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I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

varunraghu.com

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Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#51

Post by colechristensen »

esalman wrote: post #16
billy99k wrote: post #5

"that’s when it struck me. coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing. its about the process. its about how you approach a problem. its critical thinking." From a business perspective, they don't care about this. They just want it built as inexpensively as possible in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding is here to stay.

What is coding without critical thinking? I never vibe coded, and I don't understand this trend AT ALL. I read how copilot and such are detrimental to critical thinking, and I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now.

Every time I've tried to get LLMs to create something they quickly get to the point where they fail miserably. It can do boilerplate, it can do straightforward things which have been done a billion times, it can come up with 50 ideas 10 of which are decent and not obvious... but it can't go beyond a certain complexity, it can't use mildly obscure libraries, it can't get major versions of libraries straight, it invents API calls that don't exist.

One of the biggest wastes of human talent is corporations hiring people to solve the same problems over and over and over. Every company has to reinvent so many wheels for themselves because sharing code between for profit companies just isn't done outside of the occasional breaking a whole project off into an open source project. This is what LLMs are good at, the very repetitive boilerplate connecting the dots and doing obvious things. Companies are going to have to retool themselves to only really be doing "the hard part", and the rest left to LLMs. In the same way languages will have to change to accommodate the hard part and the easy part.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#52

Post by rowanseymour »

billy99k wrote: post #5

"that’s when it struck me. coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing. its about the process. its about how you approach a problem. its critical thinking." From a business perspective, they don't care about this. They just want it built as inexpensively as possible in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding is here to stay.

Yes there are businesses (game companies?) which just want to get a thing out the door, sell it, and move on to the next thing. But I don't think that's how most software businesses function. Usually software is iterated on and maintained, and you've got a problem if nobody has invested time in understanding how that software actually works.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#53

Post by hooverd »

BayArea925 wrote: post #20
isoprophlex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding is a death trap for juniors just starting out, as it kills critical thinking and understanding what a computer is. And a guaranteed paycheck for people with the experience to clean up the resulting messes. I hope...

Coding will not be done by juniors anymore. We are quickly progressing to humans no longer needing to learn machine langauage (syntax) and computers better developing code by interpreting human languages (english). Teams will be led by one subject matter expert, and fulfilled by thousands of agents. I would not be advising anyone under 21 to become a "coder". Studying computer sceince still has value, but coding was…

God, software is about to get so much worse, isn't it.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#54

Post by trollied »

BayArea925 wrote: post #20
isoprophlex wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Vibe coding is a death trap for juniors just starting out, as it kills critical thinking and understanding what a computer is. And a guaranteed paycheck for people with the experience to clean up the resulting messes. I hope...

Coding will not be done by juniors anymore. We are quickly progressing to humans no longer needing to learn machine langauage (syntax) and computers better developing code by interpreting human languages (english). Teams will be led by one subject matter expert, and fulfilled by thousands of agents. I would not be advising anyone under 21 to become a "coder". Studying computer sceince still has value, but coding was…

Thanks for the laugh!

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#55

Post by sph »

darknavi wrote: post #33
chrisco255 wrote: post #15

Independent of the opinion expressed, I dig the minimalistic, typewriter-style blog format demonstrated here.

I don't dislike it but I don't love the lack of capitalization. Not really sure why that trend is on the uptick.

Zoomers that write in lowercase because it's more "chill"; go figure. It's a pretty reliable indicator that you're talking to someone < 25 years old.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#56

Post by bredren »

In the 80s you could "vibe code" by copying lines of basic out of a magazine and then change values to play.

If you didn't care about learning *how* the program worked you wouldn't learn. Many people did not, but some did.

The same happened on stack overflow, where you could copy paste random solutions or go to the docs often linked from the solution and learn *why* it worked. Many people did not, some did.

The doom and gloom around vibe coding is a proxy for FUD around generative AI mixed with some misplaced sage-like nostalgia.

People who want to learn to program will still learn to program. Only they have way better tools to do so and could progress in capability much faster.

To me, this post getting upvoted is a strangely implies there's no professional SWE gate-keeping to the generative AI coding assistance Luddism, only a shared sense of authenticity.

I suspect these posts get attention from people who have not put in the work to learn how to use generative AI for their hard SWE problems and so presume it is mostly enabling crap because they have yet to study it enough to make it do better than that in their own workstreams.

If you're in the older set, maybe you remember what it was like to get drivers working for DOS on your new CD ROM and how much you put into that effort. Put that effort into using gen ai and you may stop seeing it only as a thing that biz will use to destroy the SWE profession.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#57

Post by amarant »

uludag wrote: post #42
billy99k wrote: post #5

"that’s when it struck me. coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing. its about the process. its about how you approach a problem. its critical thinking." From a business perspective, they don't care about this. They just want it built as inexpensively as possible in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding is here to stay.

> Vibe coding is here to stay. I would say this is true in the same way that copy-paste coding functioned and that vibe coding isn't fundamentally different. It can be a useful approach to a variety of problems. Having capable, knowledgable, and skilled employees is important to businesses though. If your business is something easily approachable then you are at risk of being outcompeted from companies with more skil…

I'm not convinced the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. Surely a skilled developer could make use of AI to produce stuff faster, while still understanding everything and making sure the code is well written (well generated?)

Haven't really tried vibe coding myself yet, but I'm tempted to give it a go. I imagine stuff like integrating external API's could be really handy, looking through external documentation and creating the correct calls to the correct endpoints is always a huge timesink. Seems like AI should be able to make short work of such tasks

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#58

Post by aylmao »

Havoc wrote: post #10

There is definitely space for a happy medium. Asking AI for individual functions and assembling them like lego blocks allows for a higher level of control and agency while still accelerating things a bit

+1. Software developers has long leveraged "someone else" writing code for their projects— be that "someone else" another human, via libraries, platforms, frameworks, etc. Or a computer, using codegen tools, compilers, etc. Sometimes it's to save tediousness, sometimes to save time, sometimes to leverage better code than one could've written.

I think AI is best when used in this same way of thinking— not a tool that should handle all the coding for you, but as a very powerful codegen tool that you can leverage in many parts of your project.

Re: I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

#59

Post by oriolid »

bigstrat2003 wrote: post #50
oriolid wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much did you get paid for this comment? And if not, why was it worth writing?

OP didn't say money is the only reason things are worth doing, he said that things can be worth doing solely for money. There's a big difference between the two.

To each their own.
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