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senderista 19 hours ago

How does either of those practices keep code maintainable?

simonw 19 hours ago | parent [-]

They solve "adding a feature now takes days and breaks two other things".

unknownfuture 16 hours ago | parent [-]

No, they solve figuring out if a change breaks your existing code.

But if your code is poorly structured, it absolutely does not make it easier to modify.

simonw 9 hours ago | parent [-]

It still solves "breaks two other things".

zie1ony 6 hours ago | parent | next [-]

True, but this way you can endup with so much testing code being 10x your core implementation.

simonw 5 hours ago | parent [-]

That was a problem when testing code was expensive to create and expensive to update. That's no longer the case.

Plus, SQLite famously has 590x the test core compared to the implementation code, and they wrote that by hand! https://sqlite.org/testing.html

unknownfuture 6 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

But that's not the problem being highlighted in that quote you clipped out and responded to.

The problem that quote (and this entire post and the folks that produced it) is putting a finger on is that vibecoding makes it very easy to build large piles of brittle, entangled code where all those early velocity gains are paid back as evolving the codebase takes more and more time (and, crucially, tokens).

No amount of <insert methodology here> replaces good judgement about architecture/design that ultimately leads to more maintainable, extensible code. That was true before AI and it remains true today.

Now eventually AI may get to the point where it's autonomously generating code that's structurally as good or better than what any experienced human would create.

So far, IME, that is not yet this case and nothing can yet substitute for an experienced human in the loop to steer AI toward better decision-making.

And before it's said, yes, that also means humans made ugly balls of mud in the before time. That term obviously came from somewhere.

But that only proves that AI is as good as prior humans that did a bad job, which on the one hand is impressive, and on the other hand is deeply alarming when you know there's folks out there letting these things loose without any supervision.

Of course if all one is doing is tossing off and walking away from greenfield projects, man, vibecoding is magical. I suspect a lot of the "we never look at code anymore" claims come from this world.

But there's another word for that: slop.