I'm getting tempted to because I have so much work to do for my "startup" and after my 8hr day job I'm burnt. It's not even that I don't know what to do it's a lot of work... swift iPhone app, the api, the web app and gcp. get that feeling of being overwhelmed and also end of day brain just feels like shit, thinking I'll drink more caffeine after gym eg. 6:30 PM will see if I can sleep.
Why I don’t vibe code
51–60 of 119 posts
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#52I 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.
This is healthy but what about the economics - what about when the prices rise? At what point do you become more thoughtful about spend?
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#53This is like reading an article "I Don't Drive Cars" that goes on like - They're too expensive - My buddy's 1995 Accord breaks down a lot - Walking is healthier, plus you can stop and smell the roses - I enjoy caring for my horse - Sometimes you can get stuck in traffic Fine if that's the way you want and can afford to live your life. But it is an exotic luxury belief. For those of us who are participating in the eco…
There are many trainfuls of people who still write code using traditional syntax-based IDE completion.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#54This is like reading an article "I Don't Drive Cars" that goes on like - They're too expensive - My buddy's 1995 Accord breaks down a lot - Walking is healthier, plus you can stop and smell the roses - I enjoy caring for my horse - Sometimes you can get stuck in traffic Fine if that's the way you want and can afford to live your life. But it is an exotic luxury belief. For those of us who are participating in the eco…
You're going to get picked apart by people who live within walking distance or public transport distance of their office and don't understand why everyone else uses cars. If you can walk to your office and the temperature is always between 50 and 70 degrees F you would probably think cars are crazy, too. Which, funnily enough, proves the point even further. Some people get so comfortable in their bubble that they bec…
I live in Southwestern Ontario and I think cars are crazy.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#55I 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…
Yep. If it weren't for cheap / freely available tools (and their limitations) I wouldn't be where I am today. I think about this every time I make a tool of my own.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#56This 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 ind…
These comparison don’t capture reality at all… wish people would stop doing them.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#57This is what I call trad coding.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#58Earlier quoted context omitted.
"painting is just procrastination that gets in the way of implementing your ideas." "woodwork is just procrastination that gets in the way of implementing your ideas." We can find plenty of others, but my main point is that industrializing a process doesn't make it "procrastinating". There are plenty of jobs that are done by machines but are still practiced by humans for multiple reasons. If we think of coding as a m…
Where does this evolution really lead? "Thinking is just procrastination that gets in the way of your opinions"? ;-)
> Where does this evolution really lead?
probably that nothing really matters, so I guess do whatever makes you happy. If programming makes you happy then you should do it.
I find programming Advent of Code fun so I do it, but I don't find writing yet another web interface fun, so I have Claude do it.
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#59This is like reading an article "I Don't Drive Cars" that goes on like - They're too expensive - My buddy's 1995 Accord breaks down a lot - Walking is healthier, plus you can stop and smell the roses - I enjoy caring for my horse - Sometimes you can get stuck in traffic Fine if that's the way you want and can afford to live your life. But it is an exotic luxury belief. For those of us who are participating in the eco…
Life without a car is not an exotic luxury at all, far from it, and all your points are just proving the point.
Cars are a luxury, from the amount of taxes paid towards car infrastructure to the social costs associated with “the car culture” (insurance, public health, climate change, etc.).
There are countless examples of urban and rural areas where alternative modes of transportation (LRT, bus, bicycle, ferries) are the norm and where cars are barely necessary/used.
Not every place in the world is Anywhere, USA…
Re: Why I don’t vibe code
#60Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 ind…
Some developers solve hard problems and some don't. It depends entirely on your specific work.
Indeed, I solve hard problem for a living, but those are mostly design. The actual engineering often decomposes to gluing things together with limited need for new primitives.
There are hard problems at every level of abstraction. TAGE predictor optimization up to handling data-center failover.
I don't really have a challenge for people like the OP, I get it. I too dragged my feet, even mourned the death of a type of work I had grown fond of. Then I got over it and realized I might prefer the romance of riding a horse into town, but I also like that there's semi-trucks delivering fresh produce to my grocery store year round. The leverage available right now is frankly insane. The one thing an "old dev" [as he self-labeled] can be sure of is that the younger generations will not share these hang-ups to the same degree and it's those people who will inherit the burden of maintaining and furthering the digital world.