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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

#371
I hear a lot of "I am not a good enough coder..." "It has all the sum of human knowledge..."

That's a very bad way to look at these tools. They legit know nothing, they hallucinate APIs all the time.

The only value they have at least in my book is they type super fast.

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

#372

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

> 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. Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost? I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that…

A better way to put it is with this example: I put my symptoms into ChatGPT and it gives some generic info with a massive "not-medical-advice" boilerplate and refuses to give specific recommendations. My wife (an NP) puts in anonymous medical questions and gets highly specific med terminology heavy guidance.

That's all to say the learning curve with LLMs is how to say things a specific way to reliability get an outcome.

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

#373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

> 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. Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost? I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that…

These people are just the same charlatans and scammers you saw in the web3 sphere. Invoking Ryan Dahl as some sort of authority figure and not a tragic figure that sold his soul to VC companies is even more pathetic.

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

#374
I've never used an AI in agent mode (and have no particular plans to), but I do think they're nice for things like "okay, I have moved five fields from this struct into a new struct which I construct in the global setup function. go through and fix all the code that uses those fields". (deciding to move those fields into a new struct is something I do want to be doing myself though, as opposed to saying "refactor this code for me")

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

#375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 yo…

> 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. Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost? I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that…

it's not just writing code.

And maybe child is too simplistic of an analogy. It's more like working with a savant.

The type of thing you can tell AI to do is like this: You tell it to code a website... it does it, but you don't like the pattern.

Say, "use functional programming", "use camel-case" don't use this pattern, don't use that. And then it does it. You can leave it in the agent file and those instructions become burned into it forever.

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

#376

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost? I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that…

These people are just the same charlatans and scammers you saw in the web3 sphere. Invoking Ryan Dahl as some sort of authority figure and not a tragic figure that sold his soul to VC companies is even more pathetic.

Don't appreciate this comment. Calling me a charlatan is rude. He's not authority, but he has more credibility than you and most people on HN.

There is obvious division of ideas here. But calling one side stupid or referring to them as charlatans is outright wrong and biased.

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

#377

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Misusing a forklift might injure the driver and a few others; but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid, expose millions to fraud and theft, put innocent people in prison, or jeopardize the institutions of government. There is more than one kind of leverage at play here.

> but it is unlikely to bring down an entire electric grid Unless you happen to drive a forklift in a power plant. > expose millions to fraud and theft You can if you drive forklift in a bank. > put innocent people in prison You can use forklift to put several innocent people in prison with one trip, they have pretty high capacity. > jeopardize the institutions of government. It's pretty easy with a forklift, just tr…

The level of pettiness in this comment is through the roof. I love it.

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

#378

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

People use "vibe coding" to mean different things - some mean the original Karpathy "look ma, no hands!", feel the vibez, thing, and some just (confusingly) use "vibe coding" to refer to any use of AI to write code, including treating it as a tool to write small well-defined parts that you have specified, as opposed to treating it as a magic genie.

There also seem to be people hearing big names like Karpathy and Linus Torvalds say they are vibe coding on their hobby projects, meaning who knows what, and misunderstanding this as being an endorsement of "magic genie" creation of professional quality software.

Results of course also vary according to how well what you are asking the AI to do matches what it was trained on. Despite sometimes feeling like it, it is not a magic genie - it is a predictor that is essentially trying to best match your input prompt (maybe a program specification) to pieces of what it was trained on. If there is no good match, then it'll have a go anyway, and this is where things tend to fall apart.

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

#379

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'…

Completely disagree. It’s like telling typists that they need to hand write to truly understand their craft. Syntax is just a way of communicating a concept to the machine. We now have a new (and admitidly imperfect) way of doing that. New skills are going to be required. Computer science is going to have to adapt.

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

#380
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…

Vibe coding was coined less than a year ago: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

I was vibe coding in November 2024, before the term was coined. I think that is about as early as anyone was doing it, so 1.25 years ago. Cursor added its "agentic" mode around then, I think, but before that there was just "accept all" without looking at changes repeatedly.

I shipped a small game that way (https://love-15.com/) -- one that I've wished to make for a long time but wouldn't have been worth building other wise. It's tiny, really, but very niche -- despite being tiny, I hit brick walls multiple times vibing it, and had to take a few brief breaks from vibing to get it unstuck.

Claude Code was a step change after that, along with model upgrades, about 9 months ago. That size project has been doable as a vibe coded project since then without hitting brick walls.

All this to say I really doubt most claims about having been vibe coding for more than 9-15 months.

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