It's fascinating to see his gears grinding at 22:55 when acknowledging that a human still has to review the thousand lines of LLM-generated code for bugs and security issues if they're "actually trying to get work done". Yet these are the tools that are supposed to make us hyperproductive? This is "Software 3.0"? Give me a break.
Plus coding is the fun bit, reviewing code is the hard and not fun bit, arguing with an overconfident machine sound like it'll be worse even than that. Thankfully I'm going to retire soon.
Agreed. Hell, even reviewing code can be fun and engaging, especially if done in person. But it helps when the other party can actually think, instead of automatically responding with "You're right!", followed by changes that may or may not make things worse.
It's as if software developers secretly hated their jobs and found most tasks a chore, so they hired someone else to poorly do the mechanical tasks for them, while ignoring the tasks that actually matter. That's not software engineering, programming, nor coding. It's some process of producing shitty software for which we need new terminology to describe.
> Plus coding is the fun bit, reviewing code is the hard and not fun bit
To you. For others, it looks differently. And for yet others, they don't care about the coding nor the reviewing, they want to solve a particular problem.
I'd probably say I'm a programmer by accident. It's not that I love producing binaries by writing and compiling code, but I need to solve some particular problem that either is best solved by programming, or can only be solved by programming. "Programming by need" maybe is a fitting definition.
Doesn't mean I don't care about code quality, or good abstractions and having a reasonable design/architecture. But I'm focused on the end goal, having a particular problem solved, and coding is just the way there (sometimes).
I can respect that. But reading and writing code, and discussing code with your colleagues, are pretty essential tasks to software development. If you don't enjoy either, then you probably would not enjoy working in the industry.
Which is fine, don't get me wrong. But that would be like if someone wants to work as an automotive engineer, but they only enjoy driving a car. It doesn't work that way. You should enjoy the entire process of manufacturing a car if you want to drive a good one. Sure, you may enjoy some tasks more than others, and this is fine, but you can't ignore the ones you don't. Otherwise you're only doing a disservice to yourself, your team, and the users of what you build.
> Doesn't mean I don't care about code quality, or good abstractions and having a reasonable design/architecture. But I'm focused on the end goal, having a particular problem solved, and coding is just the way there (sometimes).
But coding is just the mechanical part of building software. It's the last step of the process after everything you mentioned is taken into consideration. Everything else is how you ensure that you reach the end goal successfully. So saying that the end goal is your main focus doesn't make sense if you want to actually reach it.
This is why I think that people who enjoy vibe coding today, are not, and will never become software engineers. They want to fast track to the end goal by jumping over the parts that are actually important. Blindly accepting whatever a code generation tool spits out if it passes a quick manual happy path test is not engineering. It's something else that produces much inferior results. At least until these tools get much, much better at it, which still seems far away, and unlikely with the current tech.
> I can respect that. But reading and writing code, and discussing code with your colleagues, are pretty essential tasks to software development. If you don't enjoy either, then you probably would not enjoy working in the industry.
I've enjoyed all my time in the software industry, especially compared to other professions I did before, like strawberry-picking, or roof-snow removal, or elder-case. It's easily the most relaxing job I've had, even when everything is on fire and you need to bring up production database again, it's so much better than most jobs out there. That the pay is just over-the-top compared to what most of us do, is just a plus.
> This is why I think that people who enjoy vibe coding today, are not, and will never become software engineers
I think I kind of agree with that, I see some people who have zero interest in understanding code, but they want to produce code somehow, today via LLMs/agents and yesterday via no-code platforms. I don't think they're interested in knowing programming, any parts of it, so they try to find workarounds.
What I was trying to say, is that there is maybe a group of developers, like myself, that sit somewhere in-between. If I can solve a problem by not using code, and the trade-offs are OK considering the context, then that's probably my ideal approach. I try to only use code when there is no way around it, or it's the best way.
But I agree that people who will just accept whatever an LLM gives you, are bound to end up in trouble in the future, regardless of improvements of the tooling/models, because spaghetti always sucks, no matter who writes/consumes it.
Because we are still using code as a proof that needs to be proven. Software 3.0 will not be about reviewing legible code, with its edge-cases and exploits and trying to impersonate hardware.
