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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

#81

Post by jv22222 »

reedf1 wrote: post #74

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 ??

Very good point. Also, What the OP describes is something I went through in the first few months of coding with AI. I pushed passed “the code looks good but it’s crap” phase and now it’s working great. I’ve found the fix is to work with it during research/planning phase and get it to layout all its proposed changes and push back on the shit. Once you have a research doc that looks good end to end then hit “go”.

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

#82

Post by yourapostasy »

Mashimo wrote: post #21
timcobb wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At the earliest, "vibecoding" was only possible with Claude 3.5, released July 2024 ... maaaybe Claude 3, released in March of that year... It's worth mentioning that even today, Copilot is an underwhelming-to-the-point-obstructing kind of product. Microsoft sent salespeople and instructors to my job, all for naught. Copilot is a great example of how product > everything, and if you don't have a good product... well.…

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.

In the enterprise deployments of GitHub Copilot I've seen at my clients that authenticate over SSO (typically OIDC with OAuth 2.0), connecting Copilot to anything outside of what Microsoft has integrated means reverse engineering the closed authentication interface. I've yet to run across someone's enterprise Github Copilot where the management and administrators have enabled the integration (the sites have enabled access to Anthropic models within the Copilot interface, but not authorized the integration to Claude Code, Opencode, or similar LLM coding orchestration tooling with that closed authentication interface).

While this is likely feasible, I imagine it is also an instant fireable offense at these sites if not already explicitly directed by management. Also not sure how Microsoft would react upon finding out (never seen the enterprise licensing agreement paperwork for these setups). Someone's account driving Claude Code via Github Copilot will also become a far outlier of token consumption by an order(s) of magnitude, making them easy to spot, compared to their coworkers who are limited to the conventional chat and code completion interfaces.

If someone has gotten the enterprise Github Copilot integration to work with something like Claude Code though (simply to gain access to the models Copilot makes available under the enterprise agreement, in a blessed golden path by the enterprise), then I'd really like to know how that was done on both the non-technical and technical angles, because when I briefly looked into it all I saw were very thorny, time-consuming issues to untangle.

Outside those environments, there are lots of options to consume Claude Code via Github Copilot like with Visual Studio Code extensions. So much smaller companies and individuals seem to be at the forefront of adoption for now. I'm sure this picture will improve, but the rapid rate of change in the field means those whose work environment is like those enterprise constrained ones I described but also who don't experiment on their own will be quite behind the industry leading edge by the time it is all sorted out in the enterprise context.

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

#83

Post by bschmidt800 »

reedf1 wrote: post #74

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 ??

[dead]

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

#84

Post by dfajgljsldkjag »

reedf1 wrote: post #74

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 ??

The term was coined then, but people have been doing it with claude code and cursor and copilot and other tools for longer. They just didn't have a word for it yet.

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

#85

Post by thesz »

frankc wrote: post #46
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 think this is a pretty solid analogy but I look at the metaphor this way - people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor. Because we invented things like the forklift we had to invent things like weightlifting to get strong instead. You can still get strong, you just need to be more deliberate about it. It doesn't mean shouldn't also use a forklift, which is its own distinct skill you al…

Weightlifting and weight training was invented long before forklifts. Even levers were not properly understood back then.

My favorite historic example of typical modern hypertrophy-specific training is the training of Milo of Croton [1]. By legend, his father gifted him with the calf and asked daily "what is your calf, how does it do? bring it here to look at him" which Milo did. As calf's weight grew, so did Milo's strength.

This is application of external resistance (calf) and progressive overload (growing calf) principles at work.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milo_of_Croton

Milo lived before Archimedes.

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

#86

Post by ChicagoDave »

ChicagoDave wrote: post #51

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 autho…

When using GenAI (and not), enforcing guardrails is critical. Documenting decisions is critical.

Sharpee’s success is rooted in this and its recorded:

https://github.com/ChicagoDave/sharpee/tree/main/docs/archit...

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

#87

Post by peacebeard »

acedTrex wrote: post #6
mettamage wrote: post #5

> In retrospect, it made sense. Agents write units of changes that look good in isolation. They are consistent with themselves and your prompt. But respect for the whole, there is not. Respect for structural integrity there is not. Respect even for neighboring patterns there was not. Well yea, but you can guard against this in several ways. My way is to understand my own codebase and look at the output of the LLM. LL…

> My way is to understand my own codebase and look at the output of the LLM. Then you are not vibe coding. The core, almost exclusive requirement for "vibe coding" is that you DON'T look at the code. Only the product outcome.

This seems to be a major source of confusion in these conversations. People do not seem to agree on the definition of vibe coding. A lot of debates seem to be between people who are using the term because it sounds cool and people who have defined it specifically to only include irresponsible tool use, then they get into a debate about if the person was being irresponsible or not. It’s not useful to have that debate based on the label rather than the particulars.

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

#88

Post by burkaman »

hyperpape wrote: post #76
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…

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.

I think it's a good analogy. A forklift is a useful tool and objectively better than humans for some tasks, but if you've never developed your muscles because you use the forklift every time you go to the gym, then when you need to carry a couch up the stairs you'll find that you can't do it and the forklift can't either.

So the idea is that you should learn to do things by hand first, and then use the powerful tools once you're knowledgeable enough to know when they make sense. If you start out with the powerful tools, then you'll never learn enough to take over when they fail.

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

#89

Post by _flux »

hyperpape wrote: post #76
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…

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.

You're making the analogy work: because the point of weightlifting as a sport or exercise is to not to actually move the weights, but condition your body such that it can move the weights.

Indeed, usually after doing weightlifting, you return the weights to the place where you originally took them from, so I suppose that means you did no work at in the first place..

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

#90

Post by QuadmasterXLII »

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 (…

When I did a CS major, there was a semester of C, a semester of assembly, a semester of building a verilog CPU, etc. I’d be shocked if an optimal CS education involved vibecoding these courses to any significant
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