Posted by ltratt 13 hours ago
I am not thrilled with all the coding decisions that it makes. I would definitely do stuff differently, but I have learned not to pop the hood and mess with the engine, myself. If I really don't like something, I ask the LLM to change it.
It's worked for me, but YMMV. I'm just one guy, shipping relatively small apps.
Do you still feel responsible for what you ship?
What about the copyright on your code?
Would you be ok with someone reverse engineering what you ship and then releasing their own version of the app?
I don't use LLMs the way that most folks do. I think a lot of people would laugh at the way I do it, but it's allowed me to retain a significant amount of control in the work, and I relinquish it very, very slowly. Everything that I've ever let go of has claw marks all over it. I have issues.
> Do you still feel responsible for what you ship?
Absolutely. If it has my chop, it's my ass on the line; no one else's. It's the way I was trained, and it's the way I worked; my entire career. I was a manager, for much of that career, and I got very used to standing behind the work of people smarter and more capable than I am, and refusing to condone bad work.
It doesn't matter how the stuff I ship gets there. It may be my own code, it may be a contracted pro, it may be an unpaid intern, it may be an LLM, it may be a howler monkey, banging on a typewriter.
If I sign off on it, and ship it, it's mine, and it's my responsibility to refuse to ship substandard crap (and I have seen a lot of substandard crap done by meat engines).
But that kind of attitude is considered "quaint," these days, and that's from long before LLMs were a broken rubber on the drug store shelf.
> Would you be ok with someone reverse engineering what you ship and then releasing their own version of the app?
Absolutely no problem. If they can do better, then more power to them, and I'll step out of the way. Might want to take a gander at the kind of stuff I write, and who I write it for. It's no secret.
I read every line and make sure it does exactly what I want it to do unless it is external plumbing, then I don't care.
There is so much software to still be built!
I'm being more ambitious in that I'm working on projects that I had sidelined for literal decades because I didn't have time for them. But I'm writing the same things, just faster. And probably better, rather than just what I'd have done before.
And I'm being slightly more ambitious in that I'm using languages I haven't used before, like Rust.
But when I hear that a non-programmer wrote a new ai-assisted (vibe or not) thing, I walk away and wait for the it to mature, be surpassed, or find out it's an absolute shitshow. An unsurprising number of them were shitshows and it came out fairly quickly after I decided to wait and see.
Now that custom software is cheap (if you can tolerate a bit of slop here and there), it seems like there's an opportunity to do some important things that weren't being done before because they're not profitable--and you can't get at those things by incrementally improving the old stuff, you need ambition.
[1]: https://github.com/vishvananda/cppgm-extended
[2]: caveats here include only c++11, only x86, and potential for bugs, but 7x is pretty darn significant even with caveats
That's why I bet that fast compilers are the future. See this other thread that reached the front page a few hours ago about the Roc language [1]
Only for Norwegian businesses as the accounting is core.
I think these kind of applications that replaces 10 different systems will be much more important than the "we vibecoded an internal tool that does exactly what we need"