Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

atmoio.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

501–510 of 652 posts

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

#501

Post by Terr_ »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #403
WorldMaker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor I think that's a bit of a myth. The Greeks and Romans had weightlifting and boxing gyms, but no forklifts. Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators with the wealth and free time to lift weights and box and wrestle. One of the things that we know about the famous philosopher Plato…

> I think that's a bit of a myth. Why do you think that? It's definitely true. You can observe it today if you want to visit a country where peasants are still common. From Bret Devereaux's recent series on Greek hoplites: > Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name > but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai…

Reaper Man, by Terry Pratchett:

> The ability of skinny old ladies to carry huge loads is phenomenal. Studies have shown that an ant can carry one hundred times its own weight, but there is no known limit to the lifting power of the average tiny eighty-year-old Spanish peasant grandmother.

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

#502

Post by tracerbulletx »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #403
WorldMaker wrote: post #148

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor I think that's a bit of a myth. The Greeks and Romans had weightlifting and boxing gyms, but no forklifts. Many of the most renowned Romans in the original form of the Olympics and in Boxing were Roman Senators with the wealth and free time to lift weights and box and wrestle. One of the things that we know about the famous philosopher Plato…

> I think that's a bit of a myth. Why do you think that? It's definitely true. You can observe it today if you want to visit a country where peasants are still common. From Bret Devereaux's recent series on Greek hoplites: > Now traditionally, the zeugitai were regarded as the ‘hoplite class’ and that is sometimes supposed to be the source of their name > but what van Wees is working out is that although the zeugitai…

I think he was saying upper classes that didn't do much physical labor have existed since at least classical era and needed to do some kind of physical training to maintain strength?

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

#503

Post by AstroBen »

jasondigitized wrote: post #473
ModernMech wrote: post #417

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

It produces the same quality code as it did years ago. The difference now is that it tends to function

Still bad code though

And by bad I'm not making a stylistic judgement. I mean it'll be hell to work with, easy to add bugs, and slow to change

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

#504

Post by h14h »

It'd be easy to simply say "skill issue" and dismiss this, but I think it's interesting to look at the possible outcomes here:

Option 1: The cost/benefit delta of agentic engineering never improves past net-zero, and bespoke hand-written code stays as valuable as ever.

Option 2: The cost/benefit becomes net positive, and economics of scale forever tie the cost of code production directly to the cost of inference tokens.

Given that many are saying option #2 is already upon us, I'm gonna keep challenging myself to engineer a way past the hurdles I run into with agent-oriented programming.

The deeper I get, the more articles like this feel like the modern equivalent of saying "internet connections are too slow to do real work" or "computers are too expensive to be useful for regular people".

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

#505

Post by AstroBen »

jasondigitized wrote: post #470
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…

Except I work with extremely competent software engineers on software used in mission critical applications in the Fortune 500. I call myself a script kiddie because I did not study Computer Science. Am I green in the test run? Does it pass load tests? Is it making money? While some of yall are worried about leaky abstractions, we just closed another client. Two worlds for sure where one team is skating to the puck,…

Have a read of this: https://martinfowler.com/articles/is-quality-worth-cost.html

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

#506

Post by AstroBen »

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.

Yeah, take Ryan Dahl:

His tweets were getting ~40k views average. He made his big proclamation about AI and boom viral 7 million

This is happening over, and over, and over again

I'm not saying he's making shit up but you're naive if you don't think they're slightly tempted by the clear reaction this content gets

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

#507

Post by daotoad »

charcircuit wrote: post #386
orev wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The point of going to school is to learn all the details of what goes into making things, so when you actually make a thing, you understand how it’s supposed to come together, including important details like correct design that can support the goal, etc. That’s the “getting stronger” part that you can’t skip if you expect to be successful. Only after you’ve done the work and understand the details can you be success…

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.

For a motivated learner with access to good materials, schools provide two important things besides that very important piece of paper:

1. contacts - these come in the form of peers who are interested in the same things and in the form of experts in their fields of study. Talking to these people and developing relationships will help you learn faster, and teach you how to have professional collegial relationships. These people can open doors for you long after graduation.

2. facilities - ever want to play with an electron microscope or work with dangerous chemicals safely? Different schools have different facilities available for students in different fields. If you want to study nuclear physics, you might want to go to a school with a research reactor; it's not a good idea to build your own.

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

#508

Post by threethirtytwo »

AstroBen wrote: post #506
threethirtytwo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Yeah, take Ryan Dahl: His tweets were getting ~40k views average. He made his big proclamation about AI and boom viral 7 million This is happening over, and over, and over again I'm not saying he's making shit up but you're naive if you don't think they're slightly tempted by the clear reaction this content gets

He’d get an equivalent reaction for talking shit about AI. Anyway it’s not just him. Plenty of other people.

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

#509

Post by threethirtytwo »

HarHarVeryFunny wrote: post #405
threethirtytwo wrote: post #387

Earlier quoted context omitted.

karpathy is biased. I wouldn't use his name as he's behind the whole vibe coding movement. You have to pick people with nothing to gain. https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666

I don't think he meant to start a movement - it was more of a throw-away tweet that people took way too seriously, although maybe with his bully pulpit he should have realized that would happen.

Still I don’t think he’ll speak against it.

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

#510

Post by threethirtytwo »

bofadeez wrote: post #476
threethirtytwo wrote: post #338

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

They are more effective then on the ground in your face evidence largely because people who are so against AI are blind to it.

I hold a result of AI in front of your face and they still proclaim it’s garbage and everything else is fraudulent.

Let’s be clear. You’re arguing against a fantasy. Nobody even proponents of AI claims that AI is as good as humans. Nowhere near it. But they are good enough for pair programming. That is indisputable. Yet we have tons of people like you who stare at reality and deny it and call it fraudulent.

Examine the lay of the land if that many people are so divided it really means both perspectives are correct in a way.

Post reply on HN