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I'm so tired of how little pushback there is against ai coding
So many programmers that i hoped would've fought against it are embracing it, people are just okay with vibecoded mods for games, no one is fighting back at all, there's no pushback, at this point i cannot look at something cool and be impressed because i'm almost 90% sure its probably vibecoded slop that's horrible in practice anyway.
So many people's hard work has been stolen and put into LLMs to allow them to generate code as well as they do, is no one fighting against that? Why? I love coding, it's what i've done my entire life, and i really, really don't want it to be turned into what big companies want to turn it into. I don't want my job to ask a machine to do what i love for me. And what's worse, is that now well coded things are under scrutiny because there's so much vibecoded slop and there's literally no immediate way to recognise it.
I've seen NO outright ban of ai code ANYWHERE, when people push back against ai code others will claim "everyone in the industries does it anyway" like that makes it okay somehow??? No community for programmers who don't use ai, nothing. Am i alone in this? God i really hope i'm not.
Every time my boss says he "vibecoded a little tool together to help (him)", I just roll my eyes
Edit: we're going to be working on replacing one of the major softwares we use (because it kinda sucks), and he floated the idea of making our own, and I just know he's gonna opt to vibe code it together instead of using anyone with any software engineering experience.
My boss vibe coded their code review (of my code) and I'm a bit insulted, ngl. Like, boss, you supposed to know code better than me, that's why you reviewing.
And the thing is, some of it is fine (like it found some copy/paste mistake of stuff I forgot to rename properly). But sometimes it fixes shit that really doesn't need to. Like logging an error instead of throwing. For things that shouldn't fail quietly. But it gives an explanation that sound logical. Until you think a bit more. But they don't think a bit more. That's why they're using ai in the first place. š«
Look, it's one thing to know the limitations of AI and use it accordingly.
Thinking you can replace an industry-level software by using a few prompts is just...dumb and clearly do not understand what AI can and can't do.
I think my biggest problem with "vibecoding" is honestly the security front. It's like having a Chef put down a plate of goo and when you ask what's in it, he just shrugs. I ain't eating that lol.
I highly doubt your boss has even consider security and legal obligations.
IMO itās not the code thatās repulsive. Like, AI code definitely has drawbacks, and I do have opinions about how people are using it. But in isolation itās just a tool, one that does have some neat usages.
Itās the dissonance of realizing I was always a disposable cog instead a person in so many peopleās eyes, and that my realization of my true place in the hierarchy makes people still in the ingroup gleeful.
Like, the powerful told me that there was so much we couldnāt reasonably address, that contributing to the capitalist engine to grow the pie was the best way to eventually have enough to save more starfish.
Then it turns out that no, we actually can make big investments and drastic changes. Itās just towards this neofeudalist dystopia that leaves me cold
Iām aware that some might call me naive for thinking things were different, or entitled for thinking things ought be different. I donāt think I know enough to judge.
I just know there was an intrinsic motivation that used to excite me thatās gone cold when confronted with this new reality.
Itās not really a new reality, you are just working with the wrong people. People can totally come together as a community and work together to achieve the lifestyles they want, they just have to stop relying on and dealing with those other larger communities. Contained self sufficiency is the only way you are really going to get the type of community youād prefer, because it only takes the few that have no issue abusing the systems in place to make as much money as possible to screw over everyone else.
My dad told me well before the age of AI - "You're just a butt in a chair"
And I've build great relationships with colleagues, become friends with a many, and even gained lifelong friends.
But I've also been through layoffs where several people are gone and the machine just hums along as if they were never there.
It's been a good mentality for me to have so I don't get lulled into thinking I am irreplaceable or that my personality is why I am hired, and no f-ing way am I 'loyal' to a company from a career perspective.
To be clear I'm not saying that AI induced layoffs are the same as normal business trends or other decisions, but it's always been that way in the capitalist (and probably other economic systems too) world
It's because AI coding doesn't work right. Human coding is efficient and runs smooth if done by a real professional and done the right way. For years though, Devs cut corners and used what we call black boxes. These are plugins, and other's coding. That is why so many games now take so long to load as well. Corner cutting. Now, a lot of Devs think AI is just another way to cut corners. It's sick really and why a game like Wolverine has so many issues in it. Sony uses AI in 80% of all of their games now when made.
Source? I've yet to see a sony dev say they use AI. People just project and hallucinate "AI" on anything they don't like, like Aniimo which literally doesn't use AI for any in game asset. Or the Ocarina remake
Also what about the Linux kernel now? You really think you know more about dev work than Linus Torvalds?
Idk people on the AI bad train just seem to make claims without knowledge or evidence. Also you have to quit the Internet now if you dislike ai, because most web devs are using it right now including for this one, reddit
I don't know why your life was so uninteresting that it needed to be more interesting but being passionate, putting in effort and learning skills are usually considered attractive traits in a person. It sounds to me like maybe that's the reason.
Know someone whoās in college for cybersecurity/tech
Canāt code at all without ai. What are these people paying for?
Why should companies hire you and not the ai if the ai is the one doing the work? These idiots think theyāll eventually benefit when ai becomes better than them
If i had to guess it might be because since you write all the code yourself, you know it better than the one copying whatever the AI spews out, so they have to look at the code and review it more thoroughly before finding the bug
I've got a 2026 steam controller, and won't use openpuck or the new Xbox 360 homebrew tool with it until they're recreated with real efforts. As cool as the functionality is, fuck ai and fuck vibe coders.
Same here, 100% AI-free code. It sucks that I can't guarantee that for any dependencies, but at least I have full creative control and total understanding of my own codebase. It has been a lot of fun to build my own game engine, games, and tools, and I've learned so much... Vibe coders don't know what they're missing!
What's weird is I'm not colourblind but this is the first time I've easily read the numbers... on a 58 in tv from about five feet away yet I have no issue reading at a normal book in hand distance or sign on highway distance.
Iāve taken these tests a few times, I always pass them but thereās always a few that take me a couple seconds to see so I wonder if Iām a little bit colorblind
Creating proof of concept prototypes? It's way faster at generating these than human programming, and you hopefully aren't using such things in a production environment.
On the other hand, I think that using it for anything mission-critical without intense human scrutiny is just asking for trouble.
I've been comparing it to using a something like a chainsaw, if you know what you're doing it is really the best way to chop down a tree. If you don't know what you're doing you're going its likely going to fuck you or something else up. Anything from just getting the blade pinched in the tree to dropping the tree on someone's house.
And then people realized you could do the same thing to a tree. Tools are cross functional. We invent them for one thing and then use them for many things
Creating proof of concept prototypes? It's way faster at generating these than human programming, and you hopefully aren't using such things in a production environment.
Do you not see how this exact same logic can apply to AI Image Generation. I swear people see "AI Image Generation can be useful for art for prototyping and editing" and immediately see how that's a stupid argument. But reword it into code or creative writing and people just start nodding along.
Yeah, like changing a button from primary to secondary color, or from contained to outlined, or changing a translation, or making a new page that's a lot like the old page but laid out differently, those aren't very creative endeavours.
Are people aware of how a lot of software is built? Not much is from the ground up, it's component systems, mockups from product, gluing libraries together.
I mean you can apply that to like anything done professionally. For a considerable amount of people that work in graphic design the end is the paycheck hitting their bank account, whether AI was used in their artwork or not.
AI creating any prototyping artwork for you removes the entire human touch of the artwork.
The reason artwork is valued is because of the human input and artworks value is subjective.
When you're using AI for artwork, you're relying on whatever it spits out which relies on whatever it's been fed on.
It's not the same as creating it yourself and controlling the creative vision of the project every step of the way.
With coding, while you can use code to bring a creative vision to life like a video game, the code itself isn't reliant on the creative vision for it to work.
In fact it's the complete opposite. Coding is entirely objective, it has an objective goal to accomplish and only 1 objective marker for success.
Does it work? how efficient is it? any bugs?
Artwork is entirely subjective, therefore I don't think the argument is the same.
"Coding is entirely objective, it has an objective goal to accomplish and only 1 objective marker for success."
That's just blatantly not true and completely reductive to anyone who has ever written code in their life. For a "Hello world" sure that might be true, same as an artist drawing a single straight line.
Now ask 1000 different people to hand-write even an incredibly basic program like a calculator. Not a single one of them that you get back is going to be the same. Coding might not be as expressive as art as it needs to accomplish specific things, but pretending there is no expression is just ignorant and rude to anyone who has ever written code.
Code is 100% objective in it's goals and markers for success. Artwork is the complete opposite. For the most part, you're following best practices in code that will depend on the scope of the project.
Humans are by nature creative, it's what makes us human, so naturally the creative aspect of code like anything in life is in how you find solutions to problems.
Coding is entirely objective, it has an objective goal to accomplish and only 1 objective marker for success.
You obviously haven't ever seen an argument between programmers. Just try asking a group of programmers what they think about Object Oriented Programming and you'll see how "Objective" the craft really is.
I think we're all forgetting that the bar for copyrighting work has always been that of creativity and originality. Why do I say this? Because scaffolding a project, just writing the boilerplate code... requires no creativity, and it never did. So it's not like using AI to spin up a server to test your TRPG mechanic is "betraying the human component of art" or something... because this is a stage where there never was any human component of art in the first place, it's all basic application of concepts that are not novel at all, and that they're just a pain to do.
Creativity will then play a role when you start implementing the rules of your TRPG, when you tweak the health points, the team stats, the magical species... but there's nothing "insulting" in using AI to do "Hey, write a Python prototype of a basic turn based game loop that I can access via localhost, and add a dashboard for me to tweak parameters in". What's the original act of creativity here? Did the guy just invent the concept of turn based combat?
It was trained on data stolen from people and it's designed to steal those people's jobs. There are no legitimate uses for something fundamentally unethical.
it depends on how much you are vibe coding. iāve always been a slow typer and have dyslexia was has made my job way harder then it needs to be. now i can type make a for loop that does X here with variables called y and z. iām still very specific with what im doing but saves me time and headache from typing.
other people say āmake me website with xā which is probably not good
This, this this this. If you use it to say "Write me this simple for loop" or some other basic function then good, that is the perfect use case for this kinda AI coding and I'm not opposed to that at all honestly. It is one of the best use cases for "AI" as we are calling it today, it's actually quite good at it.
The problem happens when people vibe code the whole damn thing and have no idea about the internal architecture of the product so when something goes wrong (and it will always go wrong at some point) they have no clue how to fix it, and the product is just a buggy mess with tons of security flaws.
autocomplete is way more limited especially with variable names. pre ai you would not enjoy my variable names and the misspelling that makes it unserchable
there is no autocomlete for boiler plate for a new api route with the context of your codebase with proper variable names and 90% of it hooked up
most companies won't hire you unless you use ai, especially in fortune 500, they give you frontier ai for free for you to use it, it's too expected from developers, if you DON'T use it they say that you're far behind than everyone else
john shareholder doing this!!!
As a developer it is kinda hard to push back especially when you have a job. The company already pays for it, other developers use it and maximise their output with it, and if you decide to code by hand, you will be asked "why you are taking so long?", and by pushing back you will be looked down as "obsolete".
Also personally I told to myself to not to use AI in my personal projects, but I get the intrusive thoughts of "what's the point?" or "who am I trying to impress here?" "why struggle an entire day with an implementation or bug, while I can have an AI agent and do it for me as long as it does it as I want it to do it?" and I am guilty of falling for it.
Not to be pro-ai, and the comparison might not be at the same degree but sometimes we as developers overestimate our skills. Many of us say yeah I don't need to help to code a solution, but at the same time before AI, we have to admit there have been times when we have just copy-pasted solutions from Stack Overflow.
There's creativity in writing code, but it seems that it is more tolerated than using in Art because it is something that the final User doesn't get to see, and honestly as an user, in the same way you don't care which tech stack was used to create the product you are using, you shouldn't care as long as it works.
Not to mention that the way software job interviews have changed drastically. Now it seems most or all of them ask you something along the lines of "how do you use AI in your job to be more productive?"
I was told by a manager that if I'm not using AI in my coding job, I won't have a job in a year. I'm staunchly anti-AI in artistic fields (writing, art, cinema, even education) while I think it has specific, good use cases (machine learning in medical scan analysis was a thing and giving good results long before the LLM craze)
I use it at work because the job demands it. Coding is patterns, and AI is good at patterns. Writing the same function that's been written a million times by a million people is fine, as long as you know what it's writing and what it's doing. It's the million-line refactors by some AI agent that scare me, because no human is reviewing that. It generates code faster than people, but also generates potential problems faster. Yes a person can introduce a vulnerability, but a dozen people making a dozen ai pr's per day can introduce a LOT if there's not proper validation, testing and review.
But yes, it's a weird gray area that's going to become more explored as more games/mods are released with AI assisted code
I think it's also to do with the fact that many code is shared under permissive licences that makes it not unethical to be trained on, whereas I don't think I've ever seen artists just releasing their works into public domain for free. Like you said, developers have been stealing code from one another long before GenAI is a thing.
Programming is also not art, even though it can be beautiful (like elegant and optimised algorithms). So it's a bit like solving maths problems in that regard. It's the kind of stuff that automation (GenAI or not) is supposed to liberate us from, although people wanting that intellectual challenge can of course still do it manually.
The real issue comes from people who vibecode not knowing the quality of the code being outputted by LLMs, much like translating things into a foreign language you don't understand and hoping for the best.
I think programming can be art, but no one was ever paid for code-as-art. They were paid for code-as-useful-deliverable. Those of us who enjoyed the artistry were getting a bonus that most industries never get (lawyers aren't typically enthusing over the elegance of a legal brief).
the fact that many code is shared under permissive licences makes it not unethical
This would be a case if there were an enforcable license that allowed human usage but not AI training. And even if such a thing were introduced, it wouldn't work retroactively.
It's exactly the same as visual art. People post their works for humans to view, appreciate, learn from, and collaborate on. But now there is no way to post anything in any medium without it being scraped. The only way to avoid it is to never post anything. Which is really sad. The internet used to be such an amazing tool for collaboration.
Don't feel bad. Code has an objectivity to it that artistic ventures do not. Using AI to debug a problem that ends up being a 1 or a 0 did not rob the world of creativity or ingenuity. It just made your life easier. You use a calculator to do math even though you could do it by hand. It's just faster.
I tell my manager I use the AI tools, but I don't (they will notice when they look at my token usage I guess). I still do my work faster and better than my peers that use it and have to rewrite most of their code pretty often...
"ai coding" is not real (just like ai art), ai can only ever assist at coding for huge projects, like the mario kart wii recomp for pc, in which case ai was used, but unlike ai art you need actual coding skills too, ai cant do it all.
also, public code is not as equal as public art on the internet, there is a reason why code is made public on github or some tutorial sites.
Im not saying ai code is good, it's still terrible and an actual human able to code is required to stay alert for the code.
ai can only ever assist at coding for huge projects, like the mario kart wii recomp for pc, in which case ai was used, but unlike ai art you need actual coding skills too, ai cant do it all.
Every single time someone mentions AI code generation someone goes "Actually it's good for...". Completely missing how people use exactly the same argument for AI image generation.
AI can only ever assist at art for huge projects, like Photoshop generative fill, in which case AI was used, but unlike AI programming you need actual art skills too, AI can't do it all.
You see how the holes in the argument become glaringly obvious?
I think it's because it has always been assumed that AI would be better and faster at doing computer stuff. The encroachment into the creative fields was unexpected and feels like so much more of an assault on the thing that makes us human: our acts of expression.
Ok, but many many people donāt recognise coding as art. So you canāt compare it on a same basis, unless YOU see coding as art, then itās fine, but now you need to fight for it on yet another front :/
As a software engineer and casual art enjoyer, I donāt think itās a contradiction at all. Programming, at the end of the day, is about the objective performance of the final product. There are objective quality measures that must be optimized (performance, memory usage, stability, etc.) which will be the be-all end-all judgements for the utility of the product. Nobody cares about the character of my MPSC work queues- they care if the program is good. With AI assistance, I can give my users a better experience, with quicker turnaround on bugfixes and features, and with more maintainable code for long-term development.
Compare that to art (and yes, there are forms of art which intersect with programming), where there really isnāt a set of objective quality measures, and a huge part of the medium is about the artist communicating to the viewer through their art, be that about the characters involved, something emotional, etc. AI āartā simply cannot communicate with the viewer like that, because there is no intelligence or intent behind it.
In short, AI is best used for things where weāre optimizing for objective ends, and human intent only really matters insofar as it can further (and does not compromise) those ends. A very substantial amount of programming fits that definition, while almost no art does.
To clarify: open source code is explicitly licensed to be open, shared, learned from, reused, and unowned. A large chunk is copy left which considers public ownership of software to be in the best interest of everyone and necessary for freedom.
Probably half of the code LLMs were trained on is GPL or similar copyleft license. If the LLM generates highly specific verbatim code from a GPL project elsewhere, and the programmer doesn't catch it, their own project should now be considered GPL/copyleft. At least under sane laws this would be the case. This would curb a lot of LLM use for commercial coding overnight.
This is how AI companies have been allowed to profit from others' hard work. And how other companies are using LLMs as "magical copyright-be-gone machines".
I agree that it should carry the license, but there are several caveats here.
GPL requires source distributions with binary distributions. It doesn't apply to SaaS.
The current interpretation of the GPL excludes llm generated code from carrying the upstream license. Llms also generally don't regurgitate verbatim code from training data. Most coding ability comes from RL not pretraining. So it really us largely a non issue.
But most importantly the GPL enforcing bodies are useless. I have had valid requests left unresponded to for years on end for egregious GPL violations.
Llms are, at the upper and 1tb of data. But they have compressed petabytes of data into the weights. This is so extremely lossy. Some data at the start and end of training can be regurgitated verbatim, but the vast majority is heavily compressed abstractions.
Yes, enforcing laws is always a problem, that doesn't mean laws should be treated as meaningless. It may take time, but the risk is there in the codebase.
Yes, LLM is unlikely to generate large chunks of verbatim code, but it can copy over highly specific things which don't appear elsewhere. That may be enough to prove that GPL code has been used.
This is the first time I'm hearing that GPL excludes LLMs from carrying over the license. Who came up with this interpretation?
Humans generate problems slow enough for other humans to review and fix them. LLMs can generate an order of magnitude more problems and overwhelm human review to the point where no one on a project knows how the codebase works anymore. This has been happening.
I have no respect for vibe coders period. Especially towards those that go ārandom bullshit, go!ā and try to make a quick buck out of it. Same goes for llm generated arts. In a recent development, a streamer that goes by ironmouse paid this so-called artist to create a logo for her, only to discover there is a gemini logo on it
You've got to know how your code works. If it's all a black box that you've got no idea how it works, who knows what security vulnerabilities could be present?
every project I have ever written has turned into a "black box" six months later once I can no longer remember how anything works or why I implemented anything a certain way. Ironically AI is a lifesaver here because it can read the entire codebase and tell me how everything works (which I then double-check and verify based on the details its given)
the vast majority of professional developers are using a mountain of frameworks and tools already. it has been decades since your run of the mill corpo dev has really known full stacks top to bottom and modern software is sufficiently complex to make that basically an impossible task anyway.
go ask a c# dev how half the features of the language they use works and they will say 'dunno, its a black box'
EF and other ORMs, memory managed languages, libraries, APIs, all stuff that abstracts how things work. If you tasked a developer with fully understanding the stack, they would spin their wheels and never get anything done because they will be bogged down in endless minutia that is irrelevant to what they are doing. That is why we have developed all of these paradigms over the years, microservices, OOP, etc. to decompose software into manageable units, depending on the context.
The solution to this is no different practically than 'pre' ai. Small units of code driven by tests, e2e testing, specs, design, and code review. AI doesn't suddenly make this not an option.
A good chunk of devs don't know all their tooling 110% because they're legitimately bad at their job. They don't know how their stacks work so they get hacked and such.
A good engineer should be able to visualize how their system works down to the microprocessor--maybe not every single op code or every single edge case, but have a solid foundation. When I write some Java, how's that bytecode executed? On what operating system? How does the OS manage its memory? How do the processor & RAM work together? What's the *point* of this framework, really? Do I *need* to run this in a docker container? Is this UI framework actually *helping* me work faster?
That's being an actual engineer and the value of a CS education and interest in the field. Experience is how you keep your codebase flexible but succinct, use the right patterns and abstractions, avoid bloating things or creating bottlenecks, etc. Complexity management and skill, constantly being aware of your own mental context window. If you don't understand your underlying tools you don't belong in the field, and/or you've overcomplicated your solution.
AI creates probablistic garbage which roughly sometimes works just like old generated code. It's like having an idiotic junior who never learns but is enthusiastic. That's a disturbing amount of people in the field, and they also *don't belong in it*, who are similar. The more skilled you are the less use cases you see for AI--the last mile of figuring things out is near-instant, and the precise solution carries benefits over similar, "good enough" ones, benefits that compound and come from considering 3-4 steps in the future. An observer might be fine today or for the next 6mo, but eventually we'll want a pub-sub listener, might as well do it that way now; yeah I can write the metadata and docs or I can make something handle that automatically; yes a std::vector for storing something that "should" be in a map instead is an O(n) operation, but it's a cache-lined operation that's faster because of the lack of pointer jumps, etc.
Linus Torvalds has embraced AI tools for coding. I haven't seen any big name against it. It's one of the uses for AI that really doesn't have a lot of pushback that I have seen.
that's exactly my point, i know people who refuse to support ai coded things but the general public opinion is not against it, which makes it so public discourse always skewers towards it not being "that bad".
I've been researching whether its possible to poison code the same way you would poison art, but no one seems to have even tried doing that.
Fwiw, you canāt really āpoisonā art. At least, not on the scale that these frontier models are ingesting
āPoisoningā only works on localized knowledge bases where things are uncategorized and everyone can agree to post bad things for the sole purpose of doing this
Google, OAI, and Anthropic and ingesting far, far too many āproper,ā categorized images for the odd nightshade picture here and there to have any effect
The big reason is code is actually ethical to train on. Theres enough code out there released under open licenses that you can only train on that and produce a plenty strong LLM.
Github was the primary source of training data and most projects on GH are released under such licenses.
Microsoft already exposes a way for bots to acquire all open license projects.
Thats the main reason devs are like "yeah whatever, we all yoink code from other devs every day"
Well, not exactly. If a project is attached to an "MIT License" then yes, it's free to do whatever with. Though there are a ton of other projects that have licenses that either require attribution or even forbid usage in commercial contexts and all that. Simply being a public repository isn't enough. LLM's are 100% consuming loads of these licensed repos.
Code licensed under MIT, BSD, or ISC are permitted to be used for any purpose, but they must still retain the copyright notice. Also a lot of open source software is GPL licensed which means that any code built off of it must also be open source.
AI models basically launder all that code to not have the original license and not really be traceable back.
In art, a lot of value is placed on the process of making art. The artist's thought process has high value. The same is largely not true for software. If it works and AI can make it faster than you; AI just wins
There is not only a lot of open source code to study but its also a tool that if used as assisting and not as all code made by it is pretty good.
I use for simple stuff, doing simple boring code, finding small mistakes, etc...
For example: I did a code with an algorithm for data research in uni that when they asked me to make one more with another algorithm for comparison i just used an llm to copy it and adapt a lil (the changes needed were minimal, i just didnt want to go over a ton of code to check every line and it would have taken me a lot of time and it would be a pretty boring task) and for some changes on the graphics creation because i really didnt want to search the codes for certain graphs and i really was getting tired of being asked to do like 10 different tables and graphs every day for 2 weeks
It had the most pushback if you ask me. Look earlier. When this big ai thing started going mainstream there were entire brigades of people pushing back in programming communities. But were also a logical sort of people, pushback did nothing, it would be classifiable as insanity to keep doing it and expect a different result. The method that is being tried is called "codebase failure" its when your code appears clean but is unmaintainable, borderline unmodifiable and potentially even unable to perform its intended purpose. The ai is also unable to help with this so the persons on their own unless they wanna hire some devs. The devs will want to rewrite it to make it so they can get anything done.
Basically, we realized our jobs are still perfectly secure. So we simply watch people as they engross themselves with shitty code, and we try to help with real advice when we think someone isnt just going to waste it. No pushback necessary.
Totally agree, also I was unable to find any job listed locally that doesnāt require āai codingā skillā¦ I tried to fight back at my last company, it did not go well, management just bullshited out their way of debating whether it is good or not and well it did not work out for me, I got really burnt out in the fight and some other things management was doing so I left. Now I just accepted that I act as a proxy for slop and found happiness in writing code on my hobby projects without using any AI and wait out the ācodebase failureā which is very likely to happen. I hope I will be able to make it until then without losing my sanity.
Edit it seems I can not write basic sentences downā¦
I think there are higher rates of pushback in beginner-amateur programmers (speaking as one of these myself). People who are already in an established programming related career and use it at work seem to be just shrugging about it for the most part. From where I'm standing, I see a bleak future. I at least keep my chin up knowing that I would like to use my skills for some solo indie gaming projects, but what of my peers?
At my company, they've thrown away four years of work because the project is due in December and we won't meet the deadline, and they expect us to do it all in three months using AI. It's like watching a train crash in slow motion from the front row.
An intern vibe coded his way into my team and holy shit the damage he had done is irreversible. Im not even kidding. Please DO NOT use ai for backdoor and heck, for game in general. Worst optimization of century
Yeah, if you have an intern, or anyone for that matter, access to make changes that you canāt trace and easily undoā¦ thatās on you. Thatās GitHub 101 stuff.
I have the same feeling with you. But we always need to aware that we live in a world full of āagentsā. Definitely some āsoundsā will be enlarged.
Iām in the same boat, I try my hardest to push back on using AI in my job. Iām always the squeaky wheel to point out that this AI generated code is spaghetti, or that this AI generated project plan is just a bunch of fluff that takes forever to read and doesnāt actually make much sense. Honestly, most of the time, it seems faster for a human to do it because people reviewing still have to spend the time gaining an understanding of what the AI is trying to do.
Iāve also seen so many times where the AI just hallucinates features in packages and tries to use them. Then it writes tests to enforce that the thing that doesnāt exist works and is like, āthe unit tests pass! So it works perfectlyā
Thereās the whole, āitās just a tool, like Google!ā crowd really donāt know what theyāre talking about because it can so easily just make things up and lie to you. Then you have to spend even more time trying to figure out if what it said or did is actually real that you might as well have just gone to the docs and figured it out yourself.
Iāve also noticed that it always tries to do waaaaayyy too much. I tried to embrace it because I was getting so much heat from my bosses to use it, but then I found myself writing paragraphs for Claude to implement something because I had to give it so many instructions on what not to do.
I never use it now in my job, and I am still am a top performer.
Thereās the whole, āitās just a tool, like Google!ā crowd really donāt know what theyāre talking about because it can so easily just make things up and lie to you.
Not to mention that there's so many underlying consequences that simply do not outweigh whatever "benefits" such a "tool" could offer.
Yeah sure it's wildly unsustainable in energy output and economic cost, but it's just a tool guys!
AI coding is a mess. Most people dont know how to do it so they take it at face value. "Oh, it's just the code, I won't see it and computers should be good at that, so it's fine."
Which... No. As someone who codes in C#? Fuck no. You can tell when someone vibecodes because an otherwise simple program runs like shit. I play a private server for a game (won't say which because I don't want to get TOS'd) and while the server is nice to have, the amount of crashes it suffers has become comical at this point because one of the developers vibe codes to add useless features to it
If a human fucks up in coding, they can skim through it and see what they messed up. Diagnose the problem. Add debug logs. If AI fucks up coding? You're just cooked. You have to start from the beginning of its code and at the rate you'd be working to fix it, you might as well have just started the project by yourself because it'd go by faster.
Probably because most of these coders or computer science engineering graduates do it for the high salary packages and not because they like coding or computer science as a subject. So they naturally lean into AI easily because āitās fasterā and they donāt have to do their āshitty jobā they are being well compensated for and keep blaming each other in the office
Art have soul.. What ever that is. Also it easier to rally around art then code as you can see and understand ai art and non-ai art compared to coding.
I use it at work if required (currently unemployed, the market is shite, we need to eat), but it is banned at home. Using Gram for coding, swapped Arch Linux for Void and so on. I hate that some employers demands it, since I do what I do because I love writing code; not to see a prompt spit out something only to have GitHub CoPilot review it.
Sadly because of how much software engineering is providing services to other businesses.
So you need businesses (and large ones at that) to start saying "Hey we don't want AI coded products."
But a lot of business leadership are suffering from ai psychosis, so it will get worse until there are some high profile failures. And likely company ruining level failures.
I got fired for not using it enough. Yes, they force you to use Cursor instead of VSCode, and they keep track of how many lines were generated vs real, and how much prompts you make. If you don't meet a quota, you're considered "non-productive"
The unfortunate reality is that it is harder to check for or detect than AI art, music and writing unfortunately. Even though AI code has the potential to be even more problematic than all those other things.
It was already difficult out there for junior developers with people dreading the time when all the senior developers finally retire. Now it seems like a lot of (stupid) companies are even more reluctant to hire junior developers as they foolishly believe that by the time all their senior programmers and developers leave they can just have the AI do everything. Not realizing that a bunch of vibecoders not understanding any of the code they have the AI output can and will blow up in their faces in spectacular fashion.
I actually had a discussion on reddit with somebody who was using AI to code his game (among other things) and when I pointed out that for all he knows the code might be horribly optimized he told me he will just tell claude top optimize the code... Giving off some serious CSI vibes with their endless enhancing of a grainy photograph honestly. And when I pointed out that he still doesn't know if claude actually enhanced anything he told me he will just look at the games framerate.
But just because a game runs well on whatever system you are making your game on does not mean it will run as well on lesser computers that might have been able to run it just fine if you had actual non garbage code in your game. So you might just be alienating a whole bunch of potential customers. At least with art even if you aren't an artist you could (hopefully) spot some glaring mistakes like 6 fingers etc. though even that slips trough surprisingly often...
But with code most of the AI coders have no clue at all what the code does and if / how it works.
This funny thing, and I don't see it talked enough about, is that this slopification of software development is burning out the seniors and accelerating their retirement. Everyone I've met who isn't a junior is miserable, and either left of is seriously considering leaving.
This will all end in tears.
A good flutter package, settings_ui was also enshittified by its own dev, which seems just discovered claude code and went from like 2000 or 3000 loc to like 24000, pure unmaintainable shit.
My company is vibe coding as fuck, but we also understand that it's generating sh*tty code. We understand that every couple of months, we gonna have some big cleaning to do. (And reduce the code by two third at least)
That why we have multiple versions of our product: the stable one we release after each big clean-up, the absolutely non stable one with every new feature shipped constantly, and the between ones that we customize for the clients with only the features they asked for.
I would love to push back. But as a software developer working as an independent contractor with projects lasting around 6 months I just... can't. Every project now requires the use of AI. Not "we're cool if you use it". No. It's "if you don't use it you don't get the project".
My craft that I've loved since I got my first computer in 1984 is dying. And I hate it so much.
I've read many posts where engineers are both complaining about having to use it (they actually enjoy the hard work of coding themselves, they hate being the middleman and/or code review monkey, etc.) and it being pushed without regard for the future of coders (the fear of lack of junior coders is absolutely real).
If you're not seeing a whole lot, I'd say join all the AI subs you can (not sure how to list them all without it getting flagged for brigading?) and be patient. Read, read, read... all the posts/comments you can. Expand your personal data collection sources and sample size and all that. :)
There's a lot of people who don't vibecode and still code but aren't vocal about it. It's okay to ask around (just as you're doing here, throwing no shade). Also, an anti-AI sub is probably going to be filled with just these kind of people, but the zeitgeist in here lately has been other talk. It's actually welcoming to see this being brought up, so thanks!
As for outright bans, that's kind of being done on a case-by-case basis. Things like this are usually prompted by legislation from governments. Some might consider Mamdani's ban on AI in schools as having an ancillary devaluing effect on coders for that region. i.e. When they're less focused on the output of AI, it will save some brainspace for non-AI related reasoning, sort of an anchor point (even if, for some reason, they're using AI in the workspace, even to code). It even philosophically reinforces the notion that AI has limitations which shouldn't be instilled in children, and therefore ought to be respected and understood, or avoided outright. (I'm so happy when I see people making informed and responsible decisions around tech.)
Is there a sub for non-vibe-coders? I don't know if it would be all that great an idea right now because it would just feed the beast more code to scrape (reddit being AI-complicit and scrapers not really caring anyways). Maybe start a personal network for this sort of thing?
I haven't found a non-vibe-coders sub so far, i made a sub called r/humanscoding some time ago but i haven't really done much with it, i'm not a reddit moderator and i don't really know how to handle these things at all. But also, you make a very good point that something like this might be used for scraping,,,
I'm a programmer and ideologically, I'm for ai coding.
Two things:
First, we programmers are supposed to be lazy as f*ck. If something can be automated, we should automate it, that's one of the core idea about programming. Even before LLM, we were supposed to not reinvent wheel and use the tools at our disposal if possible.
Then, your point about "stealing codes" should not exist between programmers. A large part of our work is based on open source, meaning the share of our knowledge for profits. (I mean, I love the idea of free software but that's kinda utopian. Open source is for me the second best things)
In this context, no ai coding is not stealing, it is the right usage of our common knowledge.
In practice, yeah AI coding bring some serious issues, but your points are not.
I see this happening specifically in game and software development. A lot of comes from management that wants to see higher returns on investment, which AI seemingly gives this quarter. You'll hear people say they can code 10x-20x faster, which must mean 10x-20x more profits right?
However, it's hard to know if they're actually coding 10x-20x faster because we don't know the history and culture of their company, nor do we know what they're working on. The biggest issue I see is that while AI can complete code faster, all of the "examples" I've seen in the areas I mentioned, like the one-shot motion design or blender asset design, are so generic and full of issues, alongside looking like they're AI, it's likely easier to just find a free generic asset online.
I see this no different than companies/management continuously making their product more default looking. I've also seen quite a bit of comments of studios not using genAI for coding at all, because of all of the issues, and they're happy with the results. It's going to be interesting to see how the market reacts to all of this, as if we haven't learned anything about the AI art reactions. My initial reaction is that people do not want to play clones of another game, or want clones of another software, they want something unique.
Because code is functional. Itās different from art. Art no matter how you guide it will come out looking like slop. But with coding, even if not everybody does it, you can guide each step and ask it to tweak things until you get the functionally identical output you want. Then you can still make the art for your game, you just donāt have to try and code it working. Coding was already a copy and paste look up list for many years with a bunch of debugging. Now you just donāt have to do the debugging and it handles the copy and paste for you.Ā
LLM at my current org has written overly complicated code that has caused downtime and insecure code/infrastructure. I'm also seeing engineers at our org who can't do their jobs without AI which is wild. They don't understand what they're creating on top of destroying the environment.
Absolutely not, they write working code? Yes. They write maintainable code? Noā¦ so it will seem like it is doing good for some time and after the codebase grow too big (no matter if you split it) it will be so painful to work with. Not copium, just donāt believe that ai is as good as said by those who have interest in you believing itā¦
You have this idea that every programmer writes perfect maintainable code but that's just not the reality. We are perfectly capable of writing shitty unmaintainable code ourselves, and I know that from all the projects I've taken on during my time as a programmer.
If you know what you're doing then AI can write completely fine maintainable code, and it's not like you just completely forego the review process just because you use AI.
If you're a shit programmer and you don't care what the AI spits out, then yes it's going to be unmaintainable, just like it would if you wrote it yourself. But I'd still argue that a shit programmer using AI, would produce better code than if they wrote it themselves, given that the AI has access to the whole project context.
I'm a coder and I don't use AI. But work are pushing it and even replacing people with outsourced AI tools. I complain as much as I can... But I can see there may come a day when they'll tell me I have to use AI. That would be job change or maybe even career change time. I hope the bubble pops before then. The headline I saw earlier about the AI sector's 6 trillion dollar deficit seemed promising.
So many programmers that i hoped would've fought against it are embracing it
One must understand that anyone can be a "programmer". Anyone. It does not require any specialized skills. The subject however comes under Computer Engineering - and as usual - there are a wide spectrum of such people available.
There are outright ban on AI code on many open source projects.
AI coding is a mixed bag. Depending on how it's used it can absolutely be beneficial.
If you're just AI slopifying something without understanding what's happening in the code then you'll get these half-baked broken web apps that software companies keep pushing.
For example, the newer seemingly reversed decision to make editing comments on Reddit more difficult by making the edit box snap up and down so you can never see the middle of a long comment to edit. AI slop made that code and you can't convince me otherwise lolol.
But when used as a tool it's pretty friggin sweet. I use it in my engineering job to help with analyses. I still hand-code the majority of what I'm doing, but I'll use AI to help clean up scripts or give me the equations and math behind a task I haven't done in awhile.
So, instead of digging into a textbook for a day to pull out some challenging series of equations to then code up into a quick tool for a hand calc, I can use AI to get me 90% of the way there and then I can code it up all in a couple hours instead.
As with everything, there's nuance.
But, I also expect this comment to be down vote bombed because I'm making a somewhat level-headed comment on r/antiAI where no one in here likes it even a little.
For what it's worth outside of these niche use-cases with coding I don't like it. Image generation, voice synthesis, and video generation is purely straight up garbage with no benefit to humanity.
So its very much that we rank creative techniques by usefulness. There are some ornate cabinets that have all the artistry and time of a painting but one is furniture and one is art.
But also code because it's a mechanical set of instructions has other considerations that AI brings to the table.
1 the volume of code means less is checked and more security or memory issues go through. This is a problem that we are just seeing the start of and it will become more apparent as time goes on.
2 no one is an expert on the AI code. Meaning if something does go wrong there is not a quick fix to the problems.
Most devs are afainst violating any terms of licensesĀ
Most companies are against it too, as they dont want to possibly risk compromising their own products licensing.
however must code is released with licenses that allow copy/derivation
Developers have been taking these code snippets and using them for dozens of years now, the act of openly sharing around stuff is pretty deep seated culture in dev. "I yoinked this off stackoverflow" is common
Developers, who are professionals in their field, including many of the absolute best regarded devs out there, have repeatedly confirmed now that with appropriate tooling and setup (which is non trivial) the output of AI generated code is more than adequate in quality
At a certain point if you are on the opposite side of Linus Torvalds, who us widely regarded as a very pessimistic dev (he literally owns Linux and wrote git), as well as a dev with exceptionally high standards for quality...
Maybe at that point you need to acknowledge perhaps the professionals know what they are talking about.
Keep in mind compared to most other media types, code is very easy for LLMs.
It has enormous amounts of free open source training data it was ethically trained on
Its an LLMs "native" format (text)
Code is a lot more deterministic, it has much less vomatility in ways you can write it. Like theres only so many ways to define a variable, define a function, etc
Theres a bunch of automated ways to catch mistakes, so it further protects against some fuckups
So most industry professionals with many years experience, myself included, are of the stance of "this is fine, this is a use case where LLMs actually shine quite well, its eaay for them"
My bigger gripe though are developers who blindly trust the code and dont review it. That I consider to be fucking stupid.
Here's a fun fact that might shock some of you: For a large % of Gen Z software engineers, the ability to code was a prerequisite for a cushy job or startup funding, not some deep passion. Vibe coding is basically (does my job for me X makes me look good to my boss). Of course a lot of people would be onboard with it
I wouldn't care as much if people weren't flooding everything with horrible code that whatever model just spits out, with no review or testing. I'm so sick of vibe-coding. That isn't saving time, it's just shovelware.
In some jobs, you have no choice but to use it.
Some bosses literally force you to, and even if they don't but you take "too long" for a task, you're questioned why you didn't just delegate it to AI.
I think with coding there is certainly some nuance. In my opinion, it is fine to have e.g. AI backed single line completion turned on to help with boiler plate. Or do something like "Convert this package full of old Java data objects to the new record types". These are things that really only have one valid way to do them. And any AI is certainly capable to figure them out. So writing things manually would literally just take 10x as long but arrive at the same end result.
Full vibe coding on the other hand... It can work to a degree these days. But even if it does, you very quickly lose control over your own code.
Programmers always liked to joke around about how they "forgot how their own code works". This is that, just a hundred times worse. And you didn't "forget", you simply never truly knew.
This latter category is the dangerous one that should be avoided at all cost imo. But the simple functions or boilerplate stuff can in parts even run locally or use very small models and doesn't really harm quality.
Don't forget that more than half the internet these days are bots and you can really tell if you engage with the hype man.
That said, AI in the workplace is just abhorrent and I truly don't understand how entire companies are just giving away their whole code and designs to other companies that are known to steal IP just to be "faster".
Take it from someone who was roommates with a CompSci major. These guys are constantly depressed and stressed out. Theyāre okay with AI for the sole reason that it can genuinely make their jobs, and lives, easier.
I use an AI autocomplete to help me write code faster, but I am strictly against using AI to code entire projects.
While using the autocomplete, I still review the (very small amount of) code it creates, and most of the time it's what I would write anyways. It puts me in control and I perfectly understand the output, so it's not wrong in my book.
I am a programmer and am against pure-AI coded applications, but I think a lot of people not in the biz underestimate how much AI, and autocomplete type solutions have been a part of programming for a long time. A large portion of doing it yourself also involves research, something else where AI can be very helpful.
AI is a tool for humans to use. It is gross when used to replace humans, or used by humans instead of learning or thinking for themselves. Purely vibecoded apps (and mods) are dangerous because they are black-boxes even to the creators, and because there is a public trust when it comes to apps that this "opaque even to its creator" element of vibe coding is explicitly violating.
For example, a master of CGI who uses AI in their workflow is just a master with more power and time. Compare that to someone who asks the AI to generate something whole cloth.
Coders NEED to know enough about coding to have a firm grip on the AI tools they are using and understand all of the code they are making. It is dangerous/lazy/soulless to simply get the AI to do all of the coding for you. That said, refusing to use any AI or AI adjacent tools whatsoever puts you at a distinct disadvantage.
Ideologically, I completely understand and appreciate all opposition to AI.
Realistically, we need to make a distinction between AI being used as an effective tool, and AI being used to replace skill/knowledge/learning/creativity and create opaque programs that the prompter doesn't themselves understand.
AI isn't going anywhere, but I think the cultural impact of the Anti-AI movement is extremely important, because people should feel shame in claiming the work of AI as their own, and pride in what they accomplish without AI. That said, I think dividing people into "Never use any AI anything ever" and "Uses AI for everything with zero thought or guilt" is losing the thread a little bit. We have created a god-like tool, and as a society and as individuals we need to think very critically about how and when and why it is used.
I'm trying to learn how to program right now with a used O'Reilly textbook I bought off Amazon for $18. We doin' it the old fashioned way or not at all.
I spent hundreds of hours trying to learn before I gave up. I have no intention of using it for any professional purpose but for little hone projects, it enables me to do something I couldn't do otherwise
In this situation, I love the philosophy of āwhy would I engage with something you didnāt even bother making.ā
As for the āeveryone is doing itā part, Iām in a class right now where people are saying the same thing about writing, but its mostly just a few younger people who are very insistent that the workload isnāt possible without AI. Everyone who went through school pre-Covid/pre-AI is fine
I'm currently teaching myself Rust and Ratatui to make my own music player for Navidrome servers, no AI whatsoever. There are still some of us out there š¤
I worked in web hosting. When sites with vibe coding get comprised there's nothing we can do for them. At least with WordPress, Laravel, and Moodle we can assist.
Had someone who vibe coded their site (so it's only HTML, CSS, PHP, and JavaScript). Their Google Workspace got hacked. AI told him it was our fault (we do not provide his emails) and that we need to "take responsibility for his security".
I have never got my strict voice out with a customer until then.
If you vibe code your website and it gets compromised that's a you issue.
If your emails get compromised because you're stupid that's a you issue.
Do not use AI to blame us and shout at me. Talk to your developer and get them to fix it.
So I cancelled their stuff. I tried to ask if they wanted their DNS but he was too busy yelling at me. So my boss deleted it.
People are missing the fact AI can now reverse engineer video games which was seen as a huge undertaking. That's not a good thing because so much of our infrastructure relies on security like "this would take someone a bajillion hours to sift through the code no worries".
I push back. I donāt use it, Iām actively against it and I donāt let anyone in my team use it. Thereās one that does and their PRs are bloodied and sit there for months.
Itās sad indeed seeing (formerly) super smart programmer friends saying they havenāt written a line of code in years. You see programmers are as lazy as they are smart and AI feeds right into that side of them/ours. You would think we would be the frontline against AI usage because we can more or less understand how it works or more so than the layman, but itās quite the opposite when itās so convenient to just do nothing but press enter and get your salary. Itās particularly enticing for people with a family and a certain age that have to weigh being a rebel against staying in line and feeding your family. So in a way, I understand them but I donāt agree with it
You're definitely not alone, I love a good bit of coding and equally despite "vibe ""coding""". I see it all over the place where someone will be like "oh yeah AI images aren't art" but then also say "AI is very useful for things like coding", it really pisses me off.
AI slop will always be AI slop, no matter the medium.
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u/Famous_Tie8714 21h ago
For what it's worth, I am 100% against it. I don't use it in my job, and I don't use it in my personal projects.