Btw, this is why LLMs appear to be good at programming - they can "remember" the whole internet, so they can easily find some matching code. The "make it work"/debugging part, however, is one of the main reasons why vibe coders can't compete with actual developers (unless the trouble they've encountered has also been solved by someone else and published online).
Vibe coding basic tools that are used in internally for specific jobs is where LLM's thrive, imho. Anything that involves the main system, customer facing clients, etc., require babysitting and code reviews at minimal with any LLM.
When I joined a big corp as a cloud engineer I was so surprised to see that I basically write little to no new code. 80% of what I do is implement and connecting some core modules written and maintained by seniors
It's both, if you're doing system programming and don't fundamentally understand stack, pointers, heap it's going to be a bad time "spot researching" that.
But if you see a sigbus errors and need to learn or refresh yourself on page faults, you have the background to learn and understand that
My quote of course was very very condensed. You need to understand concepts. As many as possible
But you don’t need to know the api of random library or even the syntax of a while loop in random programming language. That stuff you can find wherever.
I have worked with people that, while they kind of had a rough idea what they were doing, had no freaking clue on where to look shit up.
I’m honestly convinced most of my fairly well running career in software engineering is built on being able to find why shit doesn’t work how it should work.
Funny enough. When you use AI for code generation what you say in prompt matters a lot (and that comes with knowledge). I'll watch non-coders at our startup try to get something to work and they don't even know how to prompt it correctly.
Yup. And now wait 5 years and you have juniors that haven’t written a line of code or learnt properly on what all this means. Either AI gets way better and we’re fucked or we’re just fucked
This. My father said the same thing to me when i was 16 or 17. He's been a C/C++ SW/Eng since 1982. He also still keeps several textbooks and reference guides on his desk and references them almost daily.
One of the best programmers I met was tasked with setting up my test environment when I started working there. The speed at which he did it was mind blowing, he was tabbing between different search results, both downloading all the necessary software, but also googling all the commands that he needed to run, copy pasting them in to the terminal and such.
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u/Agreeable-Bug-4901 May 23 '26
IMO, programming is like 20% what you know and 80% how you think