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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

#221

Post by specproc »

quinnjh wrote: post #79
jrm4 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This analogy works pretty well. Too much time doing everything in it and your muscles will atrophy. Some edge cases will be better if you jump out and use your hands.

I like the electric bike as a metaphor. You can go further faster, but you quickly find yourself miles from home and out of juice, and you ain't in shape enough to get that heavy bugger back.

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

#222

Post by Attrecomet »

thfuran wrote: post #99
moritzruth wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I do too, but the point they were trying to make is that "learning how to write code" is not the point of CS education, but only a side effect.

A huge portion of the students in CS do intend the study precisely for writing code and the CS itself is more of a side effect.

Which is a pretty big failure of somewhere in the education pipeline -- don't expect a science program to do what a trade is there for! (to be clear, I'm not trying to say the students are wrong in choosing CS in order to get a good coding job, but somewhere, expectations and reality are misaligned here. Perhaps with companies trying to outsource their training to universities while complaining that the training isn't spot-on for what they need?)

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

#223

Post by acessoproibido »

phailhaus wrote: post #177
acessoproibido wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's the koolaid, but seriously I don't really believe it anymore.

I only had to do this leg work during university to prove that I can be allowed to try and write code for a living. The grounding as you call it is not required for that at all,since im a dozen levels of abstraction removed from it. It might be useful if I was a researcher or would work on optimizing complex cutting edge stuff, but 99% of what I do is CRUD apps and REST Apis. That stuff can safely be done by anyone, no need for a degree. Tbf I'm from Germany so in other places they might allow you to do this job without a degree

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

#224

Post by WalterBright »

bambax wrote: post #134
Quothling wrote: post #25

Earlier 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…

> 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.

I wrote code in a spiral notebook because the mainframe was not available to me at home.

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

#225

Post by dev_l1x_be »

GolDDranks wrote: post #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_ di…

Well one way of solving this is to keep giving it simple tasks.

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

#226

Post by therealdrag0 »

ashikns wrote: post #48
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…

Because a novel is about creative output, and engineering is about understanding a lot of rules and requirements and then writing logic to satisfy that. The latter has a much more explicitly defined output.

Said another way, a novel is about the experience of reading every word of implementation, whereas software is sufficient to be a black box, the functional output is all that matters. No one is reading assembly for example.

We’re moving into a world where suboptimal code doesn’t matter that much because it’s so cheap to produce.

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

#227

Post by kaydub »

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.

I don't know anybody except the bleeding edge people (Steve Yegge) or non-engineers that are actually "vibe coding" to this definition.

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

#228

Post by bluGill »

ray_v wrote: post #204
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'…

Lots of interesting ways to spin this. I was in a computer science course in the late 90s and we were not allowed to use the C++ standard library because it made you a "lazy programmer" according to the instructor. I'm not sure if I agree with that, but the way that I look at it is that computer science all about abstraction, and it seems to me that AI, generative pair programming, vibe coding or what ever you want t…

When in school the point is often to learn how to write complex code by writing things the standard library does.

Though also in the 90's the standard library was new and often had bugs

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

#229

Post by GolDDranks »

GolDDranks wrote: post #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_ di…

Just a supplementary fact: I'm in the beneficial position, against the AI, that in a case where it's hard to provide that automatic feedback loop, I can run and test the code at my discretion, whereas the AI model can't.

Yet. Most of my criticism is not after running the code, but after _reading_ the code. It wrote code. I read it. And I am not happy with it. No even need to run it, it's shit at glance.

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

#230

Post by ekidd »

WorldMaker wrote: post #155
quinnjh wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This analogy works pretty well. Too much time doing everything in it and your muscles will atrophy. Some edge cases will be better if you jump out and use your hands.

There's also plenty of mech tales where the mech pilots need to spend as much time out of the suits making sure their muscles (and/or mental health) are in good strength precisely because the mechs are a "force multiplier" and are only as strong as their pilot. That's a somewhat common thread in such worlds.

Yes. Also, it's a fairly common trope that if you want to pilot a mech suit, you need to be someone like Tony Stark. He's a tinkerer and an expert. What he does is not a commodity. And when he loses his suit and access to his money? His big plot arc is that he is Iron Man. He built it in a cave out of a box of scraps, etc.

There are other fictional variants: the giant mech with the enormous support team, or Heinlein's "mobile infantry." And virtually every variantion on the Heinlein trope has a scene of drop commandos doing extensive pre-drop checks on their armor.

The actual reality is it isn't too had for a competent engineer to pair with Claude Code, if they're willing to read the diffs. But if you try to increase the ratio of agents to humans, dealing with their current limitations quickly starts to feel like you need to be Tony Stark.

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