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Guy at work did a whole mini project with just LLMs and prompting. I asked him some questions about how it works and some implementation details, and he had no idea. Great. I'm going to have to maintain this thing, probably.
Just use a LLM to maintain it. Duh.
A guy vibe coded something and said to incorporate it into my work.
Now it was a feature that people had asked for so I had to try it out.
It failed 75% of the things it was supposed to do and for the other what usually was a near instant interactive task took 5 minutes. I kicked it back saying he needed to fix the problems and improve performance. The end of the next day he answered that the infrastructure must be broken because the AI couldn't get results and the performance problem was just the nature of the things the software had to interact with. I say "he", but pretty sure his comment was LLM generated, long and useless.
But it was the impetus to get that function done now, as his "substantiative" work meant we could technically provide a customer request, lower priority as it may have been. So I spent a morning implementing the same thing it did but the old fashioned way, 100% worked and the unavoidably slow thing took less than a second.
If you're technical, spec kit helps with this a lot.
You define the spec, and declare everything important about how it needs to work.
Then let the ai loose on developing the code. Then I have another ai check for accuracy to the spec, and have it walk me through the code at a high level.
I understand it about as well as I do most projects where there is a team working on something.
Works great if you are already a competent coder. If I was new to coding though, I don't think I would be learning a ton
I feel like most of the time saved is by skipping the part where you learn stuff. Like, the AI fills out how you do a left join with this ORM library. Cool. Now I don't know how to do that.
You know how a lot of managers are annoying and don't know anything about how shit works? That's down the road using LLMs like this.
I don't disagree. That's why I feel for new developers. I've been doing this for 25 years, and I have some stuff still to learn, but not all that much on a vibe coded saas app.
If I had to learn like this when I was new though, I probably would have never learned anything
except instead of ls it runs rm -rf /
-y-frfr
Why did you prompt for that?
To test the --no-preserve-root safeguard. It's like playing Russian roulette
Didn't steam actually do that for a bit on some systems when you tried to uninstall?
If you ask AI to create the shell of a class for you with 3 variables (two ints and one Vector as you defined elsewhere in your project), that’s different than saying “make me Facebook 2” and expecting everything to go well.
Ethics of current LLMs in a still-capitalist-materially society aside, the problem with AI is that management wants the robots to do all the work so their jobs become easier and their stocks go up. But that shit just doesn’t DO that. LLMs don’t think. They are statistical autocomplete. Programming is not trivial, no matter how much it may seem that way because we have trivialized as much of it as possible to make it useful.
"They are statistical autocomplete." nice
Thought it was going to be ctrl+r
I didn't know that one for years.
(Searches command history.)
Yeah, pair that with fzf!
...pressing the 'up' arrow ten times in a shell might let you avoid typing 'ls'
I feel seen. But in my defense, that directory was like, 6 levels deep
Let me introduce you to my savior: ctrl + r
And a better bash with fuzzy find: fish or zsh.
fzf is where it's at
Yeah, that what you can type ^R ls instead of ls to save time!
Pretty sure I use ls <dir> more than ls
Also, use mc and you'll never need ls
Ctrl r my friend
But doesn't pressing the up arrow 10 times (and reading each command) waste both time and effort compared to just pressing 2 buttons?
Yes, which is a perfect comparison
Stretching an additional finger, as well as locating an additional key, could be considered extra effort.
Sure but both quantified and qualified, those 4 actions are less effort than the 20 actions of key pressing and reading the terminal.
Yes, and you can make a door by driving a car through a wall. The outcome may be less than optimal though.
That's a doorway, not a door
I've been trying full on vibe coding the last few weeks to see where it's at. I don't feel any less exhausted at the end of the day.
alias what-the-fuck-is-in-this-room=ls
It might be longer but it's definitely more memorable to type.
this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2026
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Showerthoughts
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A "Showerthought" is a simple term used to describe the thoughts that pop into your head while you're doing everyday things like taking a shower, driving, or just daydreaming. The most popular seem to be lighthearted clever little truths, hidden in daily life.
Here are some examples to inspire your own showerthoughts:
- Both “200” and “160” are 2 minutes in microwave math
- When you’re a kid, you don’t realize you’re also watching your mom and dad grow up.
- More dreams have been destroyed by alarm clocks than anything else
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