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We're all CTO now

jamie.ideasasylum.com

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Re: We're all CTO now

#21

Post by sokoloff »

StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the more interesting question is whether you without AI can outperform you using AI, not whether you can outperform someone else who is using AI. I think AI has already gotten to a point to where it can help skilled devs be more productive.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

That makes sense. It’s also step 1 in your journey.

Maybe taking the AI code as input and refactoring it heavily will result in a better step 2 than your previous step 0 was.

Re: We're all CTO now

#22

Post by dgfitz »

noitpmeder wrote: post #13
hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #6

>And with those new skills, your old skills will start to atrophy. Skills don't work like muscles, please stop with this thinking model of the world. No one is going to fire you because you don't have the same speed of recall of language constructs and have to look more things up. Speed of coding is not the damn bottleneck. Plus have a little faith in your brain that you could get back to that point if you wanted to.

This is absolutely not true. Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads. If people stop manually coding their ability to do so WILL atrophy. Take away the coding agents and you'll s…

> Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days.

Surely you realize this is the problem. I just landed a mid 6-figures job _without_ grinding leetcode. They’re out there. This game everyone plays is an abomination.

Re: We're all CTO now

#23

Post by artursapek »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #18
artursapek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents are definitely more useful than Google and SO… have you tried pair programming with Claude 4 Opus and building something? It’s amazing.

I have, and it does a mediocre to poor job, even at trivial tasks using popular stacks and languages. IME, one most either start with a green field, or babysit every step with/as an expert, or both. Perhaps I've just been unlucky or my projects have too much debt.

I’ve used it greenfield and with existing indebted codebases and it’s remarkably good at both. You have to give it a good amount of context but that goes for a human worker too. I think devs who get bad results from AI generally prefer to be the ones coding and not managing and maybe take their own context for granted.

Re: We're all CTO now

#24

Post by [deleted] »

hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #6

>And with those new skills, your old skills will start to atrophy. Skills don't work like muscles, please stop with this thinking model of the world. No one is going to fire you because you don't have the same speed of recall of language constructs and have to look more things up. Speed of coding is not the damn bottleneck. Plus have a little faith in your brain that you could get back to that point if you wanted to.

[deleted]

Re: We're all CTO now

#25

Post by mrbluecoat »

StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10
sokoloff wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To me, the more interesting question is whether you without AI can outperform you using AI, not whether you can outperform someone else who is using AI. I think AI has already gotten to a point to where it can help skilled devs be more productive.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

Clearly this affected you deeply enough to create a new HN crusade account. Genuinely curious questions: Did you share this experience with management and your peers? What was their response? What steps could realistically reverse the momentum of vibe coding?

Re: We're all CTO now

#26

Post by fguerraz »

Interesting that the author didn’t use AI to proofread his post. He’s not interested in coding very much but the English language doesn’t seem to be his forte either.

Author, if you’re reading this, “let’s” => “lets” (2 occurrences).

Re: We're all CTO now

#27

Post by skydhash »

noitpmeder wrote: post #13
hnthrow90348765 wrote: post #6

>And with those new skills, your old skills will start to atrophy. Skills don't work like muscles, please stop with this thinking model of the world. No one is going to fire you because you don't have the same speed of recall of language constructs and have to look more things up. Speed of coding is not the damn bottleneck. Plus have a little faith in your brain that you could get back to that point if you wanted to.

This is absolutely not true. Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads. If people stop manually coding their ability to do so WILL atrophy. Take away the coding agents and you'll s…

There’s a difference between not learning something, and not using something after learning it. For the latter the relearning process is fast. And often it may only requires a few hours of practices. There’s such thing as long term memory.

Re: We're all CTO now

#28

Post by StopVibeCoding »

sokoloff wrote: post #21
StopVibeCoding wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have tested this. I have been coding for close to 20 years, in anything from web to embedded. I got tired of hearing about vibe coding day in and day out, so I gave in, and I tried everything under the sun. For the first few days, I started to see the hype. I was much faster at coding, I thought, I can just type this small prompt to the LLM and it will do what I wanted, much faster than I could have. It worked! I d…

That makes sense. It’s also step 1 in your journey. Maybe taking the AI code as input and refactoring it heavily will result in a better step 2 than your previous step 0 was.

it makes me feel like an absolute beginner, and not in a good way. It was such a terrible experience that I don't believe I will try this again for at least a year. If this is what programming will become in the future, then feel free to call me a luddite, because I will only write hand crafted code.

Re: We're all CTO now

#29

Post by hobs »

dgfitz wrote: post #22
noitpmeder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is absolutely not true. Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Sure someone won't fire you because you can't balance a binary tree by hand, but it certainly might exclude you from getting that next job, regardless of if it applies to their day to day workloads. If people stop manually coding their ability to do so WILL atrophy. Take away the coding agents and you'll s…

> Think of all the studying that is required before applying to tech jobs these days. Surely you realize this is the problem. I just landed a mid 6-figures job _without_ grinding leetcode. They’re out there. This game everyone plays is an abomination.

Right, but are you going to fix it by yourself? No. Is the point correct that most people wont remember half of the arcane rituals we're expected to perform on command only in an interview or in very specific parts of the job? Yes. Can we relearn it? Sure. Will skills atrophy if unused? Definitely, balancing a binary tree is not like riding a bike.

Re: We're all CTO now

#30

Post by XenophileJKO »

paulryanrogers wrote: post #18
artursapek wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agents are definitely more useful than Google and SO… have you tried pair programming with Claude 4 Opus and building something? It’s amazing.

I have, and it does a mediocre to poor job, even at trivial tasks using popular stacks and languages. IME, one most either start with a green field, or babysit every step with/as an expert, or both. Perhaps I've just been unlucky or my projects have too much debt.

I agree with the other reply. This is a tool like any other and it takes skill and practice to use it effectively. I'm learning how best to create and persist architectural guidance.

For example giving it a meta process to follow before making an edit. I've also had the models keep a document of architecture and architecture decisions.

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