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

> It was pure, unadulterated slop. I was bewildered. Had I not reviewed every line of code before admitting it? Where did all this...gunk..come from?

I chuckled at this. This describes pretty much every large piece of software I've ever worked on. You don't need an LLM to create a giant piece of slop. To avoid it takes tons of planning, refinement, and diligence whether it's LLM's or humans writing it.

Are engineers really doing vibecoding in the truest sense of the word though? Just blindly copy/pasting and iterating? Because I don't. It is more of sculpting via conversation. I start with the requirements, provide some half-baked ideas or approaches that I think may work and then ask what the LLM suggests and whether there are better ways to achieve the goals. Once we have some common ground, I ask to show the outlines of the chosen structure: the interfaces, classes, test uses. I review it, ask more questions/make design/approach changes until I have something that makes sense to me. Only then the fully fleshed coding starts and even then I move at a deliberate pace so that I can pause and think about it before moving on to the next step. It is by no means super fast for any non-trivial task but then collaborating with anyone wouldn't be.

I also like to think that I'm utilising the training done on many millions of lines of code while still using my experience/opinions to arrive at something compared to just using my fallible thinking wherein I could have missed some interesting ideas. Its like me++. Sure, it does a lot of heavy lifting but I never leave the steering wheel. I guess I'm still at the pre-agentic stage and not ready to letting go fully.

I haven't been vibe coding for more than a few months.

It's just a tool with a high level of automation. That becomes clear when you have to guide it to use more sane practices, simple things like don't overuse HTTP headers when you don't need them.

>Our current approach with AI code is "draft a design in 15mins" and have AI implement it. The contrasts with the thoughtful approach a human would take with other human engineers. Plan something, pitch the design, get some feedback, take some time thinking through pros and cons. Begin implementing, pivot, realizations, improvements, design morphs.

Perhaps that is the distinction between reports of success with AI and reports of abject failure. Your description of "Our current approach" is nothing like how I have been working with AI.

When I was making some code to do a complex DMA chaining, the first step with the AI was to write an emulator function that produced the desired result from the parameters given in software. Then a suite of tests with memory to memory operations that would produce a verifiable output. Only then started building the version that wrote to the hardware registers ensuring that the hardware produced the same memory to memory results as the emulator. When discrepancies occurred, checking the test case, the emulator and the hardware with the stipulation that the hardware was the ground truth of behaviour and the test case should represent the desired result.

I occasionally ask LLMs to one shot full complex tasks, but when I do so it is more as a test to see how far it gets. I'm not looking to use the result, I'm just curious as to what it might be. The amount of progress it makes before getting lost is advancing at quite a rate.

It's like seeing an Atari 2600 and expecting it to be a Mac. People want to fly to the moon with Atari 2600 level hardware. You can use hardware at that level to fly to the moon, and flying to the moon is an impressive achievement enabled by the hardware, but to do so you have to wrangle a vast array of limitations.

They are no panacea, but they are not nothing. They have been, and will remain, somewhere between for some time. Nevertheless they are getting better and better.

The more accurate prompt would be “You are a mind reader. Create me a plan to create a task manager, define the requirements, deploy it, and tell me when it’s done.”

And then you just rm -rf and repeat until something half works.