I’m vibe coding a fairly complicated bash script to fully automate upgrading a web server at work. For context, I have over 2 decades experience in programming/data analytics/tech, but I’m a Linux and server admin newbie.
It’s comically bad at it. Like, I had to tell it not to post passwords to the production database to console and plaintext log files. Then, about a dozen prompts later, it does it again. The restore script rm-ed things (as sudo) before checking that it had a valid backup file to replace it with. It keeps deleting the comments in the code snippets I send it to update/fix, even when explicitly told to keep the comments. I asked it to prepend time to live commands (i.e. not “dry run” echos), and then it deleted them all again when I asked it to refactor something unrelated.
It’s been great learning for me, and I’m definitely getting this job done faster and to a higher quality than I could on my own, but holy hell these scripts would have been a disaster if someone just ran them “as is”. I’ve needed to fix dozens of errors that could have really screwed things up.
I wonder how often people go through their vibe coded outputs with the careful attention and care it needs. I’m guessing infrequently. LLMs are just word prediction machines; they don’t understand anything.
I’m vibe coding a fairly complicated bash script to fully automate upgrading a web server at work. For context, I have over 2 decades experience in programming/data analytics/tech, but I’m a Linux and server admin newbie.
It’s comically bad at it. Like, I had to tell it not to post passwords to the production database to console and plaintext log files. Then, about a dozen prompts later, it does it again. The restore script rm-ed things (as sudo) before checking that it had a valid backup file to replace it with. It keeps deleting the comments in the code snippets I send it to update/fix, even when explicitly told to keep the comments. I asked it to prepend time to live commands (i.e. not “dry run” echos), and then it deleted them all again when I asked it to refactor something unrelated.
It’s been great learning for me, and I’m definitely getting this job done faster and to a higher quality than I could on my own, but holy hell these scripts would have been a disaster if someone just ran them “as is”. I’ve needed to fix dozens of errors that could have really screwed things up.
I wonder how often people go through their vibe coded outputs with the careful attention and care it needs. I’m guessing infrequently. LLMs are just word prediction machines; they don’t understand anything.