I think that I am getting something wrong and maybe being unfair, but I don't quite see why all you coders are so upset about LLMs in code and then I am slightly suspicious that the real objection is being hidden.

The objection seems to break down into 3 distinct complaints:
1. The tech doesn't work
2. It is doing people out of job
3. It is bad environmentally and exploitative

1 may well be true, but is a shallow objection in the sense that if and when it turns out to be false, you should adopt vibe coding. If true, it is a good reason to avoid automatically generated code. It makes more work and projects worse. It can't explain the hostility. It can't ground that avoidance as a principle. It just a heuristic.

2. Is a bit rich coming from coders. Computers are ubiquitous because they do people out of a job. They were adopted at scale precisely because they reduced the need for human labour. Don't forget that in the 1960s a calculator was a job.

3. Is very true. It is awful. It is also true of clothes, food and the hardware it runs on. It must basically be true of every product we use. Veggies are grown by exploited migrant labour. Clothes are made in sweatshops in Bangladesh. The minerals and metals used to make the machines are mined in hellish conditions. I get not wanting to have one more thing that destroys life on earth and exploits racialized people because, hey, racism. But you need to take more radical action than raging against the slop machines. It requires concerted, independent, international working class organisation and action, not a boycott of one particular product. You really should take the organisation seriously. It is the only way we have a future on this planet.

Here is where I get uncharitable. I once read an interview with the less charismatic of the two programmers who wrote Elite (Ian Bell I think). He was complaining that no one had to write machine code anymore. It wasn't real programming to use libraries and abstractions and things I don't understand. I could imagine that Von Neumann thought that assembly language was cheating. You should just set the switches.

It feels like the objection is that it is no fun just having to think about the architecture of your code at the highest level, describe the problem you want solved and get the machine to solve it. If so, that is not a deep objection. Coding has changed and you will have to learn new skills that may be less interesting to you.

#LLMs, #VibeCoding