Vibe-coded software is junk food
I was thinking about this while cooking some meal. I'm not good at it, so I try to follow a recipe. I use fresh ingredients, wash and chop them carefully, watch the boiling pan oftenly so I don't overcook. Maybe too often, because I don't really know what I'm doing. The result isn't necessarily great, but it's better than fast food, industrially processed food and sometimes even restaurant delivery. The reason is that I care, while someone in fast food would probably not. (Well they care that I don't die eating it, but they don't care that I'll be overweight 5 years from now.)
Unlike cooking, I know a thing or two about software. I'm long past the delusion of greatness, but I'm a decent engineer and I usually know what I'm doing. But when I work on something, if the result is any good, it's for the same reason: I care.
Vibe-coded software is like junk food, because the AI doesn't care. Maybe worse: it doesn't even think. For this main reason I believe that companies which allow too much AI-generated code into their production systems might have some major health issues in the long run.1
I have seen projects having tens of thousands of lines, created in record time. Definitely impressive, but it's humanly impossible to review all that code. What if there's some fundamental flaw lurking somewhere, which can ocasionally do something catastrophic like wiping out databases or filesystems? Or maybe worse, silently slipping inaccuracies in production data for a long period of time? You can only hope there isn't.
Human-made software should be trusted more than AI-generated software simply because someone cares about it. Most programmers I know even care about their code beeing fast and beautiful (besides just doing the job), to the extent afforded by their experience. But AI doesn't care; it says “you are absolutely right, let me try that again” after doing the dumbest shit possible. AI won't lose its job, AI won't get divorced, won't lose family, won't get sued; whatever things people care about, AI isn't affected.
I'm avoiding it for as much as I can (it's sad that it starts being like a requirement at work), and if I'm ever going to use it it'll be for small, boring tasks, not for anything big that would leave a lot of junk food on the table. My trust is so low that I refrain from personally trying projects that seem genuinely useful, like this one (entirely vibe-coded). I hope it won't invade much open source software that I use.
[ By the way, did you notice how buggy Github is lately? The start of the troubles seems to coincide with the advent of AI.. just sayin'. ]
Don't become a full-slop developer.