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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

#421

Post by ljm »

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…

If all I know is the mech suit, I’ll struggle with tasks that I can’t use it for. Maybe even get stuck completely. Now it’s a skill issue because I never got my 10k hours in and I don’t even know what to observe or how to explain the outcome I want.

In true HN fashion of trading analogies, it’s like starting out full powered in a game and then having it all taken away after the tutorial. You get full powered again at the end but not after being challenged along the way.

This makes the mech suit attractive to newcomers and non-programmers, but only because they see product in massively simplified terms. Because they don’t know what they don’t know.

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

#422

Post by nosianu »

lucianbr wrote: post #340
nosianu wrote: post #255

Earlier quoted context omitted.

(U880 - GDR Z80 8 bit CPU clone) I wrote assembler on pages of paper. Then I used tables, and a calculator for the two's-complement relative negative jumps, to manually translate it into hex code. Then I had software to type in such hex dumps and save them to audio cassette, from which I could then load them for execution. I did not have an assembler for my computer. I had a disassembler though- manually typed it in…

Real programmers just use a magnetized needle to flip bits on the HDD platter.

Now if only you had read to the end of my comment, to recognize that I was setting up for something, and also applied not just one but several HN guidelines (https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html, under "comments")...

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

#423

Post by leros »

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'…

I see junior devs hyping vibe coding and senior devs mostly using AI as an assistant. I fall in the latter camp myself.

I've hired and trained tons of junior devs out of university. They become 20x productive after a year of experience. I think vibe coding is getting new devs to 5x productivity, which seems amazing, but then they get stuck there because they're not learning. So after year one, they're a 5x developer, not a 20x developer like they should be.

I have some young friends who are 1-3 years into software careers I'm surprised by how little they know.

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

#424

Post by giancarlostoro »

GolDDranks wrote: post #219

I 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…

The secret sauce for me is Beads. Once Beads is setup you make the tasks and refine them and by the end each task is a very detailed prompt. I have Claude ask me clarifying questions, do research for best practices etc

Because of Beads I can have Claude do a code review for serious bugs and issues and sure enough it finds some interesting things I overlooked.

I have also seen my peers in the reverse engineering field make breakthroughs emulating runtimes that have no or limited existing runtimes, all from the ground up mind you.

I think the key is thinking of yourself as an architect / mentor for a capable and promising Junior developer.

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

#425

Post by storystarling »

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…

The mech suit works well until you need to maintain stateful systems. I've found that while initial output is faster, the AI tends to introduce subtle concurrency bugs between Redis and Postgres that are a nightmare to debug later. You get the speed up front but end up paying for it with a fragile architecture.

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

#426

Post by saturnite »

leros wrote: post #423
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'…

I see junior devs hyping vibe coding and senior devs mostly using AI as an assistant. I fall in the latter camp myself. I've hired and trained tons of junior devs out of university. They become 20x productive after a year of experience. I think vibe coding is getting new devs to 5x productivity, which seems amazing, but then they get stuck there because they're not learning. So after year one, they're a 5x developer,…

If I find myself writing code in a way that has me saying to myself "there has to be a better way," there usually is. That's when I could present AI with that little bit of what I want to write. What I've found to be important is to describe what I want in natural language. That's when AI might introduce me to a better way of doing things. At that point, I stop and learn all that I can about what the AI showed me. I look it up in books and trusted online tutorials to make sure it is the proper way to do it.

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

#427

Post by ungreased0675 »

WalterBright wrote: post #102
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'…

I remember reading about a metal shop class, where the instructor started out by giving each student a block of metal, and a file. The student had to file an end wrench out of the block. Upon successful completion, then the student would move on to learning about the machine tools. The idea was to develop a feel for cutting metal, and to better understand what the machine tools were doing. -- My wood shop teacher tau…

This concept can be taken to ridiculous extremes, where learning the actual useful skill takes too long for most participants to get to. For example, the shop class teacher taking his students out into the wilderness to prospect for ore, then building their own smelter, then making their own alloy, then forging billet, etc.

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

#428

Post by charcircuit »

mrtesthah wrote: post #52
ncruces wrote: post #42

> The AI had simply told me a good story. Like vibewriting a novel, the agent showed me a good couple paragraphs that sure enough made sense and were structurally and syntactically correct. Hell, it even picked up on the idiosyncrasies of the various characters. But for whatever reason, when you read the whole chapter, it’s a mess. It makes no sense in the overall context of the book and the preceding and proceeding…

I wrote this a day ago but I find it even more relevant to your observation: — I would never use, let alone pay for, a fully vibe-coded app whose implementation no human understands. Whether you’re reading a book or using an app, you’re communicating with the author by way of your shared humanity in how they anticipate what you’re thinking as you explore the work. The author incorporates and plans for those predicted…

No human understands how Windows works. The number of products where a human understands the whole thing is small.

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

#429

Post by hxugufjfjf »

thesz wrote: post #401
aaronbrethorst wrote: post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dad needs to respect that we need rest days.

Bulgarian Method does not have rest days: https://www.mashelite.com/the-bulgarian-method-is-worth-a-lo... Alexander Zass (Iron Samson) also trained each day: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alexander_Zass "He was taken as a prisoner of war four times, but managed to escape each time. As a prisoner, he pushed and pulled his cell bars as part of strength training, which was cited as an example of the effectiveness of iso…

They are until you get injured, burned out or both and stop training all together.

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

#430

Post by causalscience »

GolDDranks wrote: post #219

I 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…

You're not crazy, I'm also always disappointed.

My theory is that the people who are impressed are trying to build CRUD apps or something like that.

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