Post #2470523

2026-05-10 11:18 UTC

&quot;It’s making developers dramatically more effective, but it’s also introducing security vulnerabilities, increasing technical debt, and producing code that can be difficult to maintain.&quot; is one heck of a sentence that appears to be relying on a rather novel definition of the word &quot;effective&quot; to be in any way coherent. (It&#39;s a pull quote from https://thenewstack.io/acm-vibe-coding-ai-agent/ that pretty much brought my brain to a juddering halt from the level of cognitive dissonance it implies)

Replies (4)

@dabeaz@mastodon.social 2026-05-10 12:30

@ancoghlan@mastodon.social Perhaps it's "effective" in the sense that it's amplifying what developers were already doing.

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@jaredwhite@indieweb.social 2026-05-10 16:15

@ancoghlan@mastodon.social Perhaps they meant to say "efficient"…where "efficient" is shorthand for “lines of code committed per day” which as we all know is a death knell for software quality.

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@cratermoon@zirk.us 2026-05-10 16:23

@ancoghlan@mastodon.social that quote is not in the ACM brief at all! The article pulled it from a statement by the lead author, who happens to work for a company using AI for digital forensics.. The newstack article seems not to have any excerpts directly from the brief, and I wonder if the author even read it. The brief: https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3807518

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@erik@mastodon.infrageeks.social 2026-05-10 20:06

@ancoghlan@mastodon.social @mastodonmigration@mastodon.online Thank you - I read the first part and my brain jumped immediately to all of your arguments. An effective developer should also be managing security risk, technical debt, performance and maintainability. If a dev organization doesn't empower their employees to solve for these requirements as part of their core responsibility then WTF are you even doing?

Open ##2887854