I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective • Hacker News Board

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#141

Post by danielbln » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:09 PM UTC

rocqua wrote: post #32

esalman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What is coding without critical thinking? I never vibe coded, and I don't understand this trend AT ALL. I read how copilot and such are detrimental to critical thinking, and I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now.

Vibe coding hasn't really hampered my critical thinking. It just means I get ideas into practice faster, and it means that for new concepts I can get to itterating much faster. Perhaps I have the concept wrong, because half the time I'm still editing code by hand.

I agree, and I think it's a continuum. I can say "make me an Instagram clone" and then come back after 100 agent loops and no looking at the code. Or I can outline the architecture, the components, service layer, data structures etc in a back and forth with the LLM and then have it do the minutia implementation.

You still get code hell after a while unless you review the code and refactor where needed, but I can absolutely imagine a future where the code is just a compile target for the architecture and design I specify. A little bit like a compiler spitting out assembly (caveats apply, LLMs being non-deterministic etc etc and at current state probably not reliable enough for full unsupervised coding)

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#142

Post by Jtsummers » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:28 PM UTC

caseyy wrote: post #21

isoprophlex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding is a death trap for juniors just starting out, as it kills critical thinking and understanding what a computer is. And a guaranteed paycheck for people with the experience to clean up the resulting messes. I hope...

Vibe coding is what I’m selfishly expecting to take out many projects and keep my principal level swe skills in demand. Someone will have to mop all the vibes up when it’s time to deliver products.

Honestly, I've made a career fixing other people's messes. Vibe coding just means a larger market, but the terrible, unmaintainable, non-extendable code has been around since the beginning and grows every year.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#143

Post by i_love_retros » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 8:29 PM UTC

danielbln wrote: post #139

i_love_retros wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find that even though I have to spend time understanding what the llm wrote, it's still faster and less energy sapping than if i write the code myself. Plus I just get the LLM to write tests for it's code and I make sure the coverage is complete. But it does make me feel uneasy still, like a dirty little cheat.

Just make sure the LLM doesn't go crazy with the mocks. I had some fully mocked tests before that didn't do anything (apart from looking green).

I tell jest to output code coverage stats so I can see the llm generated tests do actually cover the code I want tested.

But yeah, I agree they go overboard and add tests that don't even test anything due to excessive mocking

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#144

Post by captainkrtek » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 9:12 PM UTC

kmac_ wrote: post #63

captainkrtek wrote: post #28

Using AI to assist in locating the right library function or similar to documentation has been effective to speed up my development, but I really dislike using it to autocomplete whole functions or large swathes of code, because then I have to spend time reading and understanding code I didn't write. This doesn't ultimately feel "faster" when I own what I write.

I'm using AI for grepping, analyzing flow, finding cross-project dependencies, etc. It provides a significant speedup. But the generated code is mediocre at best. Changes look like patches on fabric, not woven threads. AI generates too much redundant code.

One other use-case I've found effective for it is assisting with API development and defining API specs. For example, I've uploaded API definitions in YAML and previously provided instructions about the API standards I want to impose and to ensure consistency as I build new things, this saves some degree of effort between writing -> linting -> fixing -> linting again if I have it just validate and fix any minor inconsistencies.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#145

Post by dang » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 9:42 PM UTC

ForOldHack wrote: post #2

[flagged]

Could you please stop posting unsubstantive comments and flamebait? You've unfortunately been doing it repeatedly. It's not what this site is for, and destroys what it is for.

If you wouldn't mind reviewing https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and taking the intended spirit of the site more to heart, we'd be grateful.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#146

Post by hooverd » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 9:51 PM UTC

AlexandrB wrote: post #118

hooverd wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

God, software is about to get so much worse, isn't it.

Absolutely. If you thought Electron was bloated, prepare yourself for Electron running a bunch of AI-generated slop.

The year is 2028. You open the AI enabled calculator app on your desktop. Your GPU overheats and catches fire.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#147

Post by caseyy » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 10:05 PM UTC

aylmao wrote: post #58

Havoc wrote: post #10

There is definitely space for a happy medium. Asking AI for individual functions and assembling them like lego blocks allows for a higher level of control and agency while still accelerating things a bit

+1. Software developers has long leveraged "someone else" writing code for their projects— be that "someone else" another human, via libraries, platforms, frameworks, etc. Or a computer, using codegen tools, compilers, etc. Sometimes it's to save tediousness, sometimes to save time, sometimes to leverage better code than one could've written. I think AI is best when used in this same way of thinking— not a tool that…

That’s a healthy view. Unfortunately, the industry is heading towards agentic coders at 200mph.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#148

Post by bloppe » Wed, Apr 23, 2025, 11:52 PM UTC

BayArea925 wrote: post #20

isoprophlex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding is a death trap for juniors just starting out, as it kills critical thinking and understanding what a computer is. And a guaranteed paycheck for people with the experience to clean up the resulting messes. I hope...

Coding will not be done by juniors anymore. We are quickly progressing to humans no longer needing to learn machine langauage (syntax) and computers better developing code by interpreting human languages (english). Teams will be led by one subject matter expert, and fulfilled by thousands of agents. I would not be advising anyone under 21 to become a "coder". Studying computer sceince still has value, but coding was…

I have a theory that all the people who truly believe this are either not software developers or have spent their whole career writing boring, cookie-cutter code.

I'm over here trying to play with bleeding edge tech and push some boundaries. I keep trying to get LLMs to help me and they keep letting me down.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#149

Post by colechristensen » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 12:59 AM UTC

esalman wrote: post #77

colechristensen wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Every time I've tried to get LLMs to create something they quickly get to the point where they fail miserably. It can do boilerplate, it can do straightforward things which have been done a billion times, it can come up with 50 ideas 10 of which are decent and not obvious... but it can't go beyond a certain complexity, it can't use mildly obscure libraries, it can't get major versions of libraries straight, it invent…

> One of the biggest wastes of human talent is corporations hiring people to solve the same problems over and over and over. It's not the same human who is doing the same thing over and over though. I have a toddler. He's learning addition and substraction now. I could had him a calculator or LLM and let him skip the entire learning process and do something productive instead. I don't. Because it'll destroy his criti…

that's not the level i'm talking about

more "everybody who wants toast is designing their own toaster"

the actual business logic is making up a tiny proportion of work done while everybody spends most of their time plumbing frameworks and libraries together to do substantially similar things

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#150

Post by johnnyanmac » Thu, Apr 24, 2025, 10:48 AM UTC

alabastervlog wrote: post #123

3np wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can and should audit your dependencies.

I don't think I've ever seen that actually happen, if you mean reading a meaningful amount of the dep's code. How many teams importing React have even one member who's ever read even a dozen key paths & files in the React codebase? Think it's more than 10%? I'd bet it's closer to 1% than 10%, of teams on which even one member has done that, ever. Do they check the diff for every update? Shit, IME you're lucky if a si…

Like any legacy code, understanding the codebase does not mean reading and memorizing every line in the repo. It's a sense of understanding the rough data flow, then having more intimate understandings of the functions you need at that moment.

Unlike "vibes" there should always be a sense of purpose on why each function is needed and what you plan to do with the output, even if in some cases you treat hat function like a black box in terms of implementation (which IMO should be avoided, but situations may make the implementation above your understanding).