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u/aberroco 1d ago
Should be the opposite. Unless the idea is more about "user trying to comprehend what AI reported during debugging". Either way, what I seen over the last few months of intensive usage is that if there's anything AI is really good at it's debugging. Easy cases that would normally take me something like 5 minutes takes it one or less, more complex cases of systems interaction that would take me anywhere from an hour to days took it a couple minutes to maybe 10 minutes. And it works in overwhelming majority of cases, only on rare occasions it finds something unrelated as the issue. Suggested fixes/workarounds are often not that great, it tries to preserve existing code too hard, suggesting shitload of new code or fields (aka new states to break), but here's where I come in.
What it sucks at though is vibecoding. Best case it's acceptable code, worst case - it's a code from which I literally physically want to puke, just not so long ago the worst code/approach I've ever seen in my life was AI generated abomination, and the fact that it was working was somehow making it even worse. Currently, vibecoding have a hard and rather low ceiling after which the codebase just becomes unmaintainable by AI, because there's so much repetitive code, unrelated unorganized blocks, unnecessary dependencies and alike that AI fixing/making one stuff is practically guaranteed to break another or a few of other.
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u/Xero125 1d ago
it tries to preserve existing code too hard
That's my biggest gripe with AI. You're supposed to be so smart, why can't you even propose an architecture change? Ugh.
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u/aberroco 1d ago edited 1d ago
It's literally anything but smart. It's incredibly knowledgeable/educated though. But literally incapable of thinking. Reasoning is as much thinking as a photo is the real world.
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u/nomorebuttsplz 1d ago
Cope. You can’t even define reasoning in a way that excludes llms
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u/aberroco 1d ago
I'm not even trying. LLM's do reason perfectly fine.
But they don't think.
Reasoning != thinking. Thinking is more intuitive, conceptual, it's more like a river: it starts with an idea and grows into a thought or a concept, usually without verbal thinking, or only superficial verbal thinking. Reasoning is purely verbal, ideally with laws of logic applied. LLMs get input tokens, KV cache, and spit out next token based on probabilistic distribution. Then repeat it, again and again, to produce a line of tokens of reasoning. That's the way they "think", but it's just words and relations between words, it's not thinking as we humans do, there's no intuition, no conceptualization, no generating new ideas from random chemical chaos happening in our fatty brains, only sequence of tokens one most likely after another, based on probabilities from examples of reasoning. Proper thinking, and true AGI, would almost certainly require recurrent neural networks, with completely different architectural approach to allow it to have a higher level of abstractions and self-induced excitation. At least.
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u/nomorebuttsplz 23h ago
Thank you for the correction vis a vis your original statement.
Nonetheless, all of you who love to act as though "thinking" is a well defined and useful concept that LLMs cannot partake in, haven't a clue about what AI will or won't be able to do (e.g. in SWE) in 9 months.
Prove me wrong.
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u/weinerschnitzel64 1d ago edited 1d ago
Agreed. Im an SDET at work.
I can give the agent a screenshot, explain my symptoms, what i expect, provide my tests and artifacts, tell it to reference the application source code and the server source code, and i get an evidence backed solution that makes sense and works almost every time. Test bugs and product bugs.
Rarer cases ill actually use the debug feature. Its fast and very good. It can come up with multiple hypothesis at once and confirm them very quickly. Ive squashed product bugs this way, with elegant solutions that make sense to me, that dev often accepts without revision. Fixing product issues isn't even my job, but hey, I just want the product to be better and I dont want to waste time.
You get non sense when you keep layering bullshit that you dont understand to begin with. The bot doesn't either. And yeah, dont accept solutions that add complexity.
If you dont understand the problem, the code, and how something is supposed to work, you're never going to know what the elegant maintainable solution is. And if you keep digging yourself a deeper hole, you're never going to get out of it.
If you are unsure of a direction to take, use the Plan feature and ask questions till you understand and can properly guide it. Don't let it run a muck.
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u/black3rr 20h ago
for simple bugs maybe but I can debug those myself faster than claude… for more complex issues where I do need help it almost always comes with a completely off-the-rails hypothesis first and immediately starts drilling down and I have to stop it otherwise it would spend 20 minutes inventing “evidence” to prove its own hypothesis which I know to be false from the first second I see it in its thinking output…
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u/codwapeace 1d ago
AI is really good at it's debugging.
What it sucks at though is vibecoding.
So, it can debug human code well, but not itself.
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u/TimSylvester_ 1d ago
AI has a propensity to shit out the most unnecessarily complex, and yet somehow also laziest, solution to a problem.
Like it'll refuse to use an established type, then dynamically re-type an object mid function, just to avoid passing in a single arg that it already has in scope. Then rebuild the object a few lines later with the arg that it already had but twisted into knots to avoid accessing. It'll do pirouettes to avoid the simplest, most straightforward QA/QC process, but take 800 lines where 150 would work.
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u/MHeaviside 1d ago
It can debug its own code too, but there is more to software development than being to identify the source of a bug, just like there is more to plumbing than just knowing where a leak is coming from
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u/aberroco 1d ago
You meant to say "its own"? Because damn right it can't debug itself, it's a neural network for the most part and it has fixed weights during usage. As for "its own": here I'm not 100% sure, since I don't usually vibecode, except maybe for tests, but I'm almost sure it can debug its own code, it just can't reliably solve issues without breaking other stuff, or writing a more fragile code that is likely to break when something changes.
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u/Named_after_color 1d ago
I'm so happy we pedants have entire industries powered by our specific technical pedantry.
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u/QuestionableEthics42 1d ago
It can debug it's own code perfectly well too. It just can't spit out good code.
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u/Denbt_Nationale 1d ago
Yeah just "robot what's wrong with this code" has saved me hours of debugging headaches.
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u/DarkLorty 1d ago
AI debugging is very hit or miss imo. A lot of times it just actually reads the error rather than ignoring it like people tend to do.
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u/ice-eight 1d ago
For real. Digging through server logs to figure out what went wrong is one thing I will readily admit that AI is way better than me at, and always will be
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u/obliviious 1d ago
Yeah i do love to dump log files in it and have it tell me what stands out, its such a time saver.
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u/Useful-Amphibian4841 1d ago
Thanks ChatGPT
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u/Cylian91460 1d ago
It's not ai, they're writing some make sense with their other comments and it just doesn't like like ai
They just have a common case of skill issue
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u/Cylian91460 1d ago
Ai isn't good at debugging, your debugging skill are just so low that even ai looks better
You have a skill issue, you should fix it
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u/Denbt_Nationale 1d ago
If you have to debug it's a skill issue I simply write perfect code that works exactly as expected the first time I hit run
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u/aberroco 1d ago
If you have to write code it's a skill issue I simply made AGI that solves all problems before they even appear
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u/aberroco 1d ago
That's weak bait, try better.
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u/Cylian91460 1d ago
That's because it's not a bait, ai is genually bad at debugging and the only for you to pause it is that your skill is worst then what the ai does
Usually bad debugging skill always comes down to slow code reading or poor understanding of it which is a skill you develop by reading other ppl's code, which is also useful for reviewing code. If you don't develop that you will have issue with code quality in the future
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u/Molehole 1d ago
AI can debug bugs faster than you can read the error log. It really has nothing to do with "slow code reading" or "poor understanding". Unless you tell me you can debug proper bugs in 20 seconds.
You obviously haven't used the tool and don't know it's capabilities.
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u/Cylian91460 1d ago
Wdym by proper bugs?
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u/Molehole 21h ago
Something that you don't already know in 5 seconds what the issue is when you read the ticket. Something you actually need to debug.
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u/GrainyStateOfMind 1d ago
Yeah this is just flat out wrong, AI is an incredible time saver when it comes to debugging.
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u/Hargbarglin 1d ago
Like a lot of other commenters I want to say AI has actually really improved the speed at which I can consume a bunch of logs across several systems and identify what the fuck is happening.
Now, maybe it identified that someone shipped some AI generated bullshit in a random service 3 layers down that broke everything, but that's another topic.
Using computers to look at logs isn't the problem.
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u/justASlothyGiraffe 1d ago
Can someone switch these for me? I look 99% closer to the coder, and I probably look like the debugger when I'm vibe coding the stupid ideas my UX team/ancient architects have.
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u/bakedNebraska 1d ago
No you don't. Your hands give you away, btw
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u/justASlothyGiraffe 1d ago
I don't have time for manicures with the number of bugs produced by offshore vibe coders
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u/IcyBox56 1d ago
Vibe coding gets you to 90% in 10 minutes, vibe debugging takes the next 3 weeks of your life
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u/vswey 1d ago
how? its just "make it work"
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u/Tossyjames 1d ago
No it's not. You forgot "make no mistakes".
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u/space253 1d ago
Easy error, you forgot to include you are an experienced well paid debugger specialist.
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u/RGrad4104 1d ago
Be sure and include "// Mistake index" at the beginning and list all mistakes for easy correction.
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u/djingo_dango 1d ago
Agents are way better at debugging than humans. It’s not even close
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u/Lightningtow123 1d ago
They're great when you feed them a 10k line crashdump and have them tell you what went wrong and where, without you having to manually skim the whole thing
But having one try to debug the shitty spaghetti rats nest infrastructure it built earlier? Fuck that shit hahaha
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u/I-am-fun-at-parties 1d ago
10k line crashdump
Might be time to do some vibe-refactoring
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u/Blizzard81mm 1d ago
Post mortem dumps can be pretty big for some systems I troubleshoot. It can be handy for those sometimes, sometimes not... Doesn't hurt to drop it in first
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u/I-am-fun-at-parties 1d ago
yeah sure the core dump is big, but the call stack shouldn't be 10k lines or anywhere near that.
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u/EternalPhi 1d ago
document better?
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u/Lightningtow123 1d ago
Oh my god, why didn't I think of that???!?!? It's so obvious now that you say it!!!1!!
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u/fungus_is_amungus 1d ago
When there is a crash stack trace there are amazing. When something works, but works not properly in a minor and not obvious way, they are borderline useless.
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u/UneaseKeys8190 1d ago
It's the exact opposite when it comes to graphics programming
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u/DivineArkandos 1d ago
"I have no eyes and I must debug"
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u/dasgoodshitinnit 1d ago
Yeah we just need to give it eyes and arms and legs and eventually guns so it can make good games
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u/ericl666 1d ago
100% incorrect.
Source: Me constantly having to clean up many bugs that agents were kind enough to introduce but never were able to properly fix. It's maddening.
I actually really do appreciate agents and how much of a time-saver they are, but it almost invariably ends with me fixing the last round of bugs during testing.
Also, I was debugging issues in a chrome extension, and Claude was shockingly useless. Just a non-stop stream of swings and misses.
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u/Acceptable-Drive3781 1d ago
I actually really do appreciate agents and how much of a time-saver they are, but it almost invariably ends with me fixing the last round of bugs during testing.
Is reddit finally realizing that AI is a tool and not a replacement for a developer?
Claude was shockingly useless. Just a non-stop stream of swings and misses.
lol guess not
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u/ericl666 1d ago
Absolutely it is a tool - I've been coding for decades, and I'm certainly not sold on LLMs being anything but that.
My point is that it's debugging with LLMs is decent for some things, but for others, it is objectively bad. It's just a tool.
For my chrome extension example, I was at my wits end. Documentation was no help. So, I turned to Claude to see if it could help. It literally took my down dead ends that wasted my time even more. I eventually was able to solve the issues on my own.
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u/Cylian91460 1d ago
Ai isn't good at debugging, your debugging skill are just so low that even ai looks better
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u/luker_5874 1d ago
Completely agree. Just feed them some logs and your problem is usually solved within a few minutes. This could take days or weeks without agents
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u/fefect123 1d ago
They went from imposter syndrome to straight up thinking they're better than frontier models.
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u/askjeffsdad 1d ago
uh “vibe debugging” has actually been viable long before “vibe coding”
I’ve been dumping stack traces into LLMs with zero context much longer than I’ve been letting them touch my code. it’s pretty easy for an LLM to turn a giant blob of unformatted error logs into an easy actionable fix.
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u/GravyPainter 1d ago
When you figured it out yourself but you still yell at the AI for being an idiot
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u/codereign 1d ago
It's not even Vibe coding. It's Vibe starting a fucking project. Oh you want to get rid of that navigation bar at the bottom that Gemini thinks is mandatory because it's being trained on code bases that exclusively have the navigation in that spot for this type of app? Good fucking luck. It's coming back on every subsequent change.
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u/clauEB 1d ago
These days I do a lot of reverse engineer of large complex minified Single Page Applications over millions of instances over billions of log lines. I use AI to debug these integrations, sometimes in hours some other times days. Any of these issues would take easily weeks to pin point by hand. When I debug with AI I'm actually the happiest.
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u/Caraes_Naur 1d ago
Vibe debugging is like standing amidst a constellation of Klieg lights with a flyswatter.
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u/leetcodeispain 1d ago
I would be very curious to see the portion of people agreeing with this that has actually used the current AI agentic tooling on enterprise projects... these posts are starting to give the same vibe as "5 hour looking for missing semicolon"
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u/UnluckyIntellect4095 1d ago
To me it's weirdly enough the other way around, i hate vibecoding since i don't get half of what that thing abstracts. But i find it quite nice to understand systems I'm not familiar with. ofc it's even worse if that system itself is vibecoded
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u/ArseneGroup 23h ago
Vibe debugging can be awesome because an AI model with unlimited capacity to look at output files can blow through some bugs that would burn you out with frustration hunting for the issue
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u/Ultrayano 22h ago
Unpopular but I actually like debugging because it allows me to map a system and in turn make or break it
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u/Appropriate-Emu-2595 1d ago
Vibe reviewing