Never thought this would be something people actually take seriously. It really makes me wonder if in 2 - 3 years there will be so much technical debt that we'll have to throw away entire pieces of software.
You have to remember that the number of software developers saw a massive swell in the last 20 years, and many of these folks are Bootcamp-educated web/app dev types, not John Carmack. They typically started too late and for the wrong reasons to become very skilled in the craft by middle age, under pre-AI circumstances and statistically (of course there are many wonderful exceptions; one of my best developers is someone who worked in a retail store for 15 years before pivoting).
AI tools are now available to everyone, not just the developers who were already proficient at writing code. When you take in the excitement you always have to consider what it does for the average developer and also those below average: A chance to redefine yourself, be among the first doing a new thing, skip over many years of skill-building and, as many of them would put it, focus on results.
It's totally obvious why many leap at this, and it's even probably what they should do, individually. But it's a selfish concern, not a care for the practice as-is. It also results in a lot of performative blog posting. But if it was you, you might well do the same to get ahead in life. There's only to so many opportunities to get in on something on the ground floor.
I feel a lot of senior developers don't keep the demographics of our community of practice into account when they try to understand the reception of AI tools.
> There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
Notice "don't read the diffs anymore".
In fact, this is practically the anniversary of that tweet: https://x.com/karpathy/status/2019137879310836075?s=20