Bad vibes
"There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works." ~ Andrej Karpathy
Surely you have now heard of the latest, (and worst in recent memory), trend in software. Leveraging immense computational resources, the machine can now write code for you.... sort of. Yes, an LLM can now write code, but code of the most dubious quality, enabling managers and junior devs to throw spaghetti at the wall and, with reckless abandon, ship to production whatever sticks. The Lords of Capital proclaim that "coding is dead" and 10 million professional code monkeys wring their hands in fear, their cushy tech jobs slipping ever further into the misty past of 2022. I have been selling Javascript and Javascript accessories now for more years that I would like to admit. I'm not the greatest coder in the world, not by a long shot. But I still consider myself an engineer and I have learned this- It's easy to write bad code. It's not hard to mash the keys until the div is centered and the database holds water. And it's very very easy to paint yourself into the metaphorical corner. Code can look reasonable, run on your machine and still be complete garbage. Cat food and foie gras look pretty similar, until you have to take a bite. And only when you've shipped it to prod and fired your senior developers, do you realize it's too late to go back now. Maybe someone enjoys eating Meow Mix, but I am not one of those people. Seasoned programmers know that The Machines are not to be trusted. Useful though they may be, real coders know computers are really capricious machine elves that delight in race conditions and dropped tables and all manner of chaos. "Thou shalt not make a machine in the likeness of a human mind" remains sage advice as ever. Or as Steve Wozniak put it, "Never trust a computer you can't throw out a window".
LLM's don't write good code, they just write bad code faster and cheaper than a junior dev. Bad news for bootcamp grads, but good news for the rest of us. Because, much like a junior dev, LLMs can be tamed. It's possible to bring them to heel, harness them under your will and point them in the direction you want them to take you. The trick is to give them a little leeway, but no real control. A little bit of carrot and a lot of stick. To me, it's ever more clear that there is only 1 real strategy for writing good code- tests. Whether it's written by meatbags or neural nets, code must be tested. And the faster you write that code, the stronger this imperative becomes. It's easier than ever to write the code, but harder than ever to ascertain it's quality.
It's for this reason that I have created testeranto. Testeranto is the synthesis of many years of insight, but it's most salient point is this: If humans write good tests, the machine can write good code to implement those tests. Using BDD practices, we can define what the code ought to do, and this makes the implementation much much more likely to succeed.
Sound interesting? Then check out this rough demo!