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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

#131

Post by PKop »

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…

> I want to make things

You need to be strong to do so. Things of any quality or value at least.

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

#132

Post by lostdog »

stackedinserter wrote: post #114
burkaman wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

We begin teaching math by having students solve problems that are trivial for a calculator.

Though I also wonder what advanced CS classes should look like. If they agent can code nearly anything, what project would challenge student+agent and teach the student how to accomplish CS fundamentals with modern tools.

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

#133

Post by andai »

gowld wrote: post #125
xcodevn wrote: post #107

My observation is that vibe-coded applications are significantly lower quality than traditional software. Anthropic software (which they claim to be 90% vibe coded) is extremely buggy, especially the UI.

That's a misunderstanding based on loose definition of "vibe coding". When companies threw around the "90% of code is written by AI" claims, they were referring to counting characers of autocomplete basing on users actually typing code (most of which was eequivalent to "AI generated" code by Eclipse tab-completion decade ago), and sometimes writing hyperlocal prompts for a single method. We can identify 3 levels of "…

I mostly work at level 2, and I call it "power coding", like power armor, or power tools. Your will and your hand still guides the process continuously. But now your force is greatly multiplied.

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

#134

Post by bambax »

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…

> That being said. I have no idea how you'd actually go about teaching students CS these days, considering a lot of them will probably use ChatGPT or Claude regardless of what you do.

My son is in a CS school in France. They have finals with pen and paper, with no computer whatsoever during the exam; if they can't do that they fail. And these aren't multiple choice questions, but actual code that they have to write.

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

#135

Post by thunspa »

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…

I work in Python as well and find Claude quite poor at writing proper tests, might be using it wrong. Just last week, I asked Opus to create a small integration test (with pre-existing examples) and it tried to create a 200-line file with 20 tests I didn't ask for.

I am not sure why, but it kept trying to do that, although I made several attempts.

Ended up writing it on my own, very odd. This was in Cursor, however.

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

#136

Post by pmontra »

In my experience it's great a writing sample code or solving obscure problems that would have been hard to google a solution for. However it fails sometimes and it can't get past some block, but neither can I unless I work hard at it.

Examples.

Thanks to Claude I've finally been able to disable the ssh subsystem of the GNOME keyring infrastructure that opens a modal window asking for ssh passhprases. What happened is that I always had to cancel the modal, look for the passhprase in my password manager, restart what made the modal open. What I have now is either a password prompt inside a terminal or a non modal dialog. Both ssh-add to a ssh agent.

However my new emacs windows still open in an about 100x100 px window on my new Debian 13 install, nothing suggested by Claude works. I'll have to dig into it but I'm not sure that's important enough. I usually don't create new windows after emacs starts with the saved desktop configuration.

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

#138

Post by raphinou »

I use ai to develop, but at every code review I find stuff to be corrected, which motivates me to continuing the reviews. It's still a win I think though. I've incrementally increased my use of ai in development [1], but I'm at a plateau now I think. I don't plan to go over to complete vibe coding for anything serious or to be maintained.

1: https://asfaload.com/blog/ai_use/

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

#139

Post by rahimnathwani »

andai wrote: post #118
rahimnathwani wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

For one novel, I gave the model a sentence about the idea, and the names and a few words about each of the characters.

For the other, my son wrote ~200 words total describing the story idea and the characters.

In each case, the model created the detailed outline and did all the writing.

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

#140

Post by aaronbrethorst »

thesz wrote: post #85
frankc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Dad needs to respect that we need rest days.
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