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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

#71

Post by [deleted] »

freedomben wrote: post #47
ap99 wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's your job. Exactly. AI assisted development isn't all or nothing. We as a group and as individuals need to figure out the right blend of AI and human.

Seriously. I've known for a very long time that our community has a serious problem with binary thinking, but AI has done more to reinforce that than anything I can think of in modern memory. Nearly every discussion I get into about AI is dead out of the gate because at least one person in the conversation has a binary view that it's either handwritten or vibe coded. They have an insanely difficult time imagining any…

[deleted]

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

#72

Post by TrackerFF »

I wish more critics would start to showcase examples of code slop. I'm not saying this because I defend the use of AI-coding, but rather because many junior devs. that read these types articles/blog posts may not know what slop is, or what it looks like. Simply put, you don't know what you don't know.

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

#73

Post by pitched »

lucianbr wrote: post #50
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 What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them.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 don't particularily care if people can write code like they work at the assembly line. I care [...] That they can deliver business value quickly. In my experience, people who talk about business value expect people to code like they work at the assembly line. Churn out features, no disturbances, no worrying about code quality, abstractions, bla bla. To me, your comment reads contradictory. You want initiative, an…

I think we very often confuse engineers with scientists in this field. Think of the old joke: “anyone can build a bridge, it takes an Engineer to build one that barely stands”. Business value and the goal of engineering is to make a bridge that is fast to build, cheap to make, and stays standing exactly as long as it needs to. This is very different from the goals of science which are to test the absolute limits of known performance.

What I read from GP is that they’re looking for engineering innovation, not new science. I don’t see it as contradictory at all.

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

#74

Post by reedf1 »

Karpathy coined the term vibecoding 11 months ago (https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383). It caused quite a stir - because not only was it was a radically new concept, but fully agentic coding had only become recently possible. You've been vibe coding for two years??

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

#75

Post by touristtam »

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #12
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…

> (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…

Embrace TDD? Write those tests and tell the agent to write the subject under test?

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

#76

Post by hyperpape »

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…

How seriously do you mean the analogy?

I think forklifts probably carry more weight over longer distances than people do (though I could be wrong, 8 billion humans carrying small weights might add up).

Certainly forklifts have more weight * distance when you restrict to objects that are over 100 pounds, and that seems like a good decision.

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

#77

Post by stackedinserter »

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…

Unlike weightlifting, the main goal of our jobs is not to lift heavy things, but develop a product that adds value to its users.

Unfortunately, many sdevs don't understand it.

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

#78

Post by steviedotboston »

mossTechnician wrote: post #4
timcobb wrote: post #2

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

GitHub copilot was released in 2021, and Cursor was released around October 2023[0]. [0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37888477

was github copilot LLM based in 2021? I thought the first version was something more rudimentary

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

#79

Post by quinnjh »

jrm4 wrote: post #64
orev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 probab…

This analogy works pretty well. Too much time doing everything in it and your muscles will atrophy. Some edge cases will be better if you jump out and use your hands.

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

#80

Post by causal »

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 like this way of framing the problem, and it might even be a good way to self-evaluate your use of AI: Try vibe-writing a novel and see how coherent it is.

I suspect part of the reason we see such a wide range of testimonies about vibe-coding is some people are actually better at it, and it would be useful to have some way of measuring that effectiveness.

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