"Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education • Hacker News Board

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

#111

Post by fragmede » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:11 PM UTC

throwup238 wrote: post #90

timr wrote: post #82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship. I spent a good portion of my life in Universities -- and went as far as one can go in terms of educational credentials and taught at the university level -- and I cannot disagree more. Universities produce job skills incidentally , if at all. It's simply not their goal [1]. Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it'…

> Universities produce job skills incidentally, if at all. It's simply not their goal [1]. Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it's possible to get a degree and still not be better than a very junior engineer at a software company (and quite a few graduates are worse). Having been self taught in both software and electrical engineering, I’ve experienced a lot of this. In EE, it’s amazing how many grad…

Yeah the practical part is what does it. Students need time on their particular niche's software programs. Outside of Altium/KiCAD/Cadence there's also Mastercam, ANSYS HFSS, LTspice / SIMetrix/Keysight/CATIA/Synopsys/Dymola, among others.

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

#112

Post by fragmede » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:16 PM UTC

deadbabe wrote: post #56

gota wrote: post #38

Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…

My problem with apprenticeship is that my workflow simply isn’t optimized for performative demonstration. It’s messy, haphazard, and a junior would have to sit around watching me do a whole lot of nothing at times. I don’t want to teach, I want to get work done. Juniors need to just accept they will have to learn the hard way, on their own, asking occasional questions and looking at tutorials until stuff sticks.

performance aversiveness is a personal problem and should be worked through

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

#113

Post by sjdjsin » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:23 PM UTC

scottyah wrote: post #62

rhetocj23 wrote: post #39

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

If you train at the gym with bad form, you will hurt yourself in the long run. A person with a personal trainer giving feedback at the right time, decreasing the feedback loop from years to seconds will always outperform someone trying to figure it out on their own(assuming the trainer is competent).

[dead]

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

#114

Post by jrowen » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:26 PM UTC

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…

I'm not entirely sure what you're saying. That usage of bureaucratic seems strange. I think your counsel is more true than ever. Moving forward, search is the meta-skill. The information is readily available, you can do anything if you know how to find it.

The automaton is not categorically different from the book or the teacher.

The fact that some number of people aren't adept at these things is an invariant of human nature, don't blame the tools getting better.

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

#115

Post by palata » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:28 PM UTC

timr wrote: post #82

hintymad wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship. And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship. Not the ones per Mark Trevor's words ( https://marktarver.com/professor.html ), of course, but a self-respecting university will train their students with progressively challenging and practical assignments. We started with implement…

> And in our modern world, universities are still the best place for such apprenticeship. I spent a good portion of my life in Universities -- and went as far as one can go in terms of educational credentials and taught at the university level -- and I cannot disagree more. Universities produce job skills incidentally , if at all. It's simply not their goal [1]. Even today, at the best CS programs in the country, it'…

I studied computer science in a university, not because I wanted to learn programming, but because I wanted to study computer science.

I admit that most development tasks don't need the knowledge you get from a CS degree, but some do.

But in computer science, it's also totally possible to be self-taught. I've learnt a lot on my own, especially after university. Computer science is good for that because it's generally accessible: you don't need an expensive lab or equipments, you can just practice at home on your laptop.

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

#116

Post by palata » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:30 PM UTC

gota wrote: post #38

Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…

> This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship.

I would argue that, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is access to knowledge.

It used to be that you had to sit next to a master to access the knowledge of the master. Now in many fields, you can just find it on the internet and learn at home, at your pace.

Everyone is different, what's best for you may not be what's best for me. But what is absolutely necessary is access to knowledge.

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

#117

Post by palata » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:32 PM UTC

rhetocj23 wrote: post #39

gota wrote: post #38

Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…

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

Read/watch, do, fail, think, read/watch, do, fail, think, ...

Learning requires effort and access to knowledge. And of course, learning requires that you know how to learn. This is what school tries to teach.

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

#118

Post by watwut » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:43 PM UTC

gota wrote: post #38

Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…

I am honestly very glad there was nothing like that when I was young. I could learn by doing things, reading things and maybe messing up and fixing after myself.

I also do not think history shows that was the most effective. That is how it was done when it was the only option.

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

#119

Post by crazygringo » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:45 PM UTC

didericis wrote: post #86

rmonvfer wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only way this might work (IMO) is writing the tests yourself (but of course, this requires you to plan and design very meticulously in advance) and doing some kind of “blind TDD” where the LLM is not able to see the tests, only run them and act on the results. Even then, I’ve had Claude (Opus 4.1) bypass tests by hardcoding conditions as it found them so I’d say reliability for this method is not 100%. Having the…

I’ve been saying this for years now: you can’t avoid communicating what you want a computer to do. The specific requirements have to be made somewhere. Inferring intent from plain english prompts and context is a powerful way for computers to guess what you want from underspecified requirements, but the problem of defining what you want specifically always requires you to convey some irreducible amount of information…

> if you care about correctness they all basically converge to the same thing and the same amount of work.

That's the part I'd push back on. They're not the same amount of work.

When I'm writing the code myself, it's basically a ton of "plumbing" of loops and ifs and keeping track of counters and making sure I'm not making off-by-one errors and not making punctuation mistakes and all the rest. It actually takes quite a lot of brain energy and time to get that all perfect.

It saves a lot of time to write the function definition in plain English, have the LLM generate a bunch of tests that you verify are the correct definition... and then let the LLM take care of all the loops and indexing and punctuation and plumbing.

I regularly cut what used to be an entire afternoon or day's worth of work down into 30 minutes. I spend 10 minutes writing the design for what will be 500-1,000 lines of code, 5 minutes answering the LLM's questions about it, 5 minutes skimming the code to make sure it all looks vaguely plausible (no obvious red flags), 5 minutes ensuring the unit tests cover everything I can think of (almost always, the LLM has thought of a bunch of edge cases I never would have bothered to test), and another 5 minutes telling it to fix things, like its unit tests make me suddenly realize there's an edge case that should be defined differently.

The idea that it's the "same amount of work" is crazy to me. It's so much more efficient. And in all honesty, the code is more reliable too because it tests things that I usually wouldn't bother with, because writing all the tests is so boring.

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

#120

Post by GuB-42 » Fri, Oct 10, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC

zahlman wrote: post #99

GuB-42 wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The advantage of traditional auto-complete over AI is that it will typically list everything that fits: all methods, all variables and constants in scope, etc... It can even fetch the documentation if available. It is great for learning because it tells you all your options without deciding for you. AI autocomplete essentially searches stackoverflow for you and pastes the first answer without context, adjusting it to…

What if you had an AI system that could order the exhaustive list according to its likelihood estimate?

I think it is a good idea, and that's actually how Japanese word processors have been working since the late 70s!

The way to input Japanese is to type the word phonetically using a regular qwerty keyboard. The computer then finds all writings that match and order them by likelihood.

Calling that "AI" may be a little much for 70s tech, but it is definitely machine learning, as the machine is able to match patterns and take previous choices into account.