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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

#441

Post by abustamam »

josephg wrote: post #420
charcircuit wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 to…

I think it depends on how they were self taught. If they just went through a few tutorials on YouTube and learned how to make a CRUD app using the shiny tool of the week, then sure. (I acknowledge this is a reduction in self-teaching — I myself am self-taught).

But if they actually spent time trying to learn architecture and how to build stuff well, either by reading books or via good mentorship on the job, then they can often be better than the folks who went to school. Sometimes even they don't know how to make software reliable.

I'm firmly in the middle. Out of the 6 engineers I work with on a daily basis (including my CTO), only one of us has a degree in CS, and he's not the one in an architecture role.

I do agree that learning how to think and learn is its own valuable skill set, and many folks learn how to do that in different ways.

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

#442

Post by hxugufjfjf »

wvenable wrote: post #291
acedTrex wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My way is to understand my own codebase and look at the output of the LLM. Then you are not vibe coding. The core, almost exclusive requirement for "vibe coding" is that you DON'T look at the code. Only the product outcome.

That is the correct definition of vibe coding "fully giv[ing] in to the vibes, embrac[ing] exponentials, and forget[ting] that the code even exists." I think we need another term for using an LLM to write code but absolutely not forgetting the code exists. I often use LLMs to do refactoring and, by definition, refactoring cannot be vibe-coding because that's caring about the code.

Agent-assisted coding (AAC) is what I call it. Everyone else around me just calls it vibe-coding. I think this is going to be like "cyber" that we tried to refuse for so long.

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

#443

Post by walthamstow »

wvenable wrote: post #291
acedTrex wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> My way is to understand my own codebase and look at the output of the LLM. Then you are not vibe coding. The core, almost exclusive requirement for "vibe coding" is that you DON'T look at the code. Only the product outcome.

That is the correct definition of vibe coding "fully giv[ing] in to the vibes, embrac[ing] exponentials, and forget[ting] that the code even exists." I think we need another term for using an LLM to write code but absolutely not forgetting the code exists. I often use LLMs to do refactoring and, by definition, refactoring cannot be vibe-coding because that's caring about the code.

> I think we need another term for using an LLM to write code but absolutely not forgetting the code exists.

That is now what software engineering is.

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

#444

Post by draebek »

boredtofears wrote: post #440
CivBase wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming with AI is like tutoring a child. You teach the child, tell it where it made mistakes and you keep iterating and monitoring the child until it makes what you want. Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost? I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that…

Here's an example: I recently inherited an over decade old web project full of EOL'd libraries and OS packages that desperately needed to be modernized. Within 3 hours I had a working test suite with 80% code coverage on core business functionality (~300 tests). Now - maybe the tests aren't the best designs given there is no way I could review that many tests in 3 hours, but I know empirically that they cover a major…

You know they cause a majority of the code of the core logic to execute, right? Are you sure the tests actually check that those bits of logic are doing the right thing? I've had Claude et al. write me plenty of tests that exercise things and then explicitly swallow errors and pass.

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

#445

Post by Balinares »

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…

Nah, I'm with you there. I've yet to see even Opus 4.5 produce something close to production-ready -- in fact Opus seems like quite a major defect factory, given its consistent tendency toward hardcoding case by case workarounds for issues caused by its own bad design choices.

I think uncritical AI enthusiasts are just essentially making the bet that the rising mountains of tech debt they are leaving in their wake can be paid off later on with yet more AI. And you know, that might even work out. Until such a time, though, and as things currently stand, I struggle to understand how one can view raw LLM code and find it acceptable by any professional standard.

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

#446

Post by ModernMech »

ashikns wrote: post #48
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…

Because a novel is about creative output, and engineering is about understanding a lot of rules and requirements and then writing logic to satisfy that. The latter has a much more explicitly defined output.

The lesson of UML is that software engineering is not a process of refining rules and requirements into logic. Software engineering is lucrative because it very much is a creative process.

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

#447

Post by wvenable »

hxugufjfjf wrote: post #442
wvenable wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is the correct definition of vibe coding "fully giv[ing] in to the vibes, embrac[ing] exponentials, and forget[ting] that the code even exists." I think we need another term for using an LLM to write code but absolutely not forgetting the code exists. I often use LLMs to do refactoring and, by definition, refactoring cannot be vibe-coding because that's caring about the code.

Agent-assisted coding (AAC) is what I call it. Everyone else around me just calls it vibe-coding. I think this is going to be like "cyber" that we tried to refuse for so long.

Vibe-coding is a more marketable term. Agent-assisted coding doesn't have the same ring to it. Maybe "Agentive Coding". ChatGPT wasn't much help coming up with alternative here.

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

#449

Post by Balinares »

__grob wrote: post #356
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…

It still amazes me that so many people can see LLMs writing code as anything less than a miracle in computing...

I mean, a trained dog who plays the piano is a miracle in canine education, until such a point where you assess the quality of its performance.

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

#450

Post by toddmorrow »

Google Maps completely and utterly obliterated my ability to navigate. I no longer actively navigated. I passively navigated.

This is no different. And I'm not talking about vibe coding. I just mean having an llm browser window open.

When you're losing your abilities, it's easy to think you're getting smarter. You feel pretty smart when you're pasting that code

But you'll know when you start asking "do me that thingy again". You'll know from your own prompts. You'll know when you look at older code you wrote with fear and awe. That "coding" has shifted from an activity like weaving cloth to one more like watching YouTube.

Active coding vs passive coding

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