3 minute read
I shouldn’t have to care about this. I don’t want to care about how someone’s code gets into the IDE. Whether you wrote it by hand, copied it from a forum, prompted an LLM, or ran a simulation where monkeys are given infinite time to produce the solution.
I care about what gets merged into the codebase.
When I click that “Approve” button, I’ve got only a few worries on my mind. Does it produce the correct outcome? Will people understand this next quarter? Will they be able to change it?
But lately, I started noticing things that immediately tell me the code is written by an LLM. No, I don’t mean the repetitive comments (I’m fine with those), not even the switch statements they’re so fond of.
I know the code was generated because it was written in a way no developer on the team would.
It works, it’s clear, it’s tested, and it’s maintainable. But it’s written in a way that doesn’t follow the project conventions we’ve accepted. I know it wasn’t written by a human.
The smell of vibe coding
Because no one would write an HTTP fetching implementation covering all edge cases when we have a data fetching library in the project that already does that.
No one would implement a bunch of utility functions that we already have in a different module.
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