I don't get what everyone sees in this post. It is just a sloppy rant. It just talks in generalities. There is no coherent argument, there are no examples, and we don't even know the problem space in which the author had bad coding assistant experience.
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
#172Karpathy 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 ??
I have only ever successfully tried "vibe coding", as Kaparathy describes it, once, soon after VS Code Copilot added the chat feature, but timestamps tell that was in November 2023. So two years is quite realistic.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#173Earlier quoted context omitted.
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)
At my last job we had the power taken out by a backhoe. It was loaded onto a trailer and either the operator forgot to lower the bucket, or the driver drove away before he had time to lower it.
Regardless of whose fault it was, the end result was the bucket snagged the power lines going into the datacentre and caused an outage.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#174Earlier quoted context omitted.
I believe Anthropic is already doing Level 3 vibe coding for >90% of their code.
They have not said that. They've only said that most of their code is written by Claude. That is different than "vibe coding". If competent engineers review the code then it is little different than any coding.
IIRC, the Claude Code creator mentioned that all the PRs are reviewed by humans, just like normal human PRs. So yes, humans still look at the code at the review stage. Though I still consider this to be level 3, but anyway, this is just a matter of definition.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#175How were you "vibe coding" 2 years ago?
There's been such a massive leap in capabilities since claude code came out, which was middle/end of 2025.
2 years ago I MAYBE used an LLM to take unstructured data and give me a json object of a specific structure. Only about 1 year ago did I start using llms for ANY type of coding and I would generally use snippets, not whole codebases. It wasn't until September when I started really leveraging the LLM for coding.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#176Earlier 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…
You should worry about code quality, but you should also worry about the return on investment.
That includes understanding risk management and knowing what the risks and costs are of failures vs. the costs of delivering higher quality.
Engineering is about making the right tradeoffs given the constraints set, not about building the best possible product separate from the constraints.
Sometimes those constraints requires extreme quality, because it includes things like "this should never, ever fail", but most of the time it does not.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#177AI 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 not so sure. I spent A LOT of time writing sorting algo code by hand in university. I spent so much time writing assembly code by hand. So much more time writing instructions for MIPS by hand. (To be fair I did study EE not CS) I learned more about programming in a weekend badly copying hack modules for Minecraft than I learned in 5+ years in university. All that stuff I did by hand back then I haven't used it a…
You didn't write sorting code or assembly code because you were going to need to write it on the job. It gave you a grounding for how datastructures and computers work on a fundamental level. That intuition is what makes picking up minecraft hack mods much easier.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#178AI 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'…
When learning basic math, you shouldn't use a calculator, because otherwise you aren't really understanding how it works. Later, when learning advanced math, you can use calculators, because you're focusing on a different abstraction level. I see the two situations as very similar.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#179I like to use AI to write code for me, but I like to take it one step at a time, looking at what it puts out and thinking about if it puts out what I want it to put out.
As a PRODUCT person, it writes code 100x faster than I can, and I treat anything it writes as a "throwaway" prototype. I've never been able to treat my own code as throwaway, because I can't just throw away multiple weeks of work.
It doesn't aid in my learning to code, but it does aid in me putting out much better, much more polished work that I'm excited to use.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#180AI 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'…
Similarly, it's always been the case that copy-pasting code out of a tutorial doesn't teach you as much much as manually typing it out, even if you don't change it. That part of the problem isn't even new.