Or did you write your comment with an intentional self-demeaning note, and not a sarcastic tone?
Even the best code I've ever written rots, not because it changes but because I get better. Now... I know thinking out of the box is hard... but one can get better a lot of different ways, and call me an optimist, but I'm betting folks can get better at producing tool-assisted code, too. Assuming how we do it now is how it will be forever is silly.
We're in the middle of figuring out the next level of mediated engineering. You-know-what or get off the pot, but stop pretending being a dinosaur is still in vogue. It's gauche, and trust me, we've seen it all before...
... back in my day we didn't have that fancy IDE autocomplete; we memorized every function in a library. IDEs?! ... Back in my day we didn't even have debuggers; we just knew how the code worked. Pish posh, back in my day the compiler didn't even produce error messages that made sense. Compilers? The faux luxury of it all! Back in my day, if you actually cared about your code, you wrote the assembly by hand.
And no, not all my code is written at 5 am when I am close of passing out. But I say those who never experienced that flow to also do hacky things to get something done and if it takes till the morning, maybe did not capture the full spirit of a hacker site?
I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness" that vibe-coding introduces.
Yes, my point was exactly about the middle ground. (And the double implemented functions were of a rather small kind, where rewriting them was faster than looking for the old ones. And it was hyperbole of course, I don't routinely do the same again and again for no reason. I remember maybe 2 or 3 instances of that happening)
I wrote bad code and good code in my life, depending on the project and depending on myself.
And where I wrote bad code in the past, AI is actually great with helping that. Finding duplicates, documentation out of order, etc.
"I believe the point being discussed is the scale of "badness" that vibe-coding introduces."
The point I was discussing is that code is not automatically understood, or good, just because a human wrote it.
So all in all, sure, Vibe coding enables a new universe of bad code (that pretends to look good). But if done right, it can also raise the bar. It is a powerful tool and up to us on how we use it.
