That is a totally real point about confidence! I recently added a feature to an application that I know I won't be able to fix myself. If it breaks, I'll need to 100% rely on AI. On the other hand, I've inherited human written code in the past that I wished that I could just rewrite myself (so that I would confidently understood all of it) rather than try to understand how someone else's code was designed to work and then run into potential surprises. I never liked that part of the job, but maybe that will be the role of professional software developers of the future - less engineering from scratch (my favorite part) and more the dirty work of finding a specific point of failure in a mess of code that you didn't write.
My strategy, so far, has been to vibe small enough chunks that I feel like I at least own and understand the overall design/architecture and can pinpoint the general area that is failing/needs work. I am starting to feel like what I enjoy about software is the "owning" and controlling the direction of development part, not so much typing out lines of code and looking up syntax. But maybe I'm just getting old and lazy :)
That is a totally real point about confidence! I recently added a feature to an application that I know I won't be able to fix myself. If it breaks, I'll need to 100% rely on AI. On the other hand, I've inherited human written code in the past that I wished that I could just rewrite myself (so that I would confidently understood all of it) rather than try to understand how someone else's code was designed to work and then run into potential surprises. I never liked that part of the job, but maybe that will be the role of professional software developers of the future - less engineering from scratch (my favorite part) and more the dirty work of finding a specific point of failure in a mess of code that you didn't write.
My strategy, so far, has been to vibe small enough chunks that I feel like I at least own and understand the overall design/architecture and can pinpoint the general area that is failing/needs work. I am starting to feel like what I enjoy about software is the "owning" and controlling the direction of development part, not so much typing out lines of code and looking up syntax. But maybe I'm just getting old and lazy :)