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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

#471

Post by bitwize »

hedgedoops2 wrote: post #259
ekidd wrote: post #230

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes. Also, it's a fairly common trope that if you want to pilot a mech suit, you need to be someone like Tony Stark. He's a tinkerer and an expert. What he does is not a commodity. And when he loses his suit and access to his money? His big plot arc is that he is Iron Man. He built it in a cave out of a box of scraps, etc. There are other fictional variants: the giant mech with the enormous support team, or Heinlein'…

For me the idea of "people piloting mech suits" brings up lost kids, like Shinji from nge.

Funny, because I was thinking of Evangelion's predecessor, Gunbuster, in which cadets are shown undergoing grueling physical training both in and out of their mechs to prepare for space combat.

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

#472

Post by kwikiel »

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…

Wondering why the obvious solution isn’t applied here - instead of giving already well known problems that have been solved thousand times give students open research opportunities- stuff which is on the edge of being possible, no way to cheat with Ai. And if Ai is able to solve those - give harder tasks

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

#473

Post by jasondigitized »

ModernMech wrote: post #417
crystal_revenge wrote: post #342

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Today. It produces mediocre code today. That is really it. What is the quality of that code compared to 1 year ago. What will it be in 1 year? Opus 6.5 is inevitable.

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

#474

Post by imadethis »

kwikiel wrote: post #472
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…

Wondering why the obvious solution isn’t applied here - instead of giving already well known problems that have been solved thousand times give students open research opportunities- stuff which is on the edge of being possible, no way to cheat with Ai. And if Ai is able to solve those - give harder tasks

The same reason we give beginner math students addition and subtraction problems, not Fermat’s last theorem?

There has to be a base of knowledge available before the student can even comprehend many/most open research questions, let alone begin to solve them. And if they were understandable to a beginner, then I’d posit the LLM models available today would also be capable of doing meaningful work.

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

#475

Post by jrm4 »

bitwize wrote: post #232
jrm4 wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No, it's not a mech suit. A mech suit doesn't fire its canister rifle at friendly units and then say "You're absolutely right! I should have done an IFF before attacking that unit." (And if it did the engineer responsible should be drawn and quartered.) Mech-suit programming AI would look like something that reads your brainwaves and transduces them into text, letting you think your code into the machine. I'd totally…

Oh, it's a mech suit with an annoying Jarvis personality that you have to reason with, for sure :)

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

#476

Post by bofadeez »

threethirtytwo wrote: post #338
ActorNightly wrote: post #331

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Its really becoming a good litmus test for how someones coding ability whether they think LLMS can do well on complex tasks. For example, someone may ask an LLM to write a simple http web server, and it can do that fine, and they consider that complex, when in reality its really not.

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.

How many more appeal-to-authority counter arguments are going to be made in this thread

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

#477

Post by bofadeez »

nozzlegear wrote: post #323
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 taking crazy pills, this is my exact experience too. I've been using my wife's eCommerce shop (a headless Medusa instance, which has pretty good docs and even their own documentation LLM) as a 100% vibe-coded project using Claude Code, and it has been one comedy of errors after another. I can't tell you how many times I've had it go through the loop of Cart + Payment Collection link is broken -> Redeploy -…

Yeah exactly this

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

#478

Post by MarsIronPI »

MyHonestOpinon wrote: post #454
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…

Thanks for the analogy. But I think students may think to themselves:"Why do I need to be stronger if I can use a forklift?"

Hey, I guess that means there's less competition for me. I don't mind.

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

#479

Post by xnx »

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'…

> You CAN'T let the machines write the code

People said this about compilers. It depends what layer you care to learn/focus on. AI at least gives us the option to move up another level.

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

#480

Post by MarsIronPI »

bluGill wrote: post #144
stackedinserter wrote: post #126

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Let's just accept that this weight lifting metaphor is leaky, like any other, and brings us to absurds like forklift operators need to lift dumbbells to keep relevant in their jobs.

Forklift operators need to do something to exercise. They sit in the seat all day. At least as a programmer I have a standing desk. This isn't relevant to the job though.

> At least as a programmer I have a standing desk.

When I stand still for hours at a time, I end up with aching knees, even though I'd have no problem walking for that same amount of time. Do you experience anything like that?

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