“No Duh,” say senior developers everywhere.
The article explains that vibe code often is close, but not quite, functional, requiring developers to go in and find where the problems are - resulting in a net slowdown of development rather than productivity gains.
LLMs work great to ask about tons of documentation and learn more about high-level concepts. It’s a good search engine.
The code they produce have basically always disappointed me.
On proprietary products, they are awful. So many hallucinations that waste hours. A manager used one on a code review of mine and only admitted it after I spent the afternoon chasing it.
I sometimes get up to five lines of viable code. Then upon occasion what should have been a one liner tries to vomit all over my codebase. The best feature about AI enabled IDE is the button to decline the mess that was just inflicted.
In the past week I had two cases I thought would be “vibe coding” fodder, blazingly obvious just tedious. One time it just totally screwed up and I had to scrap it all. The other one generated about 4 functions in one go and was salvageable, though still off in weird ways. One of those was functional, just nonsensical. It had a function to check whether a certain condition was present or not, but instead of returning a boolean, it passed a pointer to a string and set the string to “” to indicate false… So damn bizarre, hard to follow and needlessly more lines of code, which is another theme of LLM generated code.