Yesterday, I've read a vibe coded script for the first time in my life, and I've cried.

It wasn't ugly. "Ugly" is not the right term. It was as if someone wasn't able to comprehend beauty, but badly tried to mimic it. It felt like "malicious compliance" to beauty. The kind of awful verbose pedantry that feels wrong every step of the way.

It's the kind of code you'd expect in a corporate environment when you know that the code would be read by the top suits who have no idea about coding, but judge it by the volume and expect science fiction level of make-believe.

It's the kind of code is abstracted away into the tiniest details. Every function returns a complex dataclass explaining precisely what it did, for no reason at all. What would be two lines of code is a function. What would be a function is a whole module. It's a caricature of good programming practices.

I was supposed to add modifying a second field on the same object via GitHub API. I've guessed it would take me about an hour to figure out the code enough to be able to do that — what ought to be 2-3 extra lines. I suspected I'd discover that most of the code does precisely nothing. Just meaningless API exchanges that are absolutely unnecessary. It felt like the kind of parody of bureaucracy where you have to file 10 forms to do something, and only one of them actually means anything.

What used to be "do one thing well" became "doing ten totally random things is fine, as long as one of them happens to be what I need, and the whole thing doesn't blow anything up in an obvious way".

Perhaps it's just because this way a throwaway script. Maybe "production" stuff takes more, err, prompt refining? Maybe it actually can produce stuff that's comprehensible.

But if that code was any indicator, then I'm not going to believe that any big LLM contributions are actually reviewed by humans. A review will take more time than rewriting from scratch. This is a ticking time bomb. That LLM-generated code isn't introducing exploits right now is either a statistical accident, or it's just that nobody bothers.

Clarification: I didn't "prompt" it or request one. I'm not a hypocrite.

#NoAI #NoLLM #AI #LLM