Comment by bluefirebrand 16 hours ago
> I can't run 80 mph but I can drive a car that fast
If you drive a car 80mph you don't get to claim you are a good runner
Similarly if you use an LLM to generate 10k lines of code, you don't get to claim you are a good programmer
Regardless of the outcome being the "same"
Project Managers will tell you that "getting to a place" is the goal
Then you get to the place and they say "now load all of the things in the garage into the truck"
But oops. You didn't bring a truck, because all they told you was "please be at this address at this time", with no mention of needing a truck
My point is that the purpose of commercial programming is not usually just to get to the goal
Often the purpose of commercial programming is to create a foundation that can be extended to meet other goals later, that you may not even be remotely aware of right now
If your foundation is a vibe coded mess that no one understands, you are going to wind up screwed
And yes, part of being a good programmer includes being aware of this
I work with quite a few F100 companies. The actual amount of software most of them create is staggering. Tens of thousands of different applications. Most of it is low throughput and used by a small number of employees for a specific purpose with otherwise low impact to the business. This kind of stuff has been vibe coded long before there was AI around to do it for you.
At the same time human ran 'feature' applications like you're talking about often suffer from "let the programmer figure it out" problems where different teams start doing their own things.
You do get to claim that you’re a good getting-places-er, though, which is the only point of commercial programming.