My rule of thumb has thus far been: if I’m gonna allow AI to write any bit of code for me, then I must, at a bare minimum, be able to understand that code.
There’s no way I could do what some of these “vibe coders” are doing where they allow AI to write code for them that they don’t even understand.
I think there's a lot of code that gets written that's either disposable or effectively "write only" in that no one is expected to maintain it. I have friends who write a lot of this code for tasks like data analysis for retail and "vibe coding" isn't that crazy in such a domain.
Basically, what's worse? "Vibes" code that no one understands or a cascade of 20 spreadsheets that no one understands? At least with the "vibes" code you can stick it in git and have some semblance of sane revision control and change tracking.
> I have friends who write a lot of this code for tasks like data analysis for retail and "vibe coding" isn't that crazy in such a domain.
I think this is a great use case for AI, but the analyst still needs to understand what the code that is output does. There are a lot of ways to transform data that result in inaccurate or misleading results.
> I have friends who write a lot of this code for tasks like data analysis for retail and "vibe coding" isn't that crazy in such a domain.
That sort of makes sense, but then again... if you run some analysis code and it spits out a few plots, how do you know what you're looking at is correct if you have no idea what the code is doing?
two wrongs don't make a right
> I have friends who write a lot of this code for tasks like data analysis for retail and "vibe coding" isn't that crazy in such a domain
Considering the hallucinations we've all seen I don't know how they can be comfortable using AI generated data analysis to drive the future direction of the business.
> what's worse? "Vibes" code that no one understands or a cascade of 20 spreadsheets that no one understands? At least with the "vibes" code you can stick it in git and have some semblance of sane revision control and change tracking.
You can for spreadsheets too.
> think there's a lot of code that gets written that's either disposable or effectively "write only" in that no one is expected to maintain it. I have friends who write a lot of this code for tasks like data analysis for retail and "vibe coding" isn't that crazy in such a domain.
> Basically, what's worse? "Vibes" code that no one understands or a cascade of 20 spreadsheets that no one understands?
Correction: it's a "cascade of 20 spreadsheets" that one person understood/understands.
Write only code still needs to work, and someone at some point needs to understand it well enough to know that it works.
Lol, that's definitely a factor. Actually plotting is the perfect example because python is really popular in the space and matplotlib sucks so much. While an analyst may not understand Python very well, they often understand the data itself through either previous projects or through other analysis tools. It's kind of like vibe coding a UI for a backend that's hand built.