"The real threat is a slow, comfortable drift toward not understanding what you're doing. Not a dramatic collapse. Not Skynet. Just a generation of researchers who can produce results but can't produce understanding."
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I've heard this argument from my primary school teacher banning calcs.
You don't need to know how to slap planks together if you can pour concrete.
Old wisdoms are relegated to quaint footnotes
New wisdoms are discovered.
@n_dimension I believe you are confusing -- or consciously conflating -- understanding with ability.
By crude example, one can readily understand θ=cos−1(A/H), without having the ability to calculate it in one's head.
Thanks for the explanation.
My current #vibecoding project uses JavaScript.
My skill in JavaScript is precisely 0.
My ability is 0.
But my understanding is sufficient to design and implement a working system.
@n_dimension Great.
Can you debug it, explain it, walk another engineer through it, build an integration for it, even security audit it?
Or would you rely entirely on automation far away to do all that for you - to explain it, debug it, adapt it, and audit it?
You may know what you want, what that code does, but can you say you know what that code actually is?
And whose code is it really?
That of countless 1000s of human coders that have written the JS from which your collage was made.
@JulianOliver from experience with organisations skimping on IT stuff (eg. not keeping their shit up to date), there'll be something like the trust thermocline: skimp, skimp, skimp and everything's fine, up until the point where the scales tip, it all goes horribly wrong and you have to spend a ton of money fixing it... if it even *can* be fixed.
@neoluddite I would agree. Even reading experienced coders unable to refactor their own vibe-coded monstrosity, talk of losing control of it. There's the work-as-output of these automations, but the decision tree itself is black-boxed. You can ask an engineer why they did what they did and when, to understand the terrible situation your infrastructure is in. You cannot trust a chatbot to do the same.
@JulianOliver it happens even without LLMs in the mix. Management put pressure on devs to meet impossible deadlines or some other dodgy thing, the good devs leave (Dead Sea Effect, qv), and all of your in-depth knowledge from the people who built the system is gone. Fast forward four or five years, and unless you've rebuilt that somehow, you're doomed to just fiddling around the edges.
