I now understand what artists felt when seeing stable diffusion images - AI code is often just wrong - not in the moral sense, but it contains tons of bugs, weirdness, excess and peculiarities you'd never be happy to see in a real code base.
Often getting rid of all of this, takes comparable amount of time as doing the job in the first place.
Now I can always switch to a different model, increase the context, prompt better etc. but I still feel that actual good quality AI code is just out of arms reach, or when something clicks, and the AI magically starts producing exactly what I want, that magic doesn't last.
Like with stable diffusion, people who don't care as much or aren't knowledgeable enough to know better, just don't get what's wrong with this.
A week ago, I received a bug ticket claiming one of the internal libs i wrote didn't work. I checked out the reporter's code, which was full of weird issues (like the debugger not working and the typescript being full of red squiggles), and my lib crashed somewhere in the middle, in some esoteric minified js.
When I asked the guy who wrote it what's going on, he admitted he vibe coded the entire project.
The comparison to art is apt. Generated art gets the job done for most people. It's good enough. Maybe it's derivative, maybe there are small inaccuracies, but it is available instantly for free and that's what matters most. Same with code, to many people.
And the knock-on effect is that there is less menial work. Artists are commissioned less for the local fair, their friend's D&D character portrait, etc. Programmers find less work building websites for small businesses, fixing broken widgets, etc.
I wonder if this will result in fewer experts, or less capable ones. As we lose the jobs that were previously used to hone our skills will people go out of their way to train themselves for free or will we just regress?
Artistic paintings are not technical artwork like computer programs or circuit boards. Nothing falls down if something is out of place.
A schematic of a useless amplifier that oscillates looks just as pretty as one of a correct amplifier. If we just want to use it as a repeated print for the wallpaper of an electronic lab, it doesn't matter.
> When I asked the guy who wrote it what's going on, he admitted he vibe coded the entire project.
This really irritates me. I’ve had the same experience with teammates’ pull requests they ask me to review. They can’t be bothered to understand the thing, but then expect you to do it for them. Really disrespectful.
At same time, there's also a huge of annoying Tech-brothers constantly shouting at artists something like, 'Your work was never valuable to begin with; why can't I copy your style? You're nothing but another matrix.'
Now I can always switch to a different model, increase the context, prompt better etc. but I still feel that actual good quality AI code is just out of arms reach, or when something clicks, and the AI magically starts producing exactly what I want, that magic doesn't last.
Like with stable diffusion, people who don't care as much or aren't knowledgeable enough to know better, just don't get what's wrong with this.
A week ago, I received a bug ticket claiming one of the internal libs i wrote didn't work. I checked out the reporter's code, which was full of weird issues (like the debugger not working and the typescript being full of red squiggles), and my lib crashed somewhere in the middle, in some esoteric minified js.
When I asked the guy who wrote it what's going on, he admitted he vibe coded the entire project.