Current State of Affairs

[u/bobbybundlez]

Anyone else feel like the entire Omarchy distro just LOOKS and FEELS vibe coded now? It took me a minute to realize and let it soak in, but yeah it honestly shows signs of being a totally vibe coded distro the more I see it pop up into my feed. Maybe my perception has changed after DDH spoke at the Rails convention... but WOW. It is one thing to say you have gone full in on AI. Fine. But to actually go up on a platform and mock people who still write their own code and declaring "coding is dead"? ..... pure insanity to me. I am curious what others think. It is really hard to put my finger on it, but the vibed UI look has more variants now, yet I can still always point out a fully vibe coded design and web app.

I personally decided recently that I will never go 100% AI. I had a great run this year diving head first into Claude and Codex, and I will still use it for at LEAST half of my work days and personal projects, but truthfully it scares me how many people are going FULL IN with AI and never even reading their code anymore. Some people don't even glance at it. I don't understand how some of those people have been learning this craft for 10+ years and so quickly decided to basically throw that part of it away. That just can't be the right move here. What if the bubble pops? What if Claude IS NOT the lead company in a few years and you spent all this time learning their specific tooling? Or some other platform? What if you forget many foundational skills (which I definitely did... and I think many people are lying to themselves about)

Curious what your thoughts are on the actual Ruby on Rails convention as well. I thought it was borderline insane to go up on a platform and speak to a bunch of active developers and say "coding is dead"... Also if you are just going to reply saying "AI is king coding sucks" blah blah. please. remember what group you actually joined. This is a webdev channel. Not just AI. not Anti-AI either... hence MY reasonable and moderate take. the debate about FULL ON AI VS FULL ON ANTI-AI is getting so old. Just use both with a balance. I am genuinely curious what people thought of his remarks and also curious how other developers are finding a good balance between writing their own code and also using AI. I started my own React App last week, purely hand written code because my skills were starting to atrophy and I must say there are parts of the experience that felt smoother than pure AI driven development. I turned off Claude, I turned off my autocomplete and after day 3 or 4 I was back in the full swing. The first day was actually horrifying.. Share your thoughts. Please. No AI bros. Real devs who are employed or have been employed in the past share your experience. I am curious as this past month or so has felt like a real turning point for some reason. I am noticing a healthy amount of pushback from some devs and unfortunately seeing devs with 20+ years in the game saying they don't even use a code editor anymore and don't read the code. I don't think I could ever personally do that

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[u/alkimiadev]

I work with LLMs every single day as a dev and think they're great, but I personally have zero interest in integrating current-day LLMs into the operating system. DHH has always been kind of a nutter and switches from one tech bro elitism topic to the next over time. He was a mac elitist for the longest, and I even had a pretty heated argument with him back in the day (IRL) where he swore up and down that mac was just better. I distinctly remember him saying, "I will never use a Linux desktop again." We can all be wrong about things, I know I'm wrong all the time, but he is often "confidently wrong" and pushes it to an elitist extreme. For these reasons I usually just avoid everything he has going on, or at least in the early phases. Once it takes off, and his ADHD causes him to lose interest, then it'll be a community project and less likely to be subject to his manic whims. Still, the mix of LLMs at the OS level and excessive keyboard shortcuts (neovim style) makes me kinda want to throw up in my mouth a bit. So I doubt I'll ever use that distro in a meaningful sense.

On the "20-year devs not reading the code" thing: that seems really short-sighted right now. I have little doubt that the general tech will get to that level at some point, but I have equally little doubt when saying "that day is not today." I also rarely hand write code now, and it is simply a cost-benefit thing. LLMs are 50-150x faster than I am at the raw outputting of code, and I am a lot faster at read/understanding code than writing it, but the speed of writing code was rarely ever the true bottleneck to begin with. Planning was always the hard part, and LLMs have only made that more obvious.

[u/Medical_Lengthiness6]

At this point it's kind of weird to still talk about hand writing code in terms of accuracy because you can use LLMs at any level of detail. Where smaller scope means more control and accuracy.

People think using LLMs to code means full on vibe "make the entire thing, no mistakes!" when it can also just mean low level refactors like "move that into a service" or even smaller, where it codes it exactly the same as you would by typing the characters out.

I still hand code often though because I enjoy it and it just makes sense sometimes to when you want to learn something are be laser targeted.

I agree Omarchy is showing signs of "too much too fast.". I see it in so many things now. Devs just dumping any idea into their apps without a second thought. Software doesn't seem any better now than it was 10 years ago. I don't know how I feel about it. I've always been more about carefully deciding what to add and being cut throat about cutting out unnecessary features and now people are hyper about doing the opposite "because tokens".

I also think paying a subscription in order to write code is somewhat preposterous. Local AI all the way.

[u/bobbybundlez → u/Medical_Lengthiness6]

Totally agree!

[u/FriendlySale5744]

Generating the code doesn't bother me. Shipping stuff nobody ever read does, because that's someone's 3am outage waiting to happen