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

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

#331

Post by ActorNightly »

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…

Its really becoming a good litmus test for how someones coding ability whether they think LLMS can do well on complex tasks.

For example, someone may ask an LLM to write a simple http web server, and it can do that fine, and they consider that complex, when in reality its really not.

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

#332

Post by bovermyer »

Interacting with LLMs like Copilot has been most interesting for me when I treat it like a rubber duck.

I will have a conversation with the agent. I will present it with a context, an observed behavior, and a question... often tinged with frustration.

What I get out of this interaction at the end of it is usually a revised context that leads me figure out a better outcome. The AI doesn't give me the outcome. It gives me alternative contexts.

On the other hand, when I just have AI write code for me, I lose my mental model of the project and ultimately just feel like I'm delaying some kind of execution.

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

#333

Post by GoatInGrey »

dev_l1x_be wrote: post #225
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…

Well one way of solving this is to keep giving it simple tasks.

The other side of this coin are the non-developer stakeholders who Dunning-Kruger themselves into firm conclusions on technical subjects with LLMs. "Well I can code this up in an hour, two max. Why is it taking you ten hours?". I've (anecdotally) even had project sponsors approach me with an LLM's judgement on their working relationship with me as if it were gospel like "It said that we aren't on the same page. We need to get aligned." It gets weird.

These cases are common enough to where it's more systemic than isolated.

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

#334

Post by xnx »

jrm4 wrote: post #64
orev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

I like this analogy along with the idea that "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit." Here's the thing -- I don't care about "getting stronger." I want to make things, and now I can make bigger things WAY faster because I have a mech suit. edit: and to stretch the analogy, I don't believe much is lost "intellectually" by my use of a mech suit, as long as I observe carefully. Me doing things by hand is probab…

> "it's not an autonomous robot, it's a mech suit."

Or "An [electric] bicycle for the mind." Steve Jobs/simonw

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

#335

Post by user____name »

vidarh wrote: post #159
jillesvangurp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you as a teacher teach might have to adapt a bit. Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code. Most academic computer scientists aren't necessarily very skilled as programmers in any case. At least, I learned most of that after I stopped being an academic myself (Ph. D. and all). This is OK. Learning to program is more of a side effect of studying computer science than it is a core goal (…

> A good analogy here is programming in assembler. Manually crafting programs at the machine code level was very common when I got my first computer in the 1980s. Especially for games. By the late 90s that had mostly disappeared. Indeed, a lot of us looked with suspicion and disdain at people that used those primitive compilers that generated awful, slow code. I once spent ages hand-optimizing a component that had be…

> These days most programmers don't know assembler, and increasingly don't know languaes as low level as C either. And the world didn't fall apart.

Maybe the world didn't fall apart, but user interactions on a desktop pc feel slower than ever. So perhaps they should.

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

#336

Post by WarmWash »

jasondigitized wrote: post #284
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 feel like I am taking crazy pills. I am getting code that works from Opus 4.5. It seems like people are living in two separate worlds.

I can't help but think of my earliest days of coding, 20ish years ago, when I would post my code online looking for help on a small thing, and being told that my code is garbage and doesn't work at all even if it actually is working.

There are many ways to skin a cat, and in programming the happens-in-a-digital-space aspect removes seemingly all boundaries, leading to fractal ways to "skin a cat".

A lot of programmers have hard heads and know the right way to do something. These are the same guys who criticized every other senior dev as being a bad/weak coder long before LLMs were around.

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

#337

Post by threethirtytwo »

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 think it’s usage patterns. It is you in a sense.

You can’t deny the fact that someone like Ryan dhal creator of nodejs declared that he no longer writes code is objectively contrary to your own experience. Something is different.

I think you and other deniers try one prompt and then they see the issues and stop.

Programming with AI is like tutoring a child. You teach the child, tell it where it made mistakes and you keep iterating and monitoring the child until it makes what you want. The first output is almost always not what you want. It is the feedback loop between you and the AI that cohesively creates something better than each individual aspect of the human-AI partnership.

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

#338

Post by threethirtytwo »

ActorNightly wrote: post #331
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…

Its really becoming a good litmus test for how someones coding ability whether they think LLMS can do well on complex tasks. For example, someone may ask an LLM to write a simple http web server, and it can do that fine, and they consider that complex, when in reality its really not.

It’s not. There are tons of great programmers, that are big names in the industry who now exclusively vibe code. Many of these names are obviously intelligent and great programmers.

This is an extremely false statement.

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

#339

Post by the_af »

Mashimo wrote: post #326
kaydub wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Copilot sucks. Copilot is like a barely better intellisense/auto-complete, especially when it came out. It was novel and cool back then but it has been vastly surpassed by other tools.

> Copilot is like a barely better intellisense/auto-complete As I have never tried Claude Code, I can't say how much better it is. But Copilot is definitely more then auto-complete. Like I already wrote, it can do Planning mode, edit mode, mcp, tool calling, web searches.

Yeah, same. I have never tried Claude Code but use Claude through the Copilot plugin, and it's NOT auto-complete. It can analyze and refactor code, write new code, etc.

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

#340

Post by lucianbr »

nosianu wrote: post #255
WalterBright wrote: post #224

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote code in a spiral notebook because the mainframe was not available to me at home.

(U880 - GDR Z80 8 bit CPU clone) I wrote assembler on pages of paper. Then I used tables, and a calculator for the two's-complement relative negative jumps, to manually translate it into hex code. Then I had software to type in such hex dumps and save them to audio cassette, from which I could then load them for execution. I did not have an assembler for my computer. I had a disassembler though- manually typed it in…

Real programmers just use a magnetized needle to flip bits on the HDD platter.
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