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After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

atmoio.substack.com

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Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#51

Post by ChicagoDave »

Everything the OP says can be true, but there’s a tipping point where you learn to break through the cruft and generate good code at scale.

It requires refactoring at scale, but GenAI is fast so hitting the same code 25 times isn’t a dealbreaker.

Eventually the refactoring is targeted at smaller and smaller bits until the entire project is in excellent shape.

I’m still working on Sharpee, an interactive fiction authoring platform, but it’s fairly well-baked at this point and 99% coded by Claude and 100% managed by me.

Sharpee is a complex system and a lot of the inner-workings (stdlib) were like coats of paint. It didn’t shine until it was refactored at least a dozen times.

It has over a thousand unit tests, which I’ve read through and refactored by hand in some cases.

The results speak for themselves.

https://sharpee.net/ https://github.com/chicagodave/sharpee/

It’s still in beta, but not far from release status.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#52

Post by mrtesthah »

ncruces wrote: post #42

> The AI had simply told me a good story. Like vibewriting a novel, the agent showed me a good couple paragraphs that sure enough made sense and were structurally and syntactically correct. Hell, it even picked up on the idiosyncrasies of the various characters. But for whatever reason, when you read the whole chapter, it’s a mess. It makes no sense in the overall context of the book and the preceding and proceeding…

I wrote this a day ago but I find it even more relevant to your observation:

—

I would never use, let alone pay for, a fully vibe-coded app whose implementation no human understands.

Whether you’re reading a book or using an app, you’re communicating with the author by way of your shared humanity in how they anticipate what you’re thinking as you explore the work. The author incorporates and plans for those predicted reactions and thoughts where it makes sense. Ultimately the author is conveying an implicit mental model (or even evoking emotional states or sensations) to the reader.

The first problem is that many of these pathways and edge cases aren’t apparent until the actual implementation, and sometimes in the process the author realizes that the overall product would work better if it were re-specified from the start. This opportunity is lost without a hands on approach.

The second problem is that, the less human touch is there, the less consistent the mental model conveyed to the user is going to be, because a specification and collection of prompts does not constitute a mental model. This can create subconscious confusion and cognitive friction when interacting with the work.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#53

Post by fsloth »

ncruces wrote: post #42

> The AI had simply told me a good story. Like vibewriting a novel, the agent showed me a good couple paragraphs that sure enough made sense and were structurally and syntactically correct. Hell, it even picked up on the idiosyncrasies of the various characters. But for whatever reason, when you read the whole chapter, it’s a mess. It makes no sense in the overall context of the book and the preceding and proceeding…

"So why do you think a 10 kLoC vibecoded codebase will be any good engineering-wise?"

I've been coding a side-project for a year with full LLM assistance (the project is quite a bit older than that).

Basically I spent over a decade developing CAD software at Trimble and now have pivoted to a different role and different company. So like an addict, I of course wanted to continue developing CAD technology.

I pretty much know how CAD software is supposed to work. But it's _a lot of work_ to put together. With LLMs I can basically speedrun through my requirements that require tons of boilerplate.

The velocity is incredible compared to if I would be doing this by hand.

Sometimes the LLM outputs total garbage. Then you don't accept the output, and start again.

The hardest parts are never coding but design. The engineer does the design. Sometimes I pain weeks or months over a difficult detail (it's a sideproject, I have a family etc). Once the design is crystal clear, it's fairly obvious if the LLM output is aligned with the design or not. Once I have good design, I can just start the feature / boilerplate speedrun.

If you have a Windows box you can try my current public alpha. The bugs are on me, not on the LLM:

https://github.com/AdaShape/adashape-open-testing/releases/t...

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#54

Post by ozten »

rtp4me wrote: post #40

I never trust the opinion of a single LLM model anymore - especially for more complex projects. I have seen Claude guarantee something is correct and then immediately apologize when I feed a critical review by Codex or Gemini. And, many times, the issues are not minor but are significant critical oversights by Claude. My habit now: always get a 2nd or 3rd opinion before assuming one LLM is correct.

It doesn’t have to be different foundation models. As long as the temperature is up, as the same model 100 times.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#55

Post by skerit »

simonw wrote: post #9

> Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. That's your job. The great thing about coding agents is that you can tell them "change of design: all API interactions need to go through a new single class that does authentication and retries and rate-limit throttl…

The article said:

> So I’m back to writing by hand for most things. Amazingly, I’m faster, more accurate, more creative, more productive, and more efficient than AI, when you price everything in, and not just code tokens per hour

At least he said "most things". I also did "most things" by hand, until Opus 4.5 came out. Now it's doing things in hours I would have worked an entire week on. But it's not a prompt-and-forget kind of thing, it needs hand holding.

Also, I have no idea _what_ agent he was using. OpenAI, Gemini, Claude, something local? And with a subscription, or paying by the token?

Because the way I'm using it, this only pays off because it's the 200$ Claude Max subscription. If I had to pay for the token (which once again: are hugely marked up), I would have been bankrupt.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#57

Post by techblueberry »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #43
recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

What you as a teacher teach might have to adapt a bit. Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code. Most academic computer scientists aren't necessarily very skilled as programmers in any case. At least, I learned most of that after I stopped being an academic myself (Ph. D. and all). This is OK. Learning to program is more of a side effect of studying computer science than it is a core goal (…

> The point of this analogy: compilers are important tools. It's more important to understand how they work than it is to be able to build one in assembler. You'll probably never do that. Most people never work on compilers. Nor do they build their own operating systems, databases, etc. But it helps to understand how they work. The point of teaching how compilers work is understanding how programming languages are created and what their limitations are.

I don't know that it's all these things at once, but most people I know that are good have done a bunch of spikes / side projects that go a level lower than they have to. Intense curiosity is good, and to the point your making, most people don't really learn this stuff just by reading or doing flash cards. If you want to really learn how a compiler works, you probably do have to write a compiler. Not a full-on production ready compiler, but hands on keyboard typing and interacting with and troubleshooting code.

Or maybe to put another way, it's probably the "easiest" way, even though it's the "hardest" way. Or maybe it's the only way. Everything I know how to do well, I know how to do well from practice and repitition.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#60

Post by couchdb_ouchdb »

Good luck finding an employer that lets you do this moving forward. The new reality is that no one can give the estimates they previously gave for tasks. \

"Amazingly, I’m faster, more accurate, more creative, more productive, and more efficient than AI, when you price everything in, and not just code tokens per hour."

For 99.99% of developers this just won't be true.

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