Posted by drogus 9 hours ago
So, I want to keep pulling the thread: is it worth reading—meaning, understanding—the code in order to prevent p95 latency from skyrocketing, avoid OOM death, and keep our apps reliable for customers?
The cost of understanding the code is ostensibly very high relative to just using a clanker (citation needed), so does paying that cost translate to value—what is it worth? Concretely, if vibe coding increases bugs and enshittification, but decreases spending without decreasing revenue (read: customers suffer, but they don't leave), do we still need to pay the cost of reading code? Is it better to invest in stickiness, lobbying, and market capture?
This comment shouldn't be read as advocating for this; it's a thought experiment about pragmatism and trade-offs, and reflects what I'm witnessing companies (and "programmers") asking themselves. I personally care a lot about understanding systems and code, and I believe I'm paid to do exactly that (I very much enjoy understanding code and nobody is paying me to run a business, so I may be biased in this). In everyday SaaS-land—not talking about critical safety systems—we've seen production databases destroyed, personal data leaked, platforms unwittingly exploited, and UX bugs creep into our operating systems, and yet the companies involved keep on keeping on.
Is thinking, meaning taking the time to actually understand what our systems are doing, going to increase their shareholder value?
Translating this from Linkedin-speak: Is it okay to subject our users to shitty software and while we use the money saved to bribe politicians, circumvent laws and buy our competitors to kill them?
Clanker code is no exception. Slop is slop because it's low effort.
There are projects I've put most of my career into (necessarily pre-AI), and those I definitely care about the code quality. I look at every line and I don't take clanker code without going around the mill a few times with it. There are lots of things in the code I like and things I don't like and want to refactor. I care about the code quality. But there are projects I've put only weeks or month into, and some only minutes. For most of my vibe-coded projects, I've only cursorily glanced at the code. For these projects I don't care about code quality as much as the architecture and interaction. The ones where I consistently tweak it to work how I want are...just better.
It definitely improves the results if you do think but I don't think "you still have to think" is a safe space that's going to save us from unemployment.
Who said anything about saving people from unemployment?
> I noticed unreliability during high load
This is pretty ambiguous. You still need to provide more context, such as which failure modes you are trying to benchmark.
Life, eh?
> It’s part of a herd behavior, to signal an ideological position.
In my experience, as I alluded to, it’s not commonly used by people who are thinking seriously for themselves about the benefits, risks, and consequences of AI and the economic activity surrounding it.
It's much more nuanced, after all. Example:
Not a good look tbh
"I didn't do anything. I asked two frontier agents to make the most of Elixir and this is what they came up with. Please do send a PR to speed things up! But also realize that it's not exactly extra points for Elixir if frontier agents can't find the magic "go fast" switches."
<astronaut always has been meme>