"Learning must be uncomfortable." Critical thinking is hard.
Also, not aligned with modern society, since you kind of need free speech for that.
"Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
51–60 of 169 posts
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#52Organizations now generate 10x the amount of code, because everyone can do it. But we have exactly the same number of reviewers. How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Like literally yesterday I had a not-technical person who used codex to build an optimization algorithm, and due to the momentum it gained I was asked to “fix the rough edges and help with scaling”.…
> How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Unit testing. LLM's are very good at writing tests and writing code that is testable (as long as you ask it), and if you just check that the tests are actually calling the code and doing so with all the obvious edge cases and that the results are correct, that's actually quite fast to review -- faster than reviewing the cod…
They're OK at it. I usually get more thoroughness of scenarios than a mediocre human engineer (which is great!) but less thoroughness of validation and output checking than a good human engineer (which is less so).
But if you have a lot of unit tests and need to make a cross-cutting refactor you run into the same problem that you always have if all your coverage is at the unit level. Now your unit boundary is fundamentally different and you need to know how to lift and shift all the relevant tests to the relevant new places.
And so far I've been less impressed by the "agents"' attempts at cross-cutting integration testing since this usually requires selective and clever interface setup and refactoring.
LLMs have a habit of creating one-off things for particular unit test scenarios that doesn't scale well to that problem.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#53Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…
A bit of a shameless plug: join a coding community [0] putting in-person meetups above online interactions [1]. It doesn't have to be ours, just any group of developers invested in the idea of craftsmanship. This may not solve your concerns directly but it's a step in the right direction.
From where I stand, we're never going to find what you want in the workplace for reasons which predate LLMs: job hopping, remote/hybrid work, incurious managers etc.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#54> Don’t use: > AI auto-complete in your editor > Agent mode or agentic tools for your educational projects While I am not learning "coding" as a beginner anymore, I am constantly learning new frameworks, language features, algorithms etc. as is the norm in the industry, and I disagree it's bad to use AI auto-complete. Pre-AI IntelliSense-style autocomplete from Visual Studio or ReSharper makes learning new libraries…
The advantage of traditional auto-complete over AI is that it will typically list everything that fits: all methods, all variables and constants in scope, etc... It can even fetch the documentation if available. It is great for learning because it tells you all your options without deciding for you.
AI autocomplete essentially searches stackoverflow for you and pastes the first answer without context, adjusting it to match your code. If you are learning, just do the stackoverflow search yourself, or prompt you favorite chatbot if you insist on using AI, so you can have at least some explanation about why it is done like this.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#55> "I don’t understand the docs, anyone have a video?" As an experienced dev, I hate this trend. I don't need my hand held for 10 minutes; I need to see three specific lines of config that may or may not be somewhere in the video.
A video can be helpful to me in some cases. Demonstrating how to set up a project or run a utility that scaffolds something. Or even some basic coding idioms. But these should be focused and short, i.e. 5-10 minutes. Show one thing, maybe a couple of examples of common scenarios, and that's it.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#56Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…
My problem with apprenticeship is that my workflow simply isn’t optimized for performative demonstration. It’s messy, haphazard, and a junior would have to sit around watching me do a whole lot of nothing at times. I don’t want to teach, I want to get work done.
Juniors need to just accept they will have to learn the hard way, on their own, asking occasional questions and looking at tutorials until stuff sticks.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#57When I was a beginner in school we got "hello world" as an example, and were on our own from there.
Of course things were much simpler. You had an editor, and a compiler that you ran from the command line. At some point you would learn about Makefiles, but not before you would appreciate their value.
And there was no CI, no source control, no IDEs, no TDD frameworks.
I can see that throwing a brand new developer into something like Visual Studio would be overwhelming. Even I find it overwhelming after three decades. I still use emacs and a shell.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#58tried reproducing the "Sycophant Problem" example in ChatGPT but couldn't.
A: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e940a1-953c-8011-a8f2-3a1a0c51be... B: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e94067-ec74-8011-88e5-9d27670f31...
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#59Disclaimer: I use Zed Pro and GPT daily to code. I have been coding for money since 1989. I view the rise of these tools and particularly efficacy in programming as an indictment against modern programming. The modern web is both amazing and horrific. If bureaucratic is "using or connected with many complicated rules and ways of doing things" (Britannica), then modern programming may be the ultimate poster child. Sur…
I agree with this sentiment. I have always wished, maybe naively, for the type of computing environment that makes possible things you see in sci-fi movies and shows, where someone can simple "route all power to the forward lazers!" or "use the power cells from your rifle to keep life support systems online!" This imaginary world where technological components are trivially interchangeable, compatible, reusable. My impression is that if you even asked a smartphone hardware engineer to replace a broken iPhone camera with a leftover working camera from an Android phone that, at best it would be an extraordinarily difficult task, and at worst, just may not be possible.
Re: "Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education
#60Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship . You, the junior, tag along a senior.…
Actually, even before apprenticeship comes drilling. Repeat, repeat, repeat.