Why I don’t vibe code
jacobharr.is
Why I don’t vibe code
1–10 of 119 posts
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#2This is so good and almost exactly expresses my own thoughts. There's a narrow window where it's capable and fits a need of tedious work (mostly around automating tasks it would take me a bit to remember all the arguments and commands I'd have to chain together to do it). But a lot of it is the stuff I actually WANT to be doing. And solving the hard problems makes me a better developer just as training in the gym makes your body stronger.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#3I thought this was going to be an article about intelligent use of LLM tools without vibecoding, but it's actually entirely against LLMs altogether. The person who wrote it used a free trial of some tool (most likely not a frontier model) and then gave up forever when the trial ran out.
> I then tried using one of the AI tools to analyze my code in a project and a few other small tasks before it all came to an awkward halt. The system informed me that I had just run out of credits and I would need to provide a credit card to purchase more tokens I wanted to keep going.
> So you must believe me that the idea of paying a service in perpetuity so I could think just seemed so laughably absurd and horrific that I didn’t even bother giving them my card. I closed the laptop. I uninstalled the IDE and went back to using Emacs even.
I wholly support their personal choice. I am tired of articles from people who haven't used LLMs preaching about how it's all vibecoding, though.
Acting like LLM use is (EDIT: I meant is not) a spectrum between doing everything manually or handing control over to the LLM and vibecoding everything is a tired strawman argument.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#4I taught myself linux/coding/servers because there was a long period of time where all I had was a chromebook for school, but I still wanted to explore this thing called "pure data" that i'd heard about, and thought I could make art with it. I distinctly remember being continually amazed at how you could get so many things for free, if you know where to look. And yeah.. once I found emacs it was all over. To this day I am definitely going to always go "the hard way" where I can instead of pay any SaaS even $5 a month. In my head its like: "I am a mechanic, or at least, I can get by as one, why would I take my car to the shop and pay money??"
I know its not rational, but it would be pretty darn terrible in my brain to pay for an IDE. Even more unimaginable to me to pay $100 a month for something...
All to say, "cheapskate"-ness from TFA really resonated with me, I don't see the sentiment around a lot.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#5[deleted]
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#6I thought this was going to be an article about intelligent use of LLM tools without vibecoding, but it's actually entirely against LLMs altogether. The person who wrote it used a free trial of some tool (most likely not a frontier model) and then gave up forever when the trial ran out. > I then tried using one of the AI tools to analyze my code in a project and a few other small tasks before it all came to an awkwar…
Imagine being disappointed that an article is NOT clickbait :|
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#7I don't agree with the overall conclusion of avoiding AI tooling but this was really wonderfully written
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#8This is so good and almost exactly expresses my own thoughts. There's a narrow window where it's capable and fits a need of tedious work (mostly around automating tasks it would take me a bit to remember all the arguments and commands I'd have to chain together to do it). But a lot of it is the stuff I actually WANT to be doing. And solving the hard problems makes me a better developer just as training in the gym mak…
Developers were not solving hard problems. The last decade was brutal—mainly frameworks, libraries, configurations, etc. The hard problems were in research.
And regarding the gym, sure, you might enjoy lifting dumbbells and solving puzzles to sharpen your brain. But that is not what engineers are hired for; they are hired to deliver a system using the best tools available. You can choose to farm by hand while the industry moves to using tractors, but sooner or later, you will be left behind.
And lastly, moving higher in abstraction allows us to tackle even more complex problems—I'd argue much more complex than the narrow puzzles we were facing before. Part of the resistance is simply an avoidance of facing higher-level complexity once the lower tier is automated.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#9This is so good and almost exactly expresses my own thoughts. There's a narrow window where it's capable and fits a need of tedious work (mostly around automating tasks it would take me a bit to remember all the arguments and commands I'd have to chain together to do it). But a lot of it is the stuff I actually WANT to be doing. And solving the hard problems makes me a better developer just as training in the gym mak…
I'm not paying someone to dig by hand if a machine makes the job quicker.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#10I thought this was going to be an article about intelligent use of LLM tools without vibecoding, but it's actually entirely against LLMs altogether. The person who wrote it used a free trial of some tool (most likely not a frontier model) and then gave up forever when the trial ran out. > I then tried using one of the AI tools to analyze my code in a project and a few other small tasks before it all came to an awkwar…
I still use LLMs in a "no-vibe coding" way. Essentially I use a combination of the typical auto-complete and asking it to generate tests or individual structs/classes that I then heavily modify. But no line of code goes unread and unvetted by me.