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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

#61

Post by SoftTalker »

Quothling wrote: post #25
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'…

I'm an external examiner for CS students in Denmark and I disagree with you. What we need in the industry is software engineers who can think for themselves, can interact with the business and understand it's needs, and, they need to know how computers work. What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them. I don't partic…

What is an "external examiner?"

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

#63

Post by rpigab »

timcobb wrote: post #2

I'm impressed that this person has been vibecoding longer than vibecoding has been a thing. A real trailblazer!

It seems the term has been introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025, so yes, but very often, people say "vibe coding" when they mean "heavily (or totally) LLM-assisted coding", which is not synonymous, but sounds better to them.

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

#64

Post by jrm4 »

orev wrote: post #27
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'…

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

I like this analogy along with the idea that "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit."

Here's the thing -- I don't care about "getting stronger." I want to make things, and now I can make bigger things WAY faster because I have a mech suit.

edit: and to stretch the analogy, I don't believe much is lost "intellectually" by my use of a mech suit, as long as I observe carefully. Me doing things by hand is probably overrated.

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

#65

Post by Mashimo »

timcobb wrote: post #32
Mashimo wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is Claude through Github Copilot THAT much worse? I know there are differences, but I don't find it to be obstructing my vibe coding.

I haven't tried it since 9-12 months ago. At the time it was really bad and I had a lot more success copy/pasting from web interfaces. Is it better now? Can you agentic code with it? How's the autocomplete?

Yes, I vibecoded small personal apps from start to finish with it. Planning mode, edit mode, mcp, tool calling, web searches. Can easily switch between Gemini, ChatGPT, Grok or Claude within the same conversation. I think multiple agents work, though not sure.

All under one subscription.

Does not support upload / reading of PDF files :(

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

#66

Post by moritzruth »

DHPersonal wrote: post #45
jillesvangurp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 (…

I only learn when I do things, not when I hear how they work. I think the teacher has the right idea.

Yes, I do too, but the point they were trying to make is that "learning how to write code" is not the point of CS education, but only a side effect.

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

#68

Post by criddell »

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'…

They don't always do the simple things well which is even more frustrating.

I do Windows development and GDI stuff still confuses me. I'm talking about memory DC, compatible DC, DIB, DDB, DIBSECTION, bitblt, setdibits, etc... AIs also suck at this stuff. I'll ask for help with a relatively straightforward task and it almost always produces code that when you ask it to defend the choices it made, it finds problems, apologizes, and goes in circles. One AI (I forget which) actually told me I should refer to Petzold's Windows Programming book because it was unable to help me further.

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

#69

Post by pitched »

candiddevmike wrote: post #36
Quothling wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an external examiner for CS students in Denmark and I disagree with you. What we need in the industry is software engineers who can think for themselves, can interact with the business and understand it's needs, and, they need to know how computers work. What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them. I don't partic…

> I'm an external examiner for CS students > Hell, I'd even like developers who will know when the code quality doesn't matter because shitty code will cost $2 a year but every hour they spend on it is $100-200. > Except most of the actual computer science parts are gone, replaced with even more OOP, design pattern bullshit. Maybe you should consider a different career, you sound pretty burnt out. There are terrible…

It can take some people a few years to get over OOP, in the same way that some kids still believe in Santa a bit longer. Keep at it though and you’ll make it there eventually too.

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

#70

Post by disgruntledphd2 »

simonw wrote: post #22
disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> (And the automated test suite will help them confirm that the refactoring worked properly, because naturally you had them construct an automated test suite when they built those original features, right?) I dunno, maybe I have high standards but I generally find that the test suites generated by LLMs are both over and under determined. Over-determined in the sense that some of the tests are focused on implementatio…

I work in Python which helps a lot because there are a TON of good examples of pytest tests floating around in the training data, including things like usage of fixture libraries for mocking external HTTP APIs and snapshot testing and other neat patterns. Or I can say "use pytest-httpx to mock the endpoints" and Claude knows what I mean. Keeping an eye on the tests is important. The most common anti-pattern I see is…

> Generally though the best way to get good tests out of a coding agent is to make sure it's working in a project with an existing test suite that uses good patterns. Coding agents pick the existing patterns up without needing any extra prompting at all.

Yeah, this is where I too have seen better results. The worse ones have been in places where it was greenfield and I didn't have an amazing idea of how to write tests (a data person working on a django app).

Thanks for the information, that's super helpful!

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