'Learning must be uncomfortable' - this is the key reason there are some professions which pay more than others. Some people are willing to bear the mental discomfort while others aren't. A lot of people are far more willing to bear physical discomfort but that's almost never monetarily rewarded.
"Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
41–50 of 169 posts
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#42I tried to find a representative phrase in the article that would make a good replacement for the baity title*, but I didn't find one, so I did a best guess. If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again.
* in keeping with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#43Organizations now generate 10x the amount of code, because everyone can do it. But we have exactly the same number of reviewers. How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Like literally yesterday I had a not-technical person who used codex to build an optimization algorithm, and due to the momentum it gained I was asked to “fix the rough edges and help with scaling”.…
> How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Unit testing. LLM's are very good at writing tests and writing code that is testable (as long as you ask it), and if you just check that the tests are actually calling the code and doing so with all the obvious edge cases and that the results are correct, that's actually quite fast to review -- faster than reviewing the cod…
The only way this might work (IMO) is writing the tests yourself (but of course, this requires you to plan and design very meticulously in advance) and doing some kind of “blind TDD” where the LLM is not able to see the tests, only run them and act on the results. Even then, I’ve had Claude (Opus 4.1) bypass tests by hardcoding conditions as it found them so I’d say reliability for this method is not 100%.
Having the LLM write the tests is… well, a recipe for destruction unless you babysit it and give it extremely specific restrictions (again, I’ve done this in mid to large sized projects with fairly comprehensive documentation on testing conventions and results have been mixed: sometimes the LLM does an okay job but tests obvious things, sometimes it ignores the instructions, sometimes it hardcodes or disables conditions…)
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#44I thought this was going to be yet another post about how AI is ruining Junior devs so we'll have a Senior replacement crysis in a few years. It sort of is, indirectly, and I agree with pretty much everything. But the bit about sycophancy was particularly enlightening. I actually thought "plain" ChatGPT-like interfaces could be good for learning. But the Youtube ROAS example is really powerful. If the student can ske…
> But the bit about sycophancy was particularly enlightening.
I always try to stay above this by prompting the question twice, with the opposite biases. But I of course don't know, which hidden biases I have that the LLM still reinforces.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#45I'm biased as I've not been a beginner dev for nearly 20 years, however I have found Copilot is pretty helpful for is learning Rust. In combination with Intellisense, it helps ease some of the mental overhead of the syntax, letting me focus on learning the important bits of the language. It helped me go from opening up a book on Rust to having a working tool in about a week. I won't pretend that it's turned me into a…
I think it's become a running theme: senior devs who have been coding for a while now are able to extract value from these tools because, even if you don't know Rust, you know how to code . BS code smells the same in any language. Beginner devs don't even know what smelling means.
Seniors being able to extract more from any new tool is a time proven constant. That hasn't changed.
What happened is that companies tried to push an idea that this new AI thing would be inhospitable to whoever is already an experienced programmer. The idea of "new land", fair and equal to all. Smelling woudn't matter, because all smells would be new and unfamiliar.
After insisting on this silly mistake for a while, they realized that experienced programmers were actually their only viable target audience, and attempted to change their approach accordingly. It's embarassing.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#46Earlier quoted context omitted.
> How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Unit testing. LLM's are very good at writing tests and writing code that is testable (as long as you ask it), and if you just check that the tests are actually calling the code and doing so with all the obvious edge cases and that the results are correct, that's actually quite fast to review -- faster than reviewing the cod…
I’ve been criticized for this by my coworkers in the past, but I strongly believe that this is generally true and has been for quite a while. Developers, myself included, like to think their code is special, set in stone and going to last forever. Most the code we write struggles to live a few years yet we treat all of it like it’s going to last forever. I’ve been an advocate for flipping that and treating it like ou…
I think this is true for the edges, but if you build on top of software that's not done well, it's a bad time.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#47Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…
You learn by doing and thinking. Not reading and watching. Pure and simple.
Yes, but even if we all agree the problem with education at scale remains - there is a very finite and limited amount of 'attention' from craftsmen/masters to distribute, which limits the amount of apprentices.
The alternative has been to massify education for 'students' (not apprentices) in passive lectures with 'exercises/homework', which does not work as well for most things and particularly for crafts.
BTW for a very minor portion of the population the 'student' route is just as effective as the 'apprentice' route, but these are in my experience the exception
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#48Disclaimer: I use Zed Pro and GPT daily to code. I have been coding for money since 1989. I view the rise of these tools and particularly efficacy in programming as an indictment against modern programming. The modern web is both amazing and horrific. If bureaucratic is "using or connected with many complicated rules and ways of doing things" (Britannica), then modern programming may be the ultimate poster child. Sur…
A few more speculative years, there will be no programming left.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#49Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…
Creating new projects from scratch can trip up even experienced professional developers because in most jobs you come in, work an existing codebase, and iterate. Even if you need a new service or app, you often start with a copy-paste or a common template. When the team needs something more new, usually there's just one person who sets that up. Setting up the whole project from scratch and making all the 0-to-1 choices is much less common.
An apprentice model doesn't really change that. Your average electrician gets called to many more "here's new construction that we're wiring from scratch" jobs than your average corporate engineer gets "we need to set up a new project from scratch without copying any of our existing files or folders."
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#50Organizations now generate 10x the amount of code, because everyone can do it. But we have exactly the same number of reviewers. How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Like literally yesterday I had a not-technical person who used codex to build an optimization algorithm, and due to the momentum it gained I was asked to “fix the rough edges and help with scaling”.…
> How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Unit testing. LLM's are very good at writing tests and writing code that is testable (as long as you ask it), and if you just check that the tests are actually calling the code and doing so with all the obvious edge cases and that the results are correct, that's actually quite fast to review -- faster than reviewing the cod…
Doesn't work if black box. You still have to inspect code performing the operation