- As a professional developer, I would find it very frustrating to have to debug someone else's code and also be held responsible for that code.
- As a hobbyist developer, it would bother me that I'm no longer a developer.
I cannot speak for the author of the article, but for my own part, I find it frustrating to take responsibility for code which no one else believes they should own. This can come about when professionals abdicate their responsibility because "AI wrote it," i.e., it's "someone else's code."
I thought that was the definition of vibe coding?
We did a hackathon at work recently, and this was definitely one thing I learned during the process of our team using Claude to do the whole thing. (Using Claude was an explicit stated goal of the hackathon, fwiw; every team did this.)
It felt very strange.
Seems fairly easy but whereas hand coding i run into bugs that are some dark corner of the code,now i do the same but cant do more than yell at the LLM to do better.
Im still saving time but the different types of bugs are fascinating.
Don't forget to add "Make no mistakes" to the prompt
Anyone can decide what words mean to them, and if enough people agree with you, you can use them to communicate!
- When you are working in a team, you always take responsibility of the code your team mates has written, (review, maintain, bugfix, extend, refactor..)
- Sometimes organizations reorg and you land in owning already written code by some other team (whole takeover)
- Some other times you take a position to maintain and fix, refactor, bugfix an unknown codebase. You will work on this and leave. So it is never your code. (can be whole takeover, can be temporary ownership)With regard to LLM generated code, the frustration often comes from there not being a previous "someone" who had been responsible for the code; or rather, the original author was in my opinion, irresponsible, and I must assume responsibility.
To your earlier point, I think your examples can be frustrating regardless of whether or not you're a professional—it being a regular part of the job notwithstanding.
On the part of vibe coded code, it can be a "bad code base" and readily so it's very understandable that reading it can be frustrating. However it could also be very well written. LLM written code can be considered a codebase that was written by a large portion of the developer community all together. It's not coming from some software. Software curated that from human written code one word at a time.
I don't think we agree on the definition of "professional" as it does or does not relate to what one feels (let alone what one should or should not feel), exclusive of what one does. I.e., I believe one can feel frustrated whilst also being professionally responsible... they can also feel frustrated and act irresponsibly, or any combination of feelings and actions. Part of professionalism to me is, in fact, performing one's responsibilities regardless of what one feels.
Perhaps what "feel frustrating" needs to be agreed upon. I took it as I would not like to do this as I feel it to be kind of distasteful, not as I would take this but the code would be confusing.