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[return to "Perverse incentives of vibe coding"]
1. brooke+Hm[view] [source] 2025-05-14 22:11:26
>>laurex+(OP)
I don't understand the productivity that people get out of these AI tools. I've tried it and I just can't get anything remotely worthwhile unless it's something very simple or something completely new being built from the ground up.

Like sure, I can ask claude to give me the barebones of a web service that does some simple task. Or a webpage with some information on it.

But any time I've tried to get AI services to help with bugfixing/feature development on a large, complex, potentially multi-language codebase, it's useless.

And those tasks are the ones that actually take up the majority of my time. On the occasion that I'm spinning a new thing up quickly, I don't really need an AI to do it for me -- I mean, that's the easy part!

Is there something I'm missing? Am I just not using it right? I keep seeing people talk about how addictive it is, how the productivity boost is insane, how all their code is now written by AI and then audited, and I just don't see how that's possible outside of really simple rote programming.

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2. hx8+9q[view] [source] 2025-05-14 22:42:04
>>brooke+Hm
Probably 80% of the time I spend coding, I'm inside a code file I haven't read in the last month. If I need to spend more than 30 seconds reading a section of code before I understand it, I'll ask AI to explain it to me. Usually, it does a good job of explaining code at a level of complexity that would take me 1-15 minutes to understand, but does a poor job of answering more complex questions or at understanding more complex code.

It's a moderately useful tool for me. I suspect the people that get the most use out of are those that would take more than 1 hour to read code I would take 10 minutes to read. Which is to say the least experienced people get the most value.

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