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  • 8 Posts
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Joined 2 years ago
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Cake day: June 7th, 2023

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  • I’m working with a team where my business partner and I are external consultants, but they also have internal developers (who are mostly very junior and need hand holding with things like using git).

    Anyway, the CEO (without talking to us first) hired a pure vibe coder with no software engineering experience to build the user interface. Super nice guy, super easy to work worth, super eager to learn but OH MY GOD THIS CODE.

    A lot of my work is / has been in cybersecurity (mostly for the space industry / NASA adjacent projects, but also less recently for start ups and fortune 500 companies). This app is the worst I’ve ever seen. The AI writes things SO weirdly. 30k lines of typescript to do something we could have done in 6k. Reams of dead code. Procedural code to do repeatable tasks instead of functions / classes (10 different ways of doing the same thing). API keys / data base credentials committed to git. API Keys stored in .env but then ALSO just hardcoded into the actual API calls.

    AND no. At the end of the day, it wasn’t cheaper or faster than it would have been to hire us to do it right. And the tech debt now accumulated to secure / maintain this thing? Security is a long term requirement, we’re bringing a buddy of mine in to pentest this thing next week, I expect him to find like 10-12 critical vulns. Wow.

    tl;dr: If a project requires security, stability, auditability, or the need to quickly understand how something works / why something happens, DON’T vibe code it. You won’t save money OR time in the long run. If you’re project DOESN’T need any of those things (and never will), then by all means I guess, knock yourself out.














  • I think it would depend on how much attention it gets. Given that both MAGA and Progressives want this out there (although I bet MAGA won’t like or believe what they see if it DOES come out), it could be dangerous for ANYONE to vote against it, and interesting to see who does.

    My guess is

    • Centrist media tries to cover it as little as possible and everyone hopes the story goes away. (Hopefully Elon’s antics and both progressive and red cap media make this difficult to the point of absurdity)
    • Congress (Mike Johnson) tries to quietly shut it down in way that’s not obvious why nothing ever happened and the doofuses on the right don’t understand who’s responsible (somehow blame Biden). We need to keep telling them “Your boy Mike kept the vote from happening. Why?”
    • If Congress IS forced against the will of the establishment to vote on it, they’ll try to make it as procedurally confusing as possible, or make noises about how they are going to vote on it, but not for a while and then they just never do.
    • If it passes in spite of all that, Trump won’t comply and no one will hold him accountable and MAGA probably eventually WILL move on to other conspiracy bullshit and this will get left in the dust.

    It’s infuriating that the ignorance and stupidity of a huge chunk of the country is what keeps enabling these bastards.