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

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

#111

Post by bluGill »

burkaman wrote: post #88
hyperpape wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

A forklift can do things no human can. I've used a forklift for things that no group of humans could - you can't physically get enough humans around that size object to lift it. (of course levers would change this)

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

#112

Post by andai »

It probably depends on what you're doing, but my use case is simple straightforward code with minimal abstraction.

I have to go out of my way to get this out of llms. But with enough persuasion, they produce roughly what I would have written myself.

Otherwise they default to adding as much bloat and abstraction as possible. This appears to be the default mode of operation in the training set.

I also prefer to use it interactively. I divide the problem to chunks. I get it to write each chunk. The whole makes sense. Work with its strengths and weaknesses rather than against them.

For interactive use I have found smaller models to be better than bigger models. First of all because they are much faster. And second because, my philosophy now is to use the smallest model that does the job. Everything else by definition is unnecessarily slow and expensive!

But there is a qualitative difference at a certain level of speed, where something goes from not interactive to interactive. Then you can actually stay in flow, and then you can actually stay consciously engaged.

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

#113

Post by rahimnathwani »

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…

  Have you ever read a 200 page vibewritten novel and found it satisfying?
I haven't, but my son has. For two separate novels authored by GPT 4.5.

(The model was asked to generate a chapter at a time. At each step, it was given the full outline of the novel, the characters, and a summary of each chapter so far.)

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

#114

Post by stackedinserter »

burkaman wrote: post #93
stackedinserter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.

I kinda get the point, but why is that? The goal of school is to teach something that's applicable in industry or academia.

Forklift operators don't lift things in their training. Even CS students start with pretty high level of abstraction, very few start from x86 asm instructions.

We need to make them implement ALU's on logical gates and wires if we want them to lift heavy things.

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

#115

Post by TeMPOraL »

_flux wrote: post #89
hyperpape wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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..

That's true of exercise in general. It's bullshit make-work we do to stay fit, because we've decoupled individual survival from hard physical labor, so it doesn't happen "by itself" anymore. A blessing and a curse.

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

#116

Post by bluGill »

burkaman wrote: post #93
stackedinserter wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yes but the goal of school is to lift heavy things, basically. You're trying to do things that are difficult (for you) but don't produce anything useful for anyone else. That's how you gain the ability to do useful things.

Even after school, you need to lift weights once in a while or you lose your ability.

I wouldn't want to write raw bytes like Mel did though. Eventually some things are not worth getting good at.

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

#117

Post by [deleted] »

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'…

[deleted]

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

#118

Post by andai »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #113
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…

Have you ever read a 200 page vibewritten novel and found it satisfying? I haven't, but my son has. For two separate novels authored by GPT 4.5. (The model was asked to generate a chapter at a time. At each step, it was given the full outline of the novel, the characters, and a summary of each chapter so far.)

Interesting. I heard that model was significantly better than what we ended up with (at least for writing), and they shut it down because it was huge and expensive.

Did the model also come up with the idea for the novel, the characters, the outline?

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

#120

Post by pjc50 »

treetalker wrote: post #97
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…

Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid, expose millions to fraud and theft, put innocent people in prison, or jeopardize the institutions of government. There is more than one kind of leverage at play here.

> Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid

That's the job of the backhoe.

(this is a joke about how diggers have caused quite a lot of local internet outages by hitting cables, sometimes supposedly "redundant" cables that were routed in the same conduit. Hitting power infrastructure is rare but does happen)

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