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After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

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Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#141

Post by orev »

jrm4 wrote: post #64
orev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

I like this analogy along with the idea that "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit." Here's the thing -- I don't care about "getting stronger." I want to make things, and now I can make bigger things WAY faster because I have a mech suit. edit: and to stretch the analogy, I don't believe much is lost "intellectually" by my use of a mech suit, as long as I observe carefully. Me doing things by hand is probab…

The point of going to school is to learn all the details of what goes into making things, so when you actually make a thing, you understand how it’s supposed to come together, including important details like correct design that can support the goal, etc. That’s the “getting stronger” part that you can’t skip if you expect to be successful. Only after you’ve done the work and understand the details can you be successful using the power tools to make things.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#142

Post by asadjb »

simonw wrote: post #9

> Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. That's your job. The great thing about coding agents is that you can tell them "change of design: all API interactions need to go through a new single class that does authentication and retries and rate-limit throttl…

Unfortunately I have started to feel that using AI to code - even with a well designed spec, ends up with code that; in the authors words, looks like

> [Agents write] units of changes that look good in isolation.

I have only been using agents for coding end-to-end for a few months now, but I think I've started to realise why the output doesn't feel that great to me.

Like you said; "it's my job" to create a well designed code base.

Without writing the code myself however, without feeling the rough edges of the abstractions I've written, without getting a sense of how things should change to make the code better architected, I just don't know how to make it better.

I've always worked in smaller increments, creating the small piece I know I need and then building on top of that. That process highlights the rough edges, the inconsistent abstractions, and that leads to a better codebase.

AI (it seems) decides on a direction and then writes 100s of LOC at one. It doesn't need to build abstractions because it can write the same piece of code a thousand times without caring.

I write one function at a time, and as soon I try to use it in a different context I realise a better abstraction. The AI just writes another function with 90% similar code.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#143

Post by dylanowen »

sailfast wrote: post #33

I felt everything in this post quite emphatically until the “but I’m actually faster than the AI.” Might be my skills but I can tell you right now I will not be as fast as the AI especially in new codebases or other languages or different environments even with all the debugging and hell that is AI pull request review. I think the answer here is fast AI for things it can do on its own, and slow, composed, human in th…

But those are the parts where it's important to struggle through the learning process even if you're slower than AI. if you defer to an LLM because it can do your work in a new codebase faster than you, that code base will stay new to you for forever. You'll never be able to review the AI code effectively.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#144

Post by bluGill »

stackedinserter wrote: post #126
bluGill wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even after school, you need to lift weights once in a while or you lose your ability. I wouldn't want to write raw bytes like Mel did though. Eventually some things are not worth getting good at.

Let's just accept that this weight lifting metaphor is leaky, like any other, and brings us to absurds like forklift operators need to lift dumbbells to keep relevant in their jobs.

Forklift operators need to do something to exercise. They sit in the seat all day. At least as a programmer I have a standing desk. This isn't relevant to the job though.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#145

Post by dionian »

simonw wrote: post #9

> Not only does an agent not have the ability to evolve a specification over a multi-week period as it builds out its lower components, it also makes decisions upfront that it later doesn’t deviate from. That's your job. The great thing about coding agents is that you can tell them "change of design: all API interactions need to go through a new single class that does authentication and retries and rate-limit throttl…

I agree, as a pretty experienced coder, I wonder if the newer generation is just rolling with the first shot. I find myself having the AI rewrite things a slightly different way 2-3x per feature or maybe even 10x. Because i know quality when i see it, having done so much by hand and so much reading.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#146

Post by xcodevn »

gowld wrote: post #125
xcodevn wrote: post #107

My observation is that vibe-coded applications are significantly lower quality than traditional software. Anthropic software (which they claim to be 90% vibe coded) is extremely buggy, especially the UI.

That's a misunderstanding based on loose definition of "vibe coding". When companies threw around the "90% of code is written by AI" claims, they were referring to counting characers of autocomplete basing on users actually typing code (most of which was eequivalent to "AI generated" code by Eclipse tab-completion decade ago), and sometimes writing hyperlocal prompts for a single method. We can identify 3 levels of "…

I believe Anthropic is already doing Level 3 vibe coding for >90% of their code.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#147

Post by kylehotchkiss »

leesec wrote: post #108

OK. Top AI labs have people using llms for 100% of their code. Enjoy writing by hand tho

"They got more VC than me, therefore they are right".

You gotta have a better argument than "AI Labs are eating their own dogfood". Are there any other big software companies doing that successfully? I bet yes, and think those stories carry more weight.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#148

Post by WorldMaker »

frankc wrote: post #46
orev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

I think this is a pretty solid analogy but I look at the metaphor this way - people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor. Because we invented things like the forklift we had to invent things like weightlifting to get strong instead. You can still get strong, you just need to be more deliberate about it. It doesn't mean shouldn't also use a forklift, which is its own distinct skill you al…

> people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor

I think that's a bit of a myth. The Greeks and Romans had weightlifting and boxing gyms, but no forklifts. Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators with the wealth and free time to lift weights and box and wrestle. One of the things that we know about the famous philosopher Plato was that Plato was essentially a nickname from wrestling (meaning "Broad") as a first career (somewhat like Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, which adds a fun twist to reading Socratic Dialogs or thinking about relationships as "platonic").

Arguably the "meritocratic ideal" of the Gladiator arena was that even "blue collar" Romans could compete and maybe survive. But even the stories that survive of that, few did.

There may be a lesson in that myth, too, that the people that succeed in some sports often aren't the people doing physical labor because they must do physical labor (for a job), they are the ones intentionally practicing it in the ways to do well in sports.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#149

Post by ecshafer »

I never really got onto "vibe coding". I treat AI as a better auto-complete that has stack overflow knowledge.

I am writing a game in Monogame, I am not primarily a game dev or a c sharp dev. I find AI is fantastic here for "Set up a configuration class for this project that maps key bindings" and have it handle the boiler plate and smaller configuration. Its great at give me an A start implementation for this graph. But when it becomes x -> y -> z without larger contexts and evolutions it falls flat. I still need creativity. I just don't worry too much about boiler plate, utility methods, and figuring out specifics of wiring a framework together.

Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

#150

Post by reedf1 »

dfajgljsldkjag wrote: post #84
reedf1 wrote: post #74

Karpathy coined the term vibecoding 11 months ago ( https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 ). It caused quite a stir - because not only was it was a radically new concept, but fully agentic coding had only become recently possible. You've been vibe coding for two years ??

The term was coined then, but people have been doing it with claude code and cursor and copilot and other tools for longer. They just didn't have a word for it yet.

Claude Code was released a month after this post - and cursor did not yet have an agent concept, mostly just integrated chat and code completion. I know because I was using it.
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