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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

#411

Post by shimman »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #376
shimman wrote: post #373

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

No one called YOU a charlatan, get thicker skin because you are going to run into more and more people that absolutely hate these tools.

There is a reason why they struggle selling them and executives are force feeding them to their workers.

Charlatan is the perfect term for those that stand to make money selling half baked goods and forcing more mass misery upon society.

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

#412

Post by fsloth »

0xffff2 wrote: post #407
fsloth wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Fair enough. I was asking mostly because it looks like the current demo is Windows only. I'm trying to de-Windows my life before I'm forced onto Windows 11 and I imagine multi-platform support isn't a high priority for a personal project. I do wish you the best of luck though.

Yes, it's Windows only (mainly because testing multiple platforms as a solo dev is above my stamina).

Thank you!

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

#413

Post by ModernMech »

orev wrote: post #27
recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

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'…

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've been showing my students this video of a robot lifting weights to illustrate why they shouldn't use AI to do their homework. It's obvious to them the robot lifting weights won't make them stronger.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Be7WBGMo3Iw

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

#414

Post by ern_ave »

zephen wrote: post #311
Verdex wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

And a recent HN article had a bunch of comments lamenting that nobody ever uses XML any more, and talking about how much better it was than things like JSON. The only thing I think I learned from some of those exchanges was that xslt adherents are approximately as vocal as lisp adherents.

> a recent HN article had a bunch of comments lamenting that nobody ever uses XML any more

I still use it from time to time for config files that a developer has to write. I find it easier to read that JSON, and it supports comments. Also, the distinction between attributes and children is often really nice to have. You can shoehorn that into JSON of course, but native XML does it better.

Obviously, I would never use it for data interchange (e.g. SOAP) anymore.

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

#416

Post by JimmaDaRustla »

recursivedoubts wrote: post #8

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'…

It doesn't PREVENT them from learning anything - said properly, it lets developers become lazy and miss important learning opportunities. That's not AIs fault.

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

#417

Post by ModernMech »

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…

> It shouldn't be even a little surprising that your impression of the result is that the code is much better looking than the impression of a more experienced developer.

This really is it: AI produces bad to mediocre code. To someone who produces terrible code mediocre is an upgrade, but to someone who produces good to excellent code, mediocre is a downgrade.

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

#418

Post by bccdee »

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…

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? — The Elements of Programming Style, 2nd edition, chapter 2

If you weren't even "clever enough" to write the program yourself (or, more precisely, if you never cultivated a sufficiently deep knowledge of the tools & domain you were working with), how do you expect to fix it when things go wrong? Chatbots can do a lot, but they're ultimately just bots, and they get stuck & give up in ways that professionals cannot afford to. You do still need to develop domain knowledge and "get stronger" to keep pace with your product.

Big codebases decay and become difficult to work with very easily. In the hands-off vibe-coded projects I've seen, that rate of decay was extremely accelerated. I think it will prove easy for people to get over their skis with coding agents in the long run.

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

#419

Post by drob518 »

sally_glance wrote: post #215
drob518 wrote: post #199

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Lots of theory but no practice.

More like using a calculator but not being able to explain how to do the calculation by hand. A probabilistic calculator which is sometimes wrong at that. The "lots of theory but no practice" has always been true for a majority of graduates in my experience.

Surely, new grads are light on experience (particularly relevant experience), but they should have student projects and whatnot that they should be able to explain, particularly for coding. Hardware projects are more rare simply because they cost money for parts and schools have limited budgets, but software has far fewer demands.

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

#420

Post by josephg »

charcircuit wrote: post #386
orev wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I graduated about 15 years ago. In that time, I’ve formed the opposite opinion. My degree - the piece of paper - has been mostly useless. But the ways of thinking I learned at university have been invaluable. That and the friends I made along the way.

I’ve worked with plenty of self taught programmers over the years. Lots of smart people. But there’s always blind spots in how they approach problems. Many fixate on tools and approaches without really seeing how those tools fit into a wider ecosystem. Some just have no idea how to make software reliable.

I’m sure this stuff can be learned. But there is a certain kind of deep, slow understanding you just don’t get from watching back-to-back 15 minute YouTube videos on a topic.

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