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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

#271

Post by fsloth »

mattjhall wrote: post #181
fsloth wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"So why do you think a 10 kLoC vibecoded codebase will be any good engineering-wise?" I've been coding a side-project for a year with full LLM assistance (the project is quite a bit older than that). Basically I spent over a decade developing CAD software at Trimble and now have pivoted to a different role and different company. So like an addict, I of course wanted to continue developing CAD technology. I pretty muc…

It’s amazing how often these miracle codebases that an AI has generated are always not open source.

If you doubt it’s real just run it, man.

I shared the app because it’s not confidential and it’s concrete - I can’t really discuss work stuff without stressing out what I can share and what not.

At least in my workplace everyone I know is using Claude Code or Cursor.

Now, I don’t know why some people are productive with tools and some aren’t.

But the code generation capabilities are for real.

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

#272

Post by kaydub »

Ososjjss wrote: post #241
kaydub wrote: post #207

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm only writing 5-10% of my own code at this point. The AI tools are good, it just seems like people that don't like them expect them to be 100% automatic with no hand holding. Like people in here complaining about how poor the tests are... but did they start another agent to review the tests? Did they take that and iterate on the tests with multiple agents? I can attest that the first pass of testing can often be s…

> I can attest that the first pass of testing can often be shit. That's why you iterate. So far, by the time I’m done iterating, I could have just written it myself. Typing takes like no time at all in aggregate. Especially with AI assisted autocomplete. I spend far more time reading and thinking (which I have to do to write a good spec for the AI anyways).

Nope, you couldn't have written it yourself in the same time. That's just a false assumption a lot of you like to make.

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

#273

Post by yaur »

GolDDranks wrote: post #244
ReverseCold wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can run and test the code at my discretion, whereas the AI model can't. It sounds like you know what the problem with your AI workflow is? Have you tried using an agent? (sorry somewhat snarky but… come on)

Yeah, you're right, and the snark might be warranted. I should consider it the same as my stupid (but cute) robot vacuum cleaner that goes at random directions but gets the job done. The thing that differentiates LLM's from my stupid but cute vacuum cleaner, is that the (at least OpenAI's) AI model is cocksure and wrong, which is infinitely more infuriating than being a bit clueless and wrong.

Give Cluade Code a go. It still makes a lot stupid mistakes, but its a vastly different experience from pasting back and forth with chat gpt.

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

#274

Post by yomismoaqui »

goostavos wrote: post #189
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 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…

This the kind of interaction that makes be think that there are only 2 possible futures:

Star Trek or Idiocracy.

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

#275

Post by gedy »

b33j0r wrote: post #253
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…

I usually do most of the engineering and it works great for writing the code. I’ll say: > There should be a TaskManager that stores Task objects in a sorted set, with the deadline as the sort key. There should be methods to add a task and pop the current top task. The TaskManager owns the memory when the Task is in the sorted set, and the caller to pop should own it after it is popped. To enforce this, the caller to…

What you’re describing makes sense, but that type of prompting is not what people are hyping

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

#276

Post by storystarling »

GolDDranks wrote: post #244
ReverseCold wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I can run and test the code at my discretion, whereas the AI model can't. It sounds like you know what the problem with your AI workflow is? Have you tried using an agent? (sorry somewhat snarky but… come on)

Yeah, you're right, and the snark might be warranted. I should consider it the same as my stupid (but cute) robot vacuum cleaner that goes at random directions but gets the job done. The thing that differentiates LLM's from my stupid but cute vacuum cleaner, is that the (at least OpenAI's) AI model is cocksure and wrong, which is infinitely more infuriating than being a bit clueless and wrong.

I've been trying to solve this by wrapping the generation in a LangGraph loop. The hope was that an agent could catch the errors, but it seems to just compound the problem. You end up paying for ten API calls where the model confidently doubles down on the mistake, which gets expensive very quickly for no real gain.

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

#277

Post by kaydub »

kridsdale1 wrote: post #214
kaydub wrote: 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.

Yeah, I've been working with LLMs since openai released that first model. What I'm doing today is VASTLY different than anything we thought possible back then, so I wouldn't call it "vibe coding"

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

#278

Post by antonvs »

GolDDranks wrote: post #266
t55 wrote: post #252

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

I don't love these kinds of throwaway comments without any substance, but... "It Is Difficult to Get a Man to Understand Something When His Salary Depends Upon His Not Understanding It" ...might be my issue indeed. Trying to balance it by not being too stubborn though. I'm not doing AI just to be able to dump on them, you know.

Skill comes from experience. It takes a good amount of working with these models to learn how to use them effectively, when to use them, and what to use them for. Otherwise, you end up hitting their limitations over and over and they just seem useless.

They're certainly not perfect, but many of the issues that people post about as though they're show-stoppers are easily resolved with the right tools and prompting.

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

#280

Post by SpaceNoodled »

fragmede wrote: post #235
specproc wrote: post #221

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

As long as we're beating the metaphor... so don't do that? Make sure you charge the battery and that it has enough range to get you home, and bring the charger with you. Or in the LLMs case, make sure it's not generating a ball of mud (code). Refactor often , into discrete classes, and distinct areas of functionality, so that you're never miles from home and out of juice.

At that rate, I would already be there if I had just walked.
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