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

Post by wvenable » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 5:28 PM UTC

disgruntledphd2 wrote: post #12

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…

> (And the automated test suite will help them confirm that the refactoring worked properly, because naturally you had them construct an automated test suite when they built those original features, right?) I dunno, maybe I have high standards but I generally find that the test suites generated by LLMs are both over and under determined. Over-determined in the sense that some of the tests are focused on implementatio…

Post by Verdex » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 5:29 PM UTC

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…

Post by jasondigitized » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 5:32 PM UTC

SCdF wrote: post #267

GolDDranks wrote: post #219

I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. The article starts with: > you give it a simple task. You’re impressed. So you give it a large task. You’re even more impressed. That has _never_ been the story for me. I've tried, and I've got some good pointers and hints where to go and what to try, a result of LLM's extensive if shallow reading, but in the sense of concrete problem solving or code/script writing, I'm _always_ di…

I am getting workable code with Claude on a 10kloc Typescript project. I ask it to make plans then execute them step by step. I have yet to try something larger, or something more obscure.

Post by vonneumannstan » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

goostavos wrote: post #189

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, li…

Post by steve_adams_86 » Mon, Jan 26, 2026, 5:33 PM UTC

yomismoaqui wrote: post #274

goostavos wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, li…

This the kind of interaction that makes be think that there are only 2 possible futures: Star Trek or Idiocracy.