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

atmoio.substack.com

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

#181

Post by mattjhall »

fsloth wrote: post #53
ncruces wrote: post #42

> The AI had simply told me a good story. Like vibewriting a novel, the agent showed me a good couple paragraphs that sure enough made sense and were structurally and syntactically correct. Hell, it even picked up on the idiosyncrasies of the various characters. But for whatever reason, when you read the whole chapter, it’s a mess. It makes no sense in the overall context of the book and the preceding and proceeding…

"So why do you think a 10 kLoC vibecoded codebase will be any good engineering-wise?" I've been coding a side-project for a year with full LLM assistance (the project is quite a bit older than that). Basically I spent over a decade developing CAD software at Trimble and now have pivoted to a different role and different company. So like an addict, I of course wanted to continue developing CAD technology. I pretty muc…

It’s amazing how often these miracle codebases that an AI has generated are always not open source.

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

#182

Post by vidarh »

bambax wrote: post #134
Quothling wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an external examiner for CS students in Denmark and I disagree with you. What we need in the industry is software engineers who can think for themselves, can interact with the business and understand it's needs, and, they need to know how computers work. What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them. I don't partic…

> That being said. I have no idea how you'd actually go about teaching students CS these days, considering a lot of them will probably use ChatGPT or Claude regardless of what you do. My son is in a CS school in France. They have finals with pen and paper, with no computer whatsoever during the exam; if they can't do that they fail. And these aren't multiple choice questions, but actual code that they have to write.

I had to do that too, in Norway. Writing C++ code with pen and paper and being told even trivial syntax errors like missing semicolons would be penalised was not fun.

This was 30 years ago, though - no idea what it is like now. It didn't feel very meaningful even then.

But there's a vast chasm between that and letting people use AI in an exam setting. Some middle ground would be nice.

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

#183

Post by acessoproibido »

asadjb wrote: post #142
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 desig…

I don't see why you can't use your approach of writing one function at a time, making it work in the context and then moving on with AI. Sure you can't tell it to do all that in one step but personally I really like not dealing with the boilerplate stuff and worrying more about the context and how to use my existing functions in different places

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

#184

Post by kaydub »

Quothling wrote: post #25
recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

I'm an external examiner for CS students in Denmark and I disagree with you. What we need in the industry is software engineers who can think for themselves, can interact with the business and understand it's needs, and, they need to know how computers work. What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them. I don't partic…

Ah, see, you're outside of the US.

In the US education has been bastardized into "job training"

Good workers don't really need to think in this paradigm.

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

#185

Post by pc86 »

kaydub wrote: post #175

How were you "vibe coding" 2 years ago? There's been such a massive leap in capabilities since claude code came out, which was middle/end of 2025. 2 years ago I MAYBE used an LLM to take unstructured data and give me a json object of a specific structure. Only about 1 year ago did I start using llms for ANY type of coding and I would generally use snippets, not whole codebases. It wasn't until September when I starte…

Typical blogspam clickbait of "I knew what LLMs were 2 years, but maybe didn't know the name for them, so we'll call that vibecoding."

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

#186

Post by stavros »

criddell wrote: post #68
recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

They don't always do the simple things well which is even more frustrating. I do Windows development and GDI stuff still confuses me. I'm talking about memory DC, compatible DC, DIB, DDB, DIBSECTION, bitblt, setdibits, etc... AIs also suck at this stuff. I'll ask for help with a relatively straightforward task and it almost always produces code that when you ask it to defend the choices it made, it finds problems, ap…

I'd prefer it to tell me it can't help me rather than write random code that I then have to spend time debugging.

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

#187

Post by dev1ycan »

I vibe coded for a while (about a year) it was just so terrible for my ability to do anything, it started becoming recurring that I couldn't control my timelines because I would get into a loop where I would keep asking AI to "fix" things I didn't actually understand and had no mental capacity to actually read 50k lines of LLM generated code compared to if I had done it from scratch so I would keep and keep going.

Or how I would start spamming SQL scripts and randomly at some point nuke all my work (happened more than once)... luckily at least I had backups regularly but... yeah.

I'm sorry but no, LLMs can't replace software engineers.

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

#188

Post by nonethewiser »

rich_sasha wrote: post #41

I came to "vibe coding" with an open mind, but I'm slowly edging in the same direction. It is hands down good for code which is laborious or tedious to write, but once done, obviously correct or incorrect (with low effort inspection). Tests help but only if the code comes out nicely structured. I made plenty of tools like this, a replacement REPL for MS-SQL, a caching tool in Python, a matplotlib helper. Things that…

The hardest part of coding has never been coding. It's been translating new business requirements into a specific implementation plan that works. Understanding what needs to be done, how things are currently working, and how to go from A to B.

You can't dispense with yourself in those scenarios. You have to read, think, investigate, break things down into smaller problems. But I employ LLM's to help with that all the time.

Granted, that's not vibe coding at all. So I guess we are pretty much in agreement up to this point. Except I still think LLMs speed up this process significantly, and the models and tools are only going to get better.

Also, there are a lot of developers that are just handed the implementation plan.

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

#189

Post by goostavos »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

AI is incredibly dangerous because it can do the simple things very well, which prevents new programmers from learning the simple things ("Oh, I'll just have AI generate it") which then prevents them from learning the middlin' and harder and meta things at a visceral level. I'm a CS teacher, so this is where I see a huge danger right now and I'm explicit with my students about it: you HAVE to write the code. You CAN'…

I had my first interview last week where I finally saw this in the wild. It was a student applying for an internship. It was the strangest interview. They had excellent textbook knowledge. They could tell you the space and time complexities of any data structure, but they couldn't explain anything about code they'd written or how it worked. After many painful and confusing minutes of trying to get them to explain, like, literally anything about how this thing on their resume worked, they finally shrugged and said that "GenAI did most of it."

It was a bizarre disconnect having someone be both highly educated and yet crippled by not doing.

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

#190

Post by WorldMaker »

asadjb wrote: post #142
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 desig…

The old classic mantra is "work smarter, not harder". LLMs are perfect for "work harder". They can produce bulk numbers of lines. They can help you brute force a problem space with more lines of code.

We expect the spec writing and prompt management to cover the "work smarter" bases, but part of the work smarter "loop" is hitting those points where "work harder" is about to happen, where you know you could solve a problem with 100s or 1000s of lines of code, pausing for a bit, and finding the smarter path/the shortcut/the better abstraction.

I've yet to see an "agentic loop" that works half as well as my well trained "work smarter loop" and my very human reaction to those points in time of "yeah, I simply don't want to work harder here and I don't think I need hundreds more lines of code to handle this thing, there has to be something smarter I can do".

In my opinion, the "best" PRs delete as much or more code than they add. In the cleanest LLM created PRs I've never seen an LLM propose a true removal that wasn't just "this code wasn't working according to the tests so I deleted the tests and the code" level mistakes.

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