This is not my experience at all. Claude will ask me follow up questions if it has some. The claim that it goes full steam ahead on its original plan is false.
After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
381–390 of 652 posts
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#382I 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.
That is such a vague claim, that there is no contradiction.
Getting code to do exactly what, based on using and prompting Opus in what way?
Of course it works well for some things.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#383How 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…
same; I think codex with gpt5 changed things for me; then opus 4.5 turned out to be also useful (yet quite pricey)
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#384a lot of AI assisted development goes into project management and system design.
I have been tolerably successful. However, I have almost 30 years of coding experience, and have the judgement on how big a component should be - when I push that myself _or_ with AI, things go hairy.
ymmv.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#385OK. Top AI labs have people using llms for 100% of their code. Enjoy writing by hand tho
> Company that builds x says that everyone in company uses x.
Have people always been this easy to market to?
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#386Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
The point of going to school is to learn all the details of what goes into making things, so when you actually make a thing, you understand how it’s supposed to come together, including important details like correct design that can support the goal, etc. That’s the “getting stronger” part that you can’t skip if you expect to be successful. Only after you’ve done the work and understand the details can you be success…
The point of school for me was to get a degree. 99% of the time at school was useless. The internet was a much better learning resources. Even more so now that AI exists.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#387Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 Linu…
karpathy is biased. I wouldn't use his name as he's behind the whole vibe coding movement.
You have to pick people with nothing to gain. https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#388Earlier quoted context omitted.
"So why do you think a 10 kLoC vibecoded codebase will be any good engineering-wise?" I've been coding a side-project for a year with full LLM assistance (the project is quite a bit older than that). Basically I spent over a decade developing CAD software at Trimble and now have pivoted to a different role and different company. So like an addict, I of course wanted to continue developing CAD technology. I pretty muc…
Neat project, and your experience mirrors mine when writing hobby projects. About the project itself, do you plan to open source if eventually? LLM discussion aside, I've long been frustrated by the lack of a good free desktop 3D CAD software.
Thanks man!
I would love to build this eventually to a real product so am not currently considering open sourcing it.
I can give you a free foreverlicense if you would like to be an alpha tester though :) - but am considering in any case for the eventual non-commercial licenses to be affordable&forever.
IMHO what the world needs is a good textbook on how to build CAD software. Mäntylä’s ”Solid modeling” is almost 40 years old. CAD itself is pushing 60-70 years.
The highly non-trivial parts in my app are open source software anyways (you can check the attribution file) and what this contributes is just a specific, opinionated way of how a program like this should work in 2020’s.
What I _would_ like to eventually contribute is a textbook in how to build something like this - and after that re-implementation would be a matter of some investment to LLM inference, testing, and end-user empathy. But that would have to wait either for my financial independence, AI-communism or my retirement :)
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#389How 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…
I started doing it as soon as ChatGPT 3.5 was out. “Given this file tree and this method signature, implement the method”. The context was only 8k so you had to function by function. About two editor screens worth at a time.
Using an LLM to code isn't the same as vibe coding. Vibe coding, as originally coined, is not caring at all about the code or looking at the code. It was coined specifically to differentiate it from the type of AI-assisted coding you're talking about.
It's used more broadly now, but still to refer to the opposite end of the spectrum of AI-assisted coding to what you described.
Re: After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand
#390Earlier quoted context omitted.
I think this is a pretty solid analogy but I look at the metaphor this way - people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor. Because we invented things like the forklift we had to invent things like weightlifting to get strong instead. You can still get strong, you just need to be more deliberate about it. It doesn't mean shouldn't also use a forklift, which is its own distinct skill you al…
Weightlifting and weight training was invented long before forklifts. Even levers were not properly understood back then. My favorite historic example of typical modern hypertrophy-specific training is the training of Milo of Croton [1]. By legend, his father gifted him with the calf and asked daily "what is your calf, how does it do? bring it here to look at him" which Milo did. As calf's weight grew, so did Milo's…
> what is your calf, how does it do?
... it's a calf, dad, just like yesterday