recent attempt to rewrite SQLite in Rust using AI

I think it is talking 100% vibe code. And yea it's pretty useful if you don't abuse it

That's weird. I've made it write a few tests once, and it pretty much made them in the style of other tests in the repo. And they did have assertions.

Vibe coding guy wrote unit tests for our embedded project. Of course, the hardware peripherals aren’t available for unit tests on the dev machine/build server, so you sometimes have to write mock versions (like an “adc” function that just returns predetermined values in the format of the real analog-digital converter).

Claude wrote the tests and mock hardware so well that it forgot to include any actual code from the project. The test cases were just testing the mock hardware.

Hahaha 🤣

if you reject her pull requests, does she fix it? is there a way for management to see when an employee is pushing bad commits more frequently than usual?

Yes it does not work right!

I agree.

also there are no new discoveries made by AI, we only see chat bots, self driving cars, automation in workplace, yet no discoveries. At some point I thought AI will help us solve cancer or way to travel in space, yet billionaires think of money.

We aren't there yet. AI and research around it started, or rather really took off, around 2018 (at least relating to what we mean by AI today; ruled based approaches existed much longer). It is very much a new field, considering most other fields existed for over 30 years at this point. And well, to be pedantic, large language models aren't really AI because there is no intelligence. They are just generating output that is the most probable continuation of the input and context provided. So yeah, "AI" cannot really research or make new discoveries yet. There may very well be a time, where AI helps us solve cancer. It definitely isn't today nor tomorrow.

I also don't think that billionaries make money with AI. I mean, if you look at OpenAI: they are actually burning money, at a fast rate measured in billions. They are believed to turn a profit in 2030. Without others investing in it, they would be long gone already. The people with money believe that OpenAI and other companies related to AI will someday make the world changing discovery. That could very well lead to AI making discoveries on its own AND to lots of money. Until then, they are obviously willing to burn a tremendous amount of money and that is keeping OpenAI in particular alive at this moment. Only time will tell what happens next. I keep my popcorn ready, once the bubble bursts :D

Edit: Connected AI making discoveries to lots of money gained or rather saved. That is the sole reason for investments from people with big money.

If they help bring reality into the conversation that's fine by me.

My take exactly. Especially the bits about unit tests. If you cannot rely on your unit tests as a first assessment of your code quality, your unit tests are trash.

And not every company runs GitHub. The metrics he's talking about are DevOps metrics and not development metrics. For example In my work, nobody gives a fuck about mean time to production. We have a planning schedule and we need the ok from our customers before we can update our product.

Ask it which is heavier: 20 pounds of gold or 20 feathers.

That was working the same in gpt one month ago. Do it, it is incredibly fun to see yourself.

they are analyzing the way the tools are being used based on marketing. yes they're useful for senior programmers who need to automate boilerplate, but they're sold as complete solutions.

Exactly. This reads like people are prompting for something then just using that code.

The way we use it is as a scaffolding tool. Write a prompt. Then use that boiler plate to actually solve the problem you’re trying to solve.

You could say the same for people using Stackoverflow, you don’t just blindly copy and paste.

Sure we did.

"Lines Of Code" is a good one, more code = more work so it must be good.

I recently had a run in with another good one : PR's/Dev/Month.

Not only it that one good for overall productivity, it's a way to weed out those unproductive devs who check in less often.

This one was so good, management decided to add it to the company wide catchup slides in a section espousing how the new AI driven systems brought this number up enough to be above other companies.

That means other companies are using it as well, so it must be good.

This is very different from my experience, but I've purposely lagged behind in adoption and I often do things the slow way because I like programming and I don't want to get too lazy and dependent.

I just recently started using Claude Code CLI. With how I use it: asking it specific questions and often telling it exactly what files and lines to analyze, it feels more like taking to an extremely knowledgeable programmer who has very narrow context and often makes short-sighted decisions.

I find it super helpful in troubleshooting. But it also feels like a trap, because I can feel it gaining my trust and I know better than to trust it.

The problem is that code is hard to write. AI just doesn't solve it. This is opposite of crypto, where the product is sort of good at what it does, (not bitcoin, though), but we don't actually need to do that.

Exactly. I’ve heard the phrase “falling behind” from many in upper management.