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

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

#141

Post by rcbdev » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 6:13 AM UTC

sph wrote: post #140

majormajor wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Creating new projects from scratch can trip up even experienced professional developers because in most jobs you come in, work an existing codebase, and iterate. Even if you need a new service or app, you often start with a copy-paste or a common template. When the team needs something more new, usually there's just one person who sets that up. Setting up the whole project from scratch and making all the 0-to-1 choic…

> Creating new projects from scratch can trip up even experienced professional developers because in most jobs you come in, work an existing codebase, and iterate. I’ve worked on greenfield projects for so long (15+ years at this point) that my experience is the exact opposite. The few times I’ve had to contribute to an existing code base was a painful experience of figuring out where everything is, and why everythin…

What are you doing, where you're solely working on greenfield projects? I remember a professor of mine saying something specifically on never trusting a Software Engineer that has never had to work on legacy code.

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

#142

Post by sph » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 6:16 AM UTC

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

> Reading and watching fills your brain [with dopamine] with whats possible

FTFY. Then you have to do it yourself, and none of that instant gratification comes. Tutorials are junk food that appear useful. Looking at one to solve a specific problem might help, trying to learn something by consuming an unspecified amount of hours watching randos with polished youtube videos is akin to scrolling TikTok and feeling you’re doing something useful.

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

#143

Post by physicsguy » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 7:11 AM UTC

majormajor wrote: post #49

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.…

Creating new projects from scratch can trip up even experienced professional developers because in most jobs you come in, work an existing codebase, and iterate. Even if you need a new service or app, you often start with a copy-paste or a common template. When the team needs something more new, usually there's just one person who sets that up. Setting up the whole project from scratch and making all the 0-to-1 choic…

When I worked at a startup (ans therefore where these skills are useful) and was interviewing, this was actually one of my questions - I’d ask people what they would do on setting up a new Python project. It is quite telling to learn who has never done anything from scratch (some people couldn’t even get as far as creating a Git repository) vs those who have done the full process and understand what “good” looks like. It wasn’t a “no hire” signal but it certainly set seniority.

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

#144

Post by jama211 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 7:22 AM 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 agree, however the model was clearly designed that the university considers first employment to be the apprenticeship and the university education to be rhetorical background education that makes it possible to follow and keep up in an apprenticeship. So really, the issue is companies don’t properly invest in training juniors… because they will leave after 2 years anyway… which is because they won’t provide them pay bumps equivalent to a change in position, which is also their fault, leading them to hire pricier individuals who just left another company looking for a pay bump instead. They pay the same in the end but trade individuals around pointlessly to do it, and have to retrain them on their software stack.

Kinda funny when you think about it.

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

#145

Post by simgt » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 7:28 AM UTC

lezojeda wrote: post #18

whatever1 wrote: post #16

Organizations now generate 10x the amount of code, because everyone can do it. But we have exactly the same number of reviewers. How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Like literally yesterday I had a not-technical person who used codex to build an optimization algorithm, and due to the momentum it gained I was asked to “fix the rough edges and help with scaling”.…

It's basically a scheme letting less scrupulous people offload work on others while at the same time making good impressions to manager, PMs and CEOs who want to automate our job and fire us.

PMs, POs and CEOs should have been the first jobs to automate in our industry. Nothing of what the vast majority of them do is based on evidence and verifiable facts, it's already all vibes anyway.

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

#146

Post by 1718627440 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 8:38 AM UTC

SoftTalker wrote: post #55

dehrmann wrote: post #10

> "I don’t understand the docs, anyone have a video?" As an experienced dev, I hate this trend. I don't need my hand held for 10 minutes; I need to see three specific lines of config that may or may not be somewhere in the video.

A video can be helpful to me in some cases. Demonstrating how to set up a project or run a utility that scaffolds something. Or even some basic coding idioms. But these should be focused and short, i.e. 5-10 minutes. Show one thing, maybe a couple of examples of common scenarios, and that's it.

How can that not be done in a tutorial showing you the shell prompt and the files you need to modify?

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

#147

Post by password54321 » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 10:48 AM UTC

mattgreenrocks wrote: post #109

password54321 wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That's what I mean. People are uncomfortable being wrong. We are taught from school that being wrong makes you less adequate.

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

#148

Post by f311a » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:18 PM UTC

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.

It made me dumb after a few years. Personally, I started to forget how to do things manually. I'm programming in 4 languages, and I literally forgot some of the syntax. It takes much more mental energy to type things quickly without assistance.

I've disabled it.

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

#149

Post by f311a » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:20 PM UTC

scott_w wrote: post #4

I'm biased as I've not been a beginner dev for nearly 20 years, however I have found Copilot is pretty helpful for is learning Rust. In combination with Intellisense, it helps ease some of the mental overhead of the syntax, letting me focus on learning the important bits of the language. It helped me go from opening up a book on Rust to having a working tool in about a week. I won't pretend that it's turned me into a…

I thought the same until I tried coding things manually in Rust. It was so hard to write Rust without any assistance. I turned off AI to learn things properly. It was an illusion that I know what I'm doing until I disabled AI.

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

#150

Post by sph » Sat, Oct 11, 2025, 12:35 PM UTC

rcbdev wrote: post #141

sph wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Creating new projects from scratch can trip up even experienced professional developers because in most jobs you come in, work an existing codebase, and iterate. I’ve worked on greenfield projects for so long (15+ years at this point) that my experience is the exact opposite. The few times I’ve had to contribute to an existing code base was a painful experience of figuring out where everything is, and why everythin…

What are you doing, where you're solely working on greenfield projects? I remember a professor of mine saying something specifically on never trusting a Software Engineer that has never had to work on legacy code.

I'm a full-stack consultant (the actual full stack, not whatever kids mean these days) and deliver "solutions" to clients. I've got my fair share of legacy code to maintain, don't worry. (I have this Django app I wrote 15 years ago that I should really port to Elixir which is my main thing these days - but there's no money in rewriting an entire application that's in production for that long)

Here's my 2 cents: take any advice on professional matters from someone that has never left academia with a heaping dose of salt.