[visarga]

>Red flag. In other words you don’t understand the implementation well enough to know if the AI has done a good job.

Red flag again! If your protection is to "understand the implementation" it means buggy code. What makes a code worthy of trust is passing tests, well designed tests that cover the angles. LGTM is vibe testing

I go as far as saying it does not matter if code was written by a human who understands or not, what matters is how well it is tested. Vibe testing is the problem, not vibe coding.

[nosianu]

> What makes a code worthy of trust is passing tests

(Sorry, but you set yourself up for this one, my apologies.)

Oh, so this post describes "worthy code", okay then.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18442941

Tests are not a panacea. They don't care about anything other than what you test. If you don't have code testing maintainability and readability, only that it "works", you end up like the product in that post.

Ultimate example: Biology (and everything related, like physiology, anatomy), where the test is similarly limited to "does it produce children that can survive". It is a huuuuuge mess, and trying to change any one thing always messes up things elsewhere in unexpected and hard or impossible to solve ways. It's genius, it works, it sells - and trying to deliberately change anything is a huge PITA because everything is interconnected and there is no clean design anywhere. You manage to change some single gene to change some very minor behavior, suddenly the ear shape changes and fur color and eye sight and digestion and disease resistance, stuff like that.

[agumonkey]

I wonder if for a large class of jobs, simple unit tests will be enough to be a negative that the llm output will try to match. Test driven delegation in a way.. that said i share the same worries as you. The fact that the LLM can wire multiple files / class / libs in a few seconds to pass your tests doesn't guarantee a good design. And the people who love vibe coding the most are the one who never valued design in the first place, just quick results..

[louthy]

> If your protection is to "understand the implementation" it means buggy code.

Hilarious. Understanding the code is literally the most important thing. If you don't understand the code then you can't understand any unit tests you write either. How could you possibly claim test coverage for something you don't understand?

I suspect you primarily develop code with dynamic languages where you're reinventing type-systems day-in day-out to test your code. Personally, I try to minimise the need for unit-tests by using well-defined types and constraints. The type-system is a much better unit-tester than any human with a poor understanding of the code.