this post was submitted on 12 Apr 2025
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Know a guy who tried to use AI to vibe code a simple web server. He wasn't a programmer and kept insisting to me that programmers were done for.
After weeks of trying to get the thing to work, he had nothing. He showed me the code, and it was the worst I've ever seen. Dozens of empty files where the AI had apparently added and then deleted the same code. Also some utter garbage code. Tons of functions copied and pasted instead of being defined once.
I then showed him a web app I had made in that same amount of time. It worked perfectly. Never heard anything more about AI from him.
AI is very very neat but like it has clear obvious limitations. I'm not a programmer and I could tell you tons of ways I tripped Ollama up already.
But it's a tool, and the people who can use it properly will succeed.
I'm not saying ita a tool for programmers, but it has uses
I think its most useful as an (often wrong) line completer than anything else. It can take in an entire file and just try and figure out the rest of what you are currently writing. Its context window simply isn't big enough to understand an entire project.
That and unit tests. Since unit tests are by design isolated, small, and unconcerned with the larger project AI has at least a fighting change of competently producing them. That still takes significant hand holding though.
I've used them for unit tests and it still makes some really weird decisions sometimes. Like building an array of json objects that it feeds into one super long test with a bunch of switch conditions. When I saw that one I scratched my head for a little bit.
I most often just get it straight up misunderstanding how the test framework itself works, but I've definitely had it make strange decisions like that. I'm a little convinced that the only reason I put up with it for unit tests is because I would probably not write them otherwise haha.
Oh, I am right there with you. I don't want to write tests because they're tedious, so I backfill with the AI at least starting me off on it. It's a lot easier for me to fix something (even if it turns into a complete rewrite) than to start from a blank file.