Every time I see a vibe coder say something along the lines of "if you haven't used these tools over the past five minutes, you don't know what they're capable of, because everything's different now!" I get a little bit perplexed.
You do know that we can see the output without using it ourselves, right? Some of us are still reviewing pull requests and reading through code repositories, y’know?
Replying to @baldur@toot.cafe
"AI" generated code is everywhere. It's impossible to avoid. We can see it. The only thing using the tools would accomplish is expose us to a bunch of cognitive hazards that come with chatbot bullshit.
Replying to @baldur@toot.cafe
(It's the delta that worries me in the code I see—the change in quality, that is. Engineers with a quarter century of experience churning out code by the bucketful that's quite a bit worse than what they used to write. So either they aren't reviewing their own code like they used to or their skills have degraded.)
Replying to @baldur@toot.cafe
@baldur I still remember (in the early days of chatbots) my brother insisting he reviews 100% of the output himself. Nowadays he doesn't even bother pretending anymore.
Replying to @chapter1@mastodon.social
@chapter1 @baldur I took a pair programming class a couple of weeks ago, and one of the exercises was for two humans to pair with copilot, which I hadn't used before. It was striking how quickly it felt that actually reviewing the code was an unnecessary bottleneck and I was holding things up by spending a couple of minutes reviewing what had been generated in a couple of seconds. I felt like I couldn't justify making the other person wait unless there was an obvious mistake.
Replying to @trantion@masto.ai
@trantion Strong opinion: if review feels like the bottleneck, review is the only part still doing engineering. Speed up everything else, never that. I built AyCode around it: agents run in parallel, you read every diff.
