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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

#21

Post by adamddev1 »

adlpz wrote: post #9
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 think it's become a running theme: senior devs who have been coding for a while now are able to extract value from these tools because, even if you don't know Rust, you know how to code . BS code smells the same in any language. Beginner devs don't even know what smelling means.

Maybe this is the answer to the ageism problem people have complained about in tech.

In the land of vibe-coders, the old man is king.

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

#22

Post by A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 »

adlpz wrote: post #5

I thought this was going to be yet another post about how AI is ruining Junior devs so we'll have a Senior replacement crysis in a few years. It sort of is, indirectly, and I agree with pretty much everything. But the bit about sycophancy was particularly enlightening. I actually thought "plain" ChatGPT-like interfaces could be good for learning. But the Youtube ROAS example is really powerful. If the student can ske…

I think I agree. From personal experience, even when I ask for scathing critique, the need to placate and make me feel better seems to bleed through ( both on 4o and 5 as far as I could tell ). I am not sure what to make of it.

We go back to this original prediction that the tool will help those, who both want help and are painfully aware of LLMs peculiar issues.

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

#23

Post by theobeers »

“If AI doesn’t literally take all the white-collar jobs over the next few years, we won’t just have a stock market bubble to deal with. We’ll have a drought of educated workers.”

Indeed. For me this feels like an “I saw the best minds of my generation” moment.

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

#24

Post by Jianghong94 »

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”.…

OR problems are hard because whoever try to vibe coding it probably don't realize they fall into a specific algorithm and can prompt llm to do thatl; what's worse is that even if you tell them so they won't be able to understand the math behind it and would much prefer their vide coding solution.

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

#25

Post by crazygringo »

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”.…

> 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 code.

And you can include things like performance testing in tests as well.

We're moving to a world where we work with definitions and tests and are less concerned with the precise details of how code is written within functions. Which is a big shift in mindset.

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

#26

Post by jasonthorsness »

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”.…

"But we have exactly the same number of reviewers."

LLMs can help with reviews as well. LLMs are not too bad at reviewing code; GPT 5 for example can find off-by-one, missed returns, all sorts of problems that are localized. I think they have a harder time with issues requiring a higher-level global understanding. I wonder if in the future you could fine-tune an LLM on a big codebase (maybe nightly or something) and it could be the first-level reviewer for all changes to that codebase.

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

#28

Post by verelo »

crazygringo wrote: post #25
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”.…

> 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…

I’ve been criticized for this by my coworkers in the past, but I strongly believe that this is generally true and has been for quite a while. Developers, myself included, like to think their code is special, set in stone and going to last forever. Most the code we write struggles to live a few years yet we treat all of it like it’s going to last forever. I’ve been an advocate for flipping that and treating it like our code will not last long, and when we identify the components that will, going back and optimizing them.

I’m pretty confident that most developers, again including myself, just really enjoy knowing something is done well. Being able to separate yourself from the code and fixate solely on the outcomes can sometimes get me past this.

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

#29

Post by Waterluvian »

> feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch.

I had a deep rooted emotional response to this. One of the most gruelling and somewhat distressing experiences of learning to program was going through a tutorial, kind of getting it, then trying to make my own spin of the same idea and getting completely stuck.

But I’m also convinced that this gruelling process was the highest density learning I’ve ever done. I’ve learned much more since then, and a lot of considerably more complex things. But I’ve never matched the same density of learning.

The closest was probably high school math. That deeply uncomfortable “this hurts my brain and is stressing me out” feeling that I suspect isn’t normal for everyone.

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