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"Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

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Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#101

Post by marcosdumay »

AstroBen wrote: post #83
rhetocj23 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You learn by doing and thinking. Not reading and watching. Pure and simple.

Reading and watching fills your brain with whats possible Doing and thinking solidifies it, teaches you to use the things you've read about You need both When I'm learning something new I like to skim a bunch of content upfront to get an idea of what's there

> fills your brain with whats possible

It doesn't. That's the problem.

It fills your brain with procedure. For a short time.

If you solidify the procedure, you will be able to perform that one task. What on software development is still useless.

Only at the next step, where you know so much that you can think of your own new procedures that you have basic competence at software development. There are other professions like this, but for most, basic competence happens before you even solidify the procedures.

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#102

Post by jncfhnb »

travisgriggs wrote: post #36

Disclaimer: I use Zed Pro and GPT daily to code. I have been coding for money since 1989. I view the rise of these tools and particularly efficacy in programming as an indictment against modern programming. The modern web is both amazing and horrific. If bureaucratic is "using or connected with many complicated rules and ways of doing things" (Britannica), then modern programming may be the ultimate poster child. Sur…

A non trivial problem is that documentation is difficult to write, search, and read. And that makes learning hard. Whereas AI makes learning easy. I’m fairly frequently impressed at how well it understands unreal engine.

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#104

Post by zahlman »

JohnMakin wrote: post #79

If you are writing a tutorial, please for the love of all that is holy do not just make it a bunch of copy/paste steps without much or any explanation. Make me work through it, debug it, take me down the wrong path on purpose for the "aha!" moments. Leave copious amounts of explanation and documentation. Tell me what can go wrong and how I can fix it. I do not want a video. I hate videos. I know not everyone does and…

Applying the diátaxis (https://diataxis.fr) wisdom here: what you describe is really a how-to guide rather than a tutorial. These are also important, and you should seek them out (and ask for them) when they're what you want.

Tutorials fundamentally exist to serve a different purpose: to orient people within the subject matter, when they don't even know what question to ask. Going through steps in order is important so that the student can focus. Intentionally going down wrong paths can be counterproductive for the neophyte, because it means having about as much experience doing the wrong thing as the right thing. Debugging is a general skill, but technology-specific debugging can and probably should be taught separately from the "happy path".

A properly done tutorial will properly show the steps, and will have been tested to ensure that it can in fact be expected to work on everyone's machine. The parameters for success will be controlled as tightly as possible.

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#105

Post by yunwal »

marcosdumay wrote: post #101
AstroBen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading and watching fills your brain with whats possible Doing and thinking solidifies it, teaches you to use the things you've read about You need both When I'm learning something new I like to skim a bunch of content upfront to get an idea of what's there

> fills your brain with whats possible It doesn't. That's the problem. It fills your brain with procedure. For a short time. If you solidify the procedure, you will be able to perform that one task. What on software development is still useless. Only at the next step, where you know so much that you can think of your own new procedures that you have basic competence at software development. There are other profession…

If you understand the difference between greedy algorithms and non-greedy, you also understand the difference between learning by doing and building a solid foundation before tackling a problem.

For most simple problems, it's true that the taking the seemingly shortest path to solving the problem is good enough. There are other problems where you simply have to understand the abstractions at a deeper level than you can visualize in code. It's there that things like reading a textbook or taking a course can help.

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#106

Post by amlib »

stavros wrote: post #32
jasonthorsness wrote: post #8

> Don’t use: > AI auto-complete in your editor > Agent mode or agentic tools for your educational projects While I am not learning "coding" as a beginner anymore, I am constantly learning new frameworks, language features, algorithms etc. as is the norm in the industry, and I disagree it's bad to use AI auto-complete. Pre-AI IntelliSense-style autocomplete from Visual Studio or ReSharper makes learning new libraries…

Very much agree. AI autocomplete is the best thing ever, because it spares you from having to read the docs but it's few enough lines that you can review and make sure it does what you intended. It won't write big chunks, so it won't hinder your learning.

So you are telling me you can always properly infer what the "black boxes" the AI auto-completed for you does without reading the documentation?

I bet you are most likely just blindly trusting the AI response and moving on. Sure, the code structure might checkout and the calls it completed are sometimes fairly generic/predictable, but there will be plenty of situations where the behavior is just different enough or the black boxes are something you have no idea about what it even does and you are too lazy to check the docs and commit the code anyway.

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#107

Post by travisgriggs »

heisenbit wrote: post #89
travisgriggs wrote: post #36

Disclaimer: I use Zed Pro and GPT daily to code. I have been coding for money since 1989. I view the rise of these tools and particularly efficacy in programming as an indictment against modern programming. The modern web is both amazing and horrific. If bureaucratic is "using or connected with many complicated rules and ways of doing things" (Britannica), then modern programming may be the ultimate poster child. Sur…

A lot what has been heaped upon us is accidental complexity in Brook‘s silber bullet sense. LLM‘s cut straight through it, collapsing the silos of knowledge (and eco systems) build around languages and frameworks.

I view them as lossy compressors. Kind of like a JPEG for algorithms. And while our optical nerve stack tends to be pretty good at glossing over and correcting for erroneous pixels, it has been my experience that computers do not possess that kind of discernment. Thy do exactly as they're told. And a "pixel off" here and there in the execution of boolean logic can quietly not matter, or it can unravel pretty epically.

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#108

Post by AstroBen »

marcosdumay wrote: post #101
AstroBen wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Reading and watching fills your brain with whats possible Doing and thinking solidifies it, teaches you to use the things you've read about You need both When I'm learning something new I like to skim a bunch of content upfront to get an idea of what's there

> fills your brain with whats possible It doesn't. That's the problem. It fills your brain with procedure. For a short time. If you solidify the procedure, you will be able to perform that one task. What on software development is still useless. Only at the next step, where you know so much that you can think of your own new procedures that you have basic competence at software development. There are other profession…

Can you give an example?

I mean: if you're learning a new language/library/framework it's really useful to have a broad idea of what the tooling for it looks like.. what features does it offer? You can look up the details when you need to

It's really useful to have a broad knowledge of algorithms and what problems they're applicable to. Look up the details later

If you're going into a new domain.. know the broad, high level pieces of it. You don't need to pre-learn the specifics of websockets but if you don't even know they exist or what they're useful for in web development.. that's kind of a problem

Even more abstract concepts like how to design code there's a lot of good info out there

If every generation had to re-invent the wheel from scratch we'd never get anywhere. The problem people have is they think ONLY reading is enough

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#109

Post by mattgreenrocks »

password54321 wrote: post #100
skovranek wrote: post #6

"Learning must be uncomfortable." Critical thinking is hard.

People just don't want to face the uncomfortable truth that they are probably not as smart as they want to believe they are.

It’s not about being smart as much as staying engaged with the problem even when it mentally defeats you several times.

Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

#110

Post by jjcob »

cultofmetatron wrote: post #88
guhidalg wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I downvoted you because you are exceptional but the rest of the world is not. Most people benefit from traditional education, software engineering is not different.

its not THAT exceptional. I myself know several people who bootstrapped themselves into being descent software engineers. Traditional education is certainly fine for some people but its not the only way for the masses to learn. whats missing is the discipline of pushing yourself when you have no immediate extrinsic motivation. You might have had a point a few decades ago when the information itself was difficult to f…

I was a self-taught software developer who already made money with programming for ~10 years before I took my first computer science classes.

Those classes unlocked a whole new level of programming for me. I just didn't know what I didn't know before.

People keep reinventing the same shit if they haven't learned about it before.

Sure, you can learn many things online. But for most things you just don't even know that they exist, you wouldn't know to search for them.

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