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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

#391

Post by furyofantares »

koakuma-chan wrote: post #211
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…

GitHub Copilot came out with AI autocomplete 2-3 years ago I believe.

Using autocomplete is very much not "vibe coding".

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

#392

Post by abrahms »

Verdex wrote: post #269
tomtomtom777 wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree, and like to add, > It is hands down good for code which is laborious or tedious to write, but once done, obviously correct or incorrect (with low effort inspection). The problem here is, that it fills in gaps that shouldn't be there in the first place. Good code isn't laborious. Good code is small. We learn to avoid unnecessary abstractions. We learn to minimize "plumbing" such that the resulting code contai…

The quote that I heard (I think on HN) was, "If we had AIs to write XML for us then we never would have invented json." My biggest LLM success resulted in something operationally correct but was something that I would never want to try to modify. The LLM also had an increasingly difficult time adding features. Meanwhile my biggest 'manual' successes have resulted in something that was operationally correct, quick to…

This doesn't sound correct. We have computers write binary for us. We still make protocols which are optimizations for binary representation.. not because it's a pain to write.. but because there's some second order effect that we care about (storage / transfer costs, etc).

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

#393

Post by aerhardt »

I don't predict ever going back to writing code by hand except in specific cases, but neither do I "vibe code" - I still maintain a very close control on the code being committed and the overall software design.

It's crazy to me nevertheless that some people can afford the luxury to completely renounce AI-assisted coding.

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

#394

Post by periodjet »

Great engagement-building post for the author’s startup, blog, etc. Contrarian and just plausible enough.

I disagree though. There’s no good reason that careful use of this new form of tooling can’t fully respect the whole, respect structural integrity, and respect neighboring patterns.

As always, it’s not the tool.

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

#395

Post by Mashimo »

kaydub wrote: post #366
Mashimo wrote: post #326

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I just feel like using Copilot would be like early car designers trying to steer their new car with reins.

Have you used it recently?

Or any specific that caused this feeling

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

#396

Post by [deleted] »

crystal_revenge wrote: post #342
jasondigitized wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Parent's profile shows that they are an experienced software engineer in multiple areas of software development. Your own profile says you are a PM whose software skills amount to "Script kiddie at best but love hacking things together." It seems like the "separate worlds" you are describing is the impression of reviewing the code base from a seasoned engineer vs an amateur. It shouldn't be even a little surprising t…

[deleted]

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

#397

Post by gadflyinyoureye »

thesz wrote: post #85
frankc wrote: post #46

Earlier 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…

I looked up the weight of cows from that era. Only about 400 lbs. Seems doable.

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

#398

Post by HarHarVeryFunny »

reedf1 wrote: post #74

Karpathy coined the term vibecoding 11 months ago ( https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 ). It caused quite a stir - because not only was it was a radically new concept, but fully agentic coding had only become recently possible. You've been vibe coding for two years ??

The term was created by Karpathy, meaning one thing, but nowadays many people use the term to refer to any time they are asking AI to write code.

You don't need a "fully agentic" tool like Claude Code to write code. Any of the AI chatbots can write code too, obviously doing so better since the advent of "thinking" models, and RL post-training for coding. They also all have had built-in "code interpreter" functionality for about 2 years where they can not only write code but also run and test it in a sandbox, at least for Python.

Recently at least, the quality of code generation (at least if you are asking for something smallish) is good enough that cut and pasting chatbot output (e.g. C++, not Python) to compile and run yourself is still a productivity boost, although this was always an option.

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

#399

Post by CodeWriter23 »

My high school computer lab instructor would tell me when I was frustrated that my code was misbehaving, "It's doing exactly what you're telling it to do".

Once I mastered the finite number of operations and behaviors, I knew how to tell "it" what to do and it would work. The only thing different about vibe coding is the scale of operations and behaviors. It is doing exactly what you're telling it to do. And also expectations need to be aligned. Don't think you can hand over architecture and design to the LLM; that's still your job. The gain is, the LLM will deal with the proper syntax, api calls, etc. and work as a reserach tool on steroids if you also (from another mentor later in life) ask good questions.

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

#400

Post by dudeinhawaii »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #378
threethirtytwo wrote: post #338

Earlier 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…

Funny, the last interview I watched with Karpathy he highlighted the way the AI/LLM was unable to think in a way that aligned with his codebase. He described vibe-coding a transition from Python to Rust but specifically called out that he hand-coded all of the python code due to weaknesses in LLM's ability to handle performant code. I'm pretty sure this was the last Dwarkesh interview with "LLMs as ghosts".
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