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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

#211
post #175

How 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 starte…

GitHub Copilot came out with AI autocomplete 2-3 years ago I believe.

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

#212
post #128

I'm flabbergasted why anyone would voluntarily vibe code anything. For me, software engineering is a craft. You're supposed to enjoy building it. You should want to do it yourself.

Do you honestly get satisfaction out of writing code that you've written dozens of times in your career? Does writing yet another REST client endpoint fill you with satisfaction? Software is my passion, but I want to write code where I can add the maximum value. I add more value by using my experience solving new problems that rehashing code I've written before. Using GenAI as a helper tool allows me to quickly write…

Sounds like eventually we will end up in a situations where engineers/developers will end up on an AI spectrum:

- No ai engineers - Minimal AI autocomplete engineers - Simple agentic developers - Vibe coders who review code they get - Complete YOLO vibe coders who have no clue how their "apps" work

And that spectrum will also correlate to the skill level in engineering: from people who understand what they are doing and what their code is doing - to people who have lost (or never even had) software engineering skills and who only know how to count lines of code and write .md files.

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

#213
post #175

How 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 starte…

Vibe coding was coined less than a year ago:

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

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

#214
post #175

How 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 starte…

I started doing it as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 was out. “Given this file tree and this method signature, implement the method”. The context was only 8k so you had to function by function. About two editor screens worth at a time.

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

#215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had my first interview last week where I finally saw this in the wild. It was a student applying for an internship. It was the strangest interview. They had excellent textbook knowledge. They could tell you the space and time complexities of any data structure, but they couldn't explain anything about code they'd written or how it worked. After many painful and confusing minutes of trying to get them to explain, li…

Lots of theory but no practice.

More like using a calculator but not being able to explain how to do the calculation by hand. A probabilistic calculator which is sometimes wrong at that. The "lots of theory but no practice" has always been true for a majority of graduates in my experience.

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

#216
post #95

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'…

As a teacher, do you have any techniques to make sure students learn to write the code?

If I was a prof, I would make it clear to the students that they won't learn to program if they use AI to do it for them. For the students who wanted to learn, great! For those who just wanted to slide through with AI, I wouldn't care about them.

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

#217
post #175

How 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 starte…

Vibe coding was coined less than a year ago: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

To a describe a thing people had been doing since LLMs became available.

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

#218
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…

The "vibe coding" term is causing a lot of brain rot.

Because when I see people that are downplaying LLMs or the people describing their poor experiences it feels like they're trying to "vibe code" but they expect the LLM to automatically do EVERYTHING. They take it as a failure that they have to tell the LLM explicitly to do something a couple times. Or they take it as a problem that the LLM didn't "one shot" something.

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

#219
I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The article starts with:

> you give it a simple task. You’re impressed. So you give it a large task. You’re even more impressed.

That has _never_ been the story for me. I've tried, and I've got some good pointers and hints where to go and what to try, a result of LLM's extensive if shallow reading, but in the sense of concrete problem solving or code/script writing, I'm _always_ disappointed. I've never gotten satisfactory code/script result from them without a tremendous amount of pushback, "do this part again with ...", do that, don't do that.

Maybe I'm just a crank with too many preferences. But I hardly believe so. The minimum requirement should be for the code to work. It often doesn't. Feedback helps, right. But if you've got a problem where a simple, contained feedback loop isn't that easy to build, the only source of feedback is yourself. And that's when you are exposed to the stupidity of current AI models.

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

#220

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding was coined less than a year ago: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

To a describe a thing people had been doing since LLMs became available.

No. That’s why he called it “a new kind of coding”.
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