the quality of produced code and the medium
If the observed behavior of the software is good, then the software is good. If a bug, of whatever kind, can be fixed by a model on a vibe-coded codebase, then that's a fixable bug. If there are no exploitable vulnerabilities, then the code is secure. If the performance is adequate, then the code is performant.
It simply does not matter what the code looks like if, from the outside, it does what its supposed to, and, from the inside, a model can fix the issue if one is found.
More than ever, software engineering is now really a job about making sure the code is doing what its supposed to.
And even if it DOES matter what the code looks like, you can have a model fix that too.
The thing is that a lot of code rely on multiple layers of abstractions with their own correctness and failure states. And then you overlay the domain correctness and failure cases on top of that.
But all of those correctness are imaginary. The hardware only enforce a few (and it may be buggy). The OS adds some more (and it’s buggy). The compiler/interpreter may have bugs (but that’s rarely a nuisance) and the libraries are often brittle. There are cracks everywhere in the tower of abstractions.
The code has never mattered. What has always mattered is the knowledge of what is the model of correctness of the software (programming as a theory by NauR), so that you can discern where a program is wrong.
The thing is a crash or some other immediate errors are actually nice to have. You get to react immediately and can have a core dump or a stacktrace that points you the error. What is truly a terror is silent corruption (wrong order of operations, wrong values for a comparison that has expanded the idea of correctness, security issues that has been backdoored for years,…).
As Hoare said:
LLM are very much the second kind. You write a lot of complicated code, and then you can no longer reason about their correctness.> There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult.
That is so real. Brilliant !