Had to spend 3 weeks fixing a tiny app that a vibe coder built with AI. It required rewriting significant portions of the app from the ground up because AI code is nearly unusable at scale. Debugging is 10x harder, code is undocumented and there is no institutional knowledge of how an internal system works.
AI code can maybe be ok for a bootstrap single programmer project, but is pretty much useless for real enterprise level development
It’s definitely not good for whole programs in one go or complex programming. Businesses hoping to replace coders isn’t really happening. But for bite sized code sections like a simple function or non-coders who need something that does a bespoke task in their life? It seems pretty effective. I don’t know a programming language but decided to try and automate my trading strategies and in a month I’d written a program in Python that automatically trades my opening strategy. I would never have been able to do that without chatGPT. It has effectively reduced the time it takes to have functional code significantly, especially as I need to use APIs which AI has been phenomenal at providing without needing to dig through the documentation.
It isn’t replacing engineers but it definitely helps save time and can empower non engineers to make useful programs without needing years of schooling.
Developer here
Had to spend 3 weeks fixing a tiny app that a vibe coder built with AI. It required rewriting significant portions of the app from the ground up because AI code is nearly unusable at scale. Debugging is 10x harder, code is undocumented and there is no institutional knowledge of how an internal system works.
AI code can maybe be ok for a bootstrap single programmer project, but is pretty much useless for real enterprise level development
It’s definitely not good for whole programs in one go or complex programming. Businesses hoping to replace coders isn’t really happening. But for bite sized code sections like a simple function or non-coders who need something that does a bespoke task in their life? It seems pretty effective. I don’t know a programming language but decided to try and automate my trading strategies and in a month I’d written a program in Python that automatically trades my opening strategy. I would never have been able to do that without chatGPT. It has effectively reduced the time it takes to have functional code significantly, especially as I need to use APIs which AI has been phenomenal at providing without needing to dig through the documentation.
It isn’t replacing engineers but it definitely helps save time and can empower non engineers to make useful programs without needing years of schooling.