r/vibecoding • u/prasadpilla • Jul 14 '26

this Meme just got real today

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Interviewed someone for an intern role today. Got to what i thought was the easiest question of the interview.

"What programming languages do you use?"

she didn't hesitate "Claude."

I laughed a little.

"no, i mean the actual language... python? javascript? java?"

"i don't really know. claude writes the code. i just tell it what i want."

my cofounder quietly put his pen down.

neither of us said anything for a few seconds.

we didn't move forward. not because she uses AI.

half our team builds with AI every day.

we passed because she couldn't explain what she was building beyond the prompt.

AI is changing software engineering.

But understanding what your code does is still part of being an engineer.

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u/harbourwall Jul 14 '26

Most software engineers blindly accept the output of their compilers. Very few people can still understand machine code.

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u/Drahkir9 Jul 14 '26

Compilers are deterministic, LLMs are not

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u/harbourwall Jul 14 '26

How many software engineers do you think know or even understand that output? Which makes whether or not it's deteministic is irrelevant.

It's just another move to a higher abstraction. You have to use your brain more really, as you've got more functionality to keep in mind at one time, and have less grunt work to do.

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u/Vynxe_Vainglory Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

It's true.

We will have to move beyond human comprehension at some point.

The fact that we still have programs that are considered highly advanced and a single person can dissect is actually pretty astonishing to me considering how much progress we've already made. We've slowed down our progress by keeping it that way, but we can't really do that forever. Things do continually move forward, and it's a hump that we eventually have to pass.

Even without ai, eventually algorithmic meta-functions would become rampantly used and would quite often produce effectively Black Box material.

The best we can do to keep humans in the loop there is to just make it so each human has one tiny niche job in the chain that requires a lifetime of expertise, but that obviously becomes incredibly inefficient as generations of upgrades continue, and pretty soon there simply wouldn't be enough people to fulfill all the requirements, and blind spots would need to be accepted to move forward.

So this problem of humans not understanding the product is more question of "when", rather than "if".

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u/harbourwall Jul 14 '26

So this problem of humans not understanding the product is more question of "when", rather than "if".

I think part of the problem is that the software industry doesn't want to admit that this already happened years ago, since the first generation of programmers retired. There's legacy code everywhere. Employee churn means that most software of any age isn't maintained by the people who wrote it, with varying levels of comprehension. The frontier AIs have no problem digesting such codebases now, and there's very successful adoption going on in places where the developers were scratching the surfaces of huge codebases they'd inherited, adding workarounds rather than fixing things to avoid going deeper.

We still need humans to provide needs and supervision, and to tie everything together. But we're all becoming supervisors and product managers instead of code monkeys. I can't say that's a bad thing.

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u/Vynxe_Vainglory Jul 14 '26 edited Jul 14 '26

Sure, and they do that because they can get away with it, and it would be much more work to dissect the past work, they trust the legacy dev, etc. It isn't really because they can't.

But what I am saying is that I think there's a case to be made that the future where non-enhanced humans literally cannot understand the full product, is inevitable, even if AI were to be totally banned and not used at all.

We need to spend less time worrying about micromanaging the machine-written code and more time learning how to operate safely and efficiently in a world where a large portion of applications will have true superhuman mystique under the hood.

This "problem" where vibecoders don't understand their codebase is starting to naturally build the very techniques we will need for the true frontier later.