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What are your thoughts about today’s show? We’d love to hear from you!
I have Windows Smart App Control turned on; I suppose that’s reassuring that I don’t really do anything too weird on my Windows PC.
I know it wasn’t, but that Tineo AI segment felt like an ad. I zoned out for a sec and I was like “wait what am I listening to? why?”. I know it’s not an advertisement because I know Leo respects us enough to disclose when something is an ad.
I’m unsure about the vibe-coding trend. It’s intriguing, but I think today’s junior developers will eventually become project leads or technical managers. When the current coders retire, who will fill their roles? Right now, AI can replace junior developers, and human programmers handle code reviews. However, once those developers age out and only AI-savvy individuals are left, who will oversee accessibility and security checks?
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The other thing is, vibe coding and AI coding in general, is fine for personal projects that will only be used by a single person, but, especially vibe coded code, is generally not maintainable.
You still need a maintainer and you definitely need someone knowledgeable to go through the generated code looking for bugs (proper unit tests, system tests and integration tests, and once the system goes live, regression tests), especially security bugs or the use of “demo” code.
Even without vibe coded apps, we have seen unknowledgeable devs take example code from manufacturers or from forums and websites, where the example shows how to accomplish the immediately asked question, but does not have any error or bounds checking, for example.
There was a case a few years back, where Intel had some sample code on how to talk to write drivers, in the comments was that is was sample code and was not fit for production as it was incomplete. Hackers exploited drivers from several manufacturers, because they had all blindly copied the sample code in their production drivers, without adding the necessary checks to make the code safe.
Vibe Coding is going to do the same thing, because it is learning from sample code, demo code and general bad code, as well as good code. Nobody is going through the training material and removing all bad code from, for example Codestack, let alone removing all the bugs and bad code from Git repositories.
So that means, for companies and individuals distributing or selling apps, that the code still needs to be properly analysed and tested, before it can be sent out into the wide world.
The sort of personal apps that @Leo is making are fine, but they are not checked and would not be suitable for wider distribution without a code review and extensive testing.
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People do distribute vibe-coded apps, though. Heard an interesting interview with Graham Bower, who’s an interface designer, I think, who has vibe-coded an iOS fitness app. He had an existing app it was based on.
I didn’t say you can’t, I said you shouldn’t, unless it has been fully tested and the code checked…
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