[satvikpendem]

This is exactly what happened with my experience of vibe coding, you don't understand the code after a while and pushing the project from the 80 percent mark to the 100 percent mark is exponentially more difficult, and that's where the AI fails and you have to take over. Only, you don't know anything about the code and you give up.

I had to rewrite several vibe coded projects from scratch due to this effect. It's useful as a prototyping tool but not a complete productionizing tool.

[prewett]

Heh, that reminds me of the BASIC games I used to write as a kid. I didn't know that variables could be more than one letter, so S would be score, but then if I needed speed and S was taken, I'd just use T. After a while I'd hit a bug that was difficult to reason about, or leave the codebase for a while and not have any clue what the variables meant. So I'd abandon it and start with the fresh, new idea.

[bonesss]

I have had similar experiences, and wonder how the subjective experience is impacting my estimations of progress and productivity.

Specifically: what if I just started downloading repo’s and aggressively copying and pasting to my needs… I’d get a whole bunch of code kinda quick, it’d mostly work.

It feels less interactive, but shares a high level similarity in output and understanding.

[WorldMaker]

I've had it stuck in my head for months now that "LLMs are Legacy Code as a Service". A lot of what they ~~plagiarize~~ produce is based on other people's legacy code. A lot of vibe coding is producing "Day 0 Legacy Code" that is hard to debug/maintain in a lot of the exact same ways Legacy Code always is. (It was written by a developer who is not currently around. It's probably poorly commented/documented in the hows/whys rather than the whats. If it was fast tracked into production somewhere it is probably already in a "not broke, don't fix it" state where the bugs are as much a part of the expected behavior as the features.)

As a developer that has spent far too much of my career maintaining or upgrading companies' legacy code, my biggest fear with the LLM mania is not that my skills go away, but become in so much higher demand in an uncomfortable way because the turn around time between launch and legacy code becomes much shorter and the management that understands why it is "legacy code"/"tech debt" shrinks because it is neither old or in obviously dead technologies. "Can you fix this legacy application? It was launched two days ago and nobody knows what it does. Management says they need it fixed yesterday, but there's no budget for this. Good luck."