A while back I came across PR #7305 on the Mumble repo. And holy fuck just look at this

623 insertions? Just for “falling back to a writable runtime directory”? And when you look at the PR it’s even more ridiculous. Why is there a unit test for this? If it doesn’t work it would just crash on launch, you don’t need a unit test to tell you that, and obviously you also get all the comments that tell you what the code does as typically seen in code written by a clanker. You’ll also notice that the return value is a struct with a warning message simply due to the fact that I left a comment suggesting it when the chance of a warning being required being so low that it probably doesn’t need a warning message in the first place!

This is the difference between a “vibe coder” and say, a programmer using AI. A “vibe coder” has no sense of direction, they have no opinions and they literally have no idea what they are doing. We joke about copying stuff from Stack Overflow all the time and yet the difference between copying Stack Overflow and just “vibe coding” is that when you copy an example on Stack Overflow, you have the adapt the example to your specific project and you at least have to choose which one of the solutions fit your project the most, whereas a “vibe coder” just slops Claude or whatever the kids are using these days onto whatever the fuck they are working on currently.

The worst part about it is that everyone is shilling it constantly. It is pretty much required to get a software engineering position these days as if you don’t use AI you’re somehow less productive even though every time I use it I am literally running in circles. All it does is that it generates plausible looking code that just follows whatever “best practices” on the Internet. Clanker code having tons of useless comments is an example of this, you gotta have comments in your code, right? Except pretty much everyone knows that you should write self-documenting code and reserve comments for why things are done the way they are. An AI can somehow not grok (no pun intended) this despite it being one of the most common recommendations out there.