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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

#161

Post by mattgreenrocks »

password54321 wrote: post #147
mattgreenrocks wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I see. You are correct. Wrong is merely feedback on something outside of us, not a value judgment of us as people. But education and other systems need us to believe the latter at some low level so they can retain authority.

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

#162

Post by theshrike79 »

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…

I've worked on very VERY brown field projects for 25 years, no green in sight, so I actually have no clue how to bootstrap many of the languages I use professionally (Java + C#) :D

Maybe that's why I like LLM-enhanced programming, I can use it to get the project up to speed and I'm perfectly capable of taking over after that. I'm not that precious about the scaffolding used to bring the project up.

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

#163

Post by theshrike79 »

tremon wrote: post #154
sph wrote: post #150

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

(the actual full stack, not whatever kids mean these days) Can you clarify what that means to you? The full stack of modern web solutions spans from datacenter hardware selection to client device PCB design, and I don't think any single person can realistically manage all of that by themselves.

I think "modern fullstack" is knowing React/Svelte/whatever frontend tech and being able to plug that in to Firebase or some all-in-one backend system that provides everything from user management to databases and messaging.

They wouldn't be able to spin up a RabbitMQ queue and Postgres on bare metal.

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

#164

Post by theshrike79 »

65 wrote: post #132
rhetocj23 wrote: post #130

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My point is reading does not provide substantial value, it provides barely any because you have to net out the opportunity cost of time spent reading. The gains are realised when you think and do something with the information consumed. Therefore reading and watching are not the key to success.

Perhaps we're considering reading with different perspectives. Reading a novel? Yeah sure. Reading documentation just to read it? Sure. But it's essentially impossible to learn without information about a subject. How do you suppose someone learn programming without reading documentation? Without reading code examples? This is active reading compared to passive reading, such as reading a novel.

Let's take two hypothetical people:

One reads all of the C++ spec from cover to cover. Remembers every single word of it, doesn't write a line of code.

One just starts fumbling around, writing code, reading just enough docs to get where they need to go.

Which one is the better programmer?

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

#165

Post by theshrike79 »

rmonvfer wrote: post #43
crazygringo wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Unit testing. LLM's are very good at writing tests and writing code that is testable (as long as you ask it), and if you just check that the tests are actually calling the code and doing so with all the obvious edge cases and that the results are correct, that's actually quite fast to review -- faster than reviewing the cod…

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…

Most unit tests aren't that complicated.

You take the smallest value and biggest value, do they work?

Take something in the middle, does that work?

Get the smallest and make it even smaller, does it break?

Get the biggest value, make it bigger, does it break?

GOTO 10

And when you got the pattern down, checking the rest is mostly just copying and pasting with different values on "smallest" and "biggest".

Something an LLM is very very good at.

Also you should always use another LLM to critique your primary one (or the same LLM with a clear context). I've found that gpt-5-high is VERY good at finding subtle bugs Claude will never catch. It can fix them immediately when I give it the Codex commentary though.

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

#166

Post by 0x457 »

Muvasa wrote: post #95
0x457 wrote: post #94

Tutorial hell...if I had a dollar for every "Anyone has a tutorial on how to build X" where X is some very specific business idea. I feel the same about "what books do you recommend reading to learn Y" Have you tried looking at the online documentation? Usually see it from people that have formal CS education. They learned one way to learn things and refuse to adapt to real life.

Documentation is not meant for learning. It's to be used as a reference. It's like learning medicine by reading a medical dictionary.

Yes, and? You can definitely learn how to do something by reading relevant references.

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

#167

Post by Muvasa »

0x457 wrote: post #166
Muvasa wrote: post #95

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Documentation is not meant for learning. It's to be used as a reference. It's like learning medicine by reading a medical dictionary.

Yes, and? You can definitely learn how to do something by reading relevant references.

How would you go about it. Let's say I want to learn how to do x in library y. How am I gonna find x. When library y has it's own idiosyncraties. In the library the concept is named differently so searching through the documentation yields nothing. Let's say you find what you are looking for. You read the documentation. And it makes no sense like if I was learning haskell and I searched for a monad and got "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors". It's a ineficient process.

Documentation is the most helpful when you already know something and want to learn the specifics. Or when you are already using something and have an issue and want to figure out why.

EDIT: Another issue I just came up. Structure is very important. It's good to know how to sum before how to multiply. It's so important having a hand crafted pathway leads to rapid success like MathAcademy does.

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

#168

Post by 0x457 »

Muvasa wrote: post #167
0x457 wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, and? You can definitely learn how to do something by reading relevant references.

How would you go about it. Let's say I want to learn how to do x in library y. How am I gonna find x. When library y has it's own idiosyncraties. In the library the concept is named differently so searching through the documentation yields nothing. Let's say you find what you are looking for. You read the documentation. And it makes no sense like if I was learning haskell and I searched for a monad and got "a monad i…

To be clear, that is not the way I'd recommend for someone with zero knowledge in software development. The assumption is that you understand something, just not this language/library. I don't think following a tutorial is a good way to learn anything besides doing this very specific thing in a tutorial. You won't learn things like how to consume documentation and evaluate libraries, which is IMO required to develop anything there isn't a tutorial for.

Maybe use libraries (and language) with better docs? I don't know much about Haskell beyond fixing other people outdated software, but I was able to do these fixes without watching any tutorials and reading books, just by reading docs.

If I were to build web service in rust, Google would lead me to axum, and https://docs.rs/axum/latest/axum/ pretty much gives me everything I need to know to get started.

Then I will want to add some sort of CLI to start that service, clap.rs docs are pretty clear. Then I will want some configuration management, I will search crates.io for crates providing such functionality and evaluate how they work (by reading the documentation), pick one and implement.

When I wanted to build an android tv app, I've read android docs and built it. If I were in tutorial hell, I'd google for "building android tv reddit client" and not found any.

Decided to build a small macOS tray app for myself? A few minutes reading the official docs, and I'm ready to start.

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

#169

Post by rcbdev »

theshrike79 wrote: post #163
tremon wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(the actual full stack, not whatever kids mean these days) Can you clarify what that means to you? The full stack of modern web solutions spans from datacenter hardware selection to client device PCB design, and I don't think any single person can realistically manage all of that by themselves.

I think "modern fullstack" is knowing React/Svelte/whatever frontend tech and being able to plug that in to Firebase or some all-in-one backend system that provides everything from user management to databases and messaging. They wouldn't be able to spin up a RabbitMQ queue and Postgres on bare metal.

Please, don't ever spin up a PostgreSQL instance for a client on bare-metal in $CURRENT_YEAR. Some jerk-off did that for a current customer of mine, and now they're having issues with their migration from SUSE to RHEL in production.

Also, this dick measuring contest on who is the fullest-stack developer sounds ridiculous.

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