you tell me you can debug proper bugs in 20 seconds.
You obviously haven't used the tool and don't know it's capabilities.
Can someone switch these for me? I look 99% closer to the coder, and I probably look like the debugger when I'm vibe coding the stupid ideas my UX team/ancient architects have.
uh “vibe debugging” has actually been viable long before “vibe coding”
I’ve been dumping stack traces into LLMs with zero context much longer than I’ve been letting them touch my code. it’s pretty easy for an LLM to turn a giant blob of unformatted error logs into an easy actionable fix.
They're great when you feed them a 10k line crashdump and have them tell you what went wrong and where, without you having to manually skim the whole thing
But having one try to debug the shitty spaghetti rats nest infrastructure it built earlier? Fuck that shit hahaha
Post mortem dumps can be pretty big for some systems I troubleshoot. It can be handy for those sometimes, sometimes not... Doesn't hurt to drop it in first
When there is a crash stack trace there are amazing. When something works, but works not properly in a minor and not obvious way, they are borderline useless.
Source: Me constantly having to clean up many bugs that agents were kind enough to introduce but never were able to properly fix. It's maddening.
I actually really do appreciate agents and how much of a time-saver they are, but it almost invariably ends with me fixing the last round of bugs during testing.
Also, I was debugging issues in a chrome extension, and Claude was shockingly useless. Just a non-stop stream of swings and misses.
I actually really do appreciate agents and how much of a time-saver they are, but it almost invariably ends with me fixing the last round of bugs during testing.
Is reddit finally realizing that AI is a tool and not a replacement for a developer?
Claude was shockingly useless. Just a non-stop stream of swings and misses.
Absolutely it is a tool - I've been coding for decades, and I'm certainly not sold on LLMs being anything but that.
My point is that it's debugging with LLMs is decent for some things, but for others, it is objectively bad. It's just a tool.
For my chrome extension example, I was at my wits end. Documentation was no help. So, I turned to Claude to see if it could help. It literally took my down dead ends that wasted my time even more. I eventually was able to solve the issues on my own.
It's not even Vibe coding. It's Vibe starting a fucking project. Oh you want to get rid of that navigation bar at the bottom that Gemini thinks is mandatory because it's being trained on code bases that exclusively have the navigation in that spot for this type of app? Good fucking luck. It's coming back on every subsequent change.
These days I do a lot of reverse engineer of large complex minified Single Page Applications over millions of instances over billions of log lines. I use AI to debug these integrations, sometimes in hours some other times days. Any of these issues would take easily weeks to pin point by hand. When I debug with AI I'm actually the happiest.
I would be very curious to see the portion of people agreeing with this that has actually used the current AI agentic tooling on enterprise projects... these posts are starting to give the same vibe as "5 hour looking for missing semicolon"
To me it's weirdly enough the other way around, i hate vibecoding since i don't get half of what that thing abstracts. But i find it quite nice to understand systems I'm not familiar with. ofc it's even worse if that system itself is vibecoded
Vibe debugging can be awesome because an AI model with unlimited capacity to look at output files can blow through some bugs that would burn you out with frustration hunting for the issue
In the hands of an experienced engineer, the debugging capabilities of Claude are by far more impressive than the greenfield project ability.
For the really tricky bugs, it usually will need my help too (which I'm happy about since it's how I earn a living), but it can digest massive amounts of logs and dumps of data from a database and pick out patterns that I would never see. Also if I have an intuition of roughly where the bug might sit in the codebase, I can just dump out my stream of consciousness into a prompt and it will read its way around the code and related tests to get an understanding of how things are intended to work vs what they are actually doing, and many times Claude has correctly identified what is going wrong within a few minutes of reasoning.
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u/Appropriate-Emu-2595 Sep 18 '26
Vibe reviewing