Not to mention that sometimes I really feel like the main character myself when I’m asking a question in this forum, despite honestly trying first to figure out the answer on my own
I haven’t seen this comparison too much, but I think vibe coding has a lot in common with “cargo cult programming”. As in copying and pasting code without really understanding how it works. Most people who understand AI understand its limitations, but those in favor of increasing AI usage choose to ignore AI’s limitations.
Among my software developer friends, the term “spaghetti code” is used to refer to program code that is so poorly written and entangled that any attempt to diagram the logic and flow would resemble a plate of spaghetti. It also refers to how some people test to see if spaghetti is fully cookied: by throwing a randomly chosen strand against a wall… if it sticks, then it’s done.
Thus, “spaghetti code” (or “cargo cult programming” or “vide coding”) is software that is created by throwing together lots of pieces of code until something “sticks to the wall.” This is often the way that the current crop of LLM “pseudo-AI” tools are being used to write code.
Regrettably, and with absolutely no disrespect intended, this behavior sometimes occurs among the well-intentioned self-described “non-programmers” who try to write TiddlyWiki wikitext code, and especially in regard to writing TiddlyWiki filters.
My response is generally to try to show them how to construct the proper wikitext code to achieve their objectives in the hope that they “learn how to cook”, rather than eating McDonalds take-out and calling it a meal.
“Give a man a fish and he eats for a day… teach a man to fish and he devastates an entire eco-sytem.”
It kind of suggests they are personaly more limited than the LLM’s they use
I have professional expierence with this when I had to maintain and build COBOL programs that had being programaticaly upgraded to a newer COBOL code version. The programs became all but unreadable as a result. Some expanded from thousands of lines to tens of thousands of lines. The only way out was to translate it into a form of psudocode that was easier to read, with all the inherit risks. This case was the key example of spaghettie code in my career.
This was in part why my training was in structured programing.
