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

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

#541

Post by andai »

ericbarrett wrote: post #487
andai wrote: post #123

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had GPT-4 design and build a GPT-4 powered Python programmer in 2023. It was capable of self-modification and built itself out after the bootstrapping phase (where I copy pasted chunks or code based on GPT-4's instructions). It wasn't fully autonomous (the reliability was a bit low -- e.g. had to get the code out of code fences programmatically), and it wasn't fully original (I stole most of it from Auto-GPT, excep…

> GPT-4 now considers self modifying AI code to be extremely dangerous and doesn't like talking about it. Claude's safety filters began shutting down similar conversations a few months ago, suggesting the user switch to a dumber model. I speculate that this has more to do with recent high-profile cases of self harm related to "AI psychosis" than any AGI-adjacent danger. I've read a few of the chat transcripts that ha…

Heh, well associating a potentially internet-ending line of research with mental illness qualifies as a societal prophylactic.

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

#542

Post by aunty_helen »

throw10920 wrote: post #191
jillesvangurp wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What you as a teacher teach might have to adapt a bit. Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code. Most academic computer scientists aren't necessarily very skilled as programmers in any case. At least, I learned most of that after I stopped being an academic myself (Ph. D. and all). This is OK. Learning to program is more of a side effect of studying computer science than it is a core goal (…

> Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code. People learn by doing. There's a reason that "do the textbook problems" is somewhat of a meme in the math and science fields - because that's the way that you learn those things . I've met someone who said that when he get a textbook, he starts by only doing the problems, and skipping the chapter content entirely. Only when he has significant trou…

I agree with you in part, you can’t expect to learn something like coding without the doing.

The brave new world is that you no longer have to do “coding” in our sense of the word. The doing, and what exercises you should learn with have both changed.

Now students should build whole systems, not worry about simple Boolean logic and program flow. The last programmer to ever need to write an if statement may already be in studies.

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

#543

Post by throw10920 »

aunty_helen wrote: post #542
throw10920 wrote: post #191

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Teaching how code works is more important than teaching how to code. People learn by doing. There's a reason that "do the textbook problems" is somewhat of a meme in the math and science fields - because that's the way that you learn those things . I've met someone who said that when he get a textbook, he starts by only doing the problems, and skipping the chapter content entirely. Only when he has significant trou…

I agree with you in part, you can’t expect to learn something like coding without the doing. The brave new world is that you no longer have to do “coding” in our sense of the word. The doing, and what exercises you should learn with have both changed. Now students should build whole systems, not worry about simple Boolean logic and program flow. The last programmer to ever need to write an if statement may already be…

> The brave new world is that you no longer have to do “coding” in our sense of the word.

Notice how I also talked about coding being a way that you learn how computers work.

If you don't code, you have a very hard time understanding how computers work.

And while there's some evidence that programmers may not need write all of their code by hand, there's zero evidence that either they don't need to learn how to code at all (as you're claiming), or that they don't need to even know how computers work (which is a step further).

There's tons of anecdotes from senior software engineers on Hacker News (and elsewhere) about coding agents writing bad code that they need to debug and fix by hand. I've literally never seen a single story about how a coding agent built a nontrivial program by itself without the prompter looking at the code.

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

#544

Post by aunty_helen »

smj-edison wrote: post #521
bdangubic wrote: post #490

Earlier quoted context omitted.

which editor plugin are you using?

I looked to see if BYU had made the source code available, but it doesn't look like they've published it. It's called code recorder, and before we do an assignment we have to enable recording. It generates a .json file that lists every single edit made in terms of a textual diff. They must have some sort of tool that reconstructs it when they grade. Sorry I don't know more! Edit: I expect it wouldn't be super hard to…

Very interesting, thanks for the insight into modern uni. It’s been a long time since I was there and struggle to imagine what it must be like now.

It does seem like they’re going the wrong way, repelling tech to keep things easy instead of embracing new tech by updating their teaching methods.

But I also think we’ve collectively fallen flat in figuring out what those methods are.

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

#545

Post by academic_84572 »

dyauspitr wrote: post #534
maurits wrote: post #137

I tell my students that they can watch sports on tv, but it will not make them fit. On a personal note, vibe coding leaves me with that same empty hollow sort of tiredness, as a day filled with meetings.

Outcomes are all that matter.

In the short term, you might see better outcomes with pure vibecoding...but in the long term, when you're mentally burnt out, cynical, and losing motivation, that's a bad outcome both in terms of productivity and your own mental health.

We need to find the Goldilocks optimal level of AI assistance that doesn't leave everyone hating their jobs, while still boosting productivity.

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

#546

Post by hn_throwaway_99 »

WorldMaker wrote: post #148
frankc wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is a pretty solid analogy but I look at the metaphor this way - people used to get strong naturally because they had to do physical labor. Because we invented things like the forklift we had to invent things like weightlifting to get strong instead. You can still get strong, you just need to be more deliberate about it. It doesn't mean shouldn't also use a forklift, which is its own distinct skill you al…

> 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…

The fact that Greeks and Romans had weightlifting and boxing gyms for their athletes in no way makes it a "bit of a myth" that people used to get strong naturally by doing physical labor. For example, average grip strength of people under age 30 in the US has declined markedly just since 1985.

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

#547

Post by derrida »

goostavos wrote: post #189
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'…

I had my first interview last week where I finally saw this in the wild. It was a student applying for an internship. It was the strangest interview. They had excellent textbook knowledge. They could tell you the space and time complexities of any data structure, but they couldn't explain anything about code they'd written or how it worked. After many painful and confusing minutes of trying to get them to explain, li…

Wait, so they could say, write a linked list out, or bubble sort, but not understand what it was doing? like no mental model of memory, registers, or intuition for execution order, or even conceptual like a graph walk, or something? Like just "zero" on the conceptual front, but could reproduce data structures, some algorithm for accessing or traversing, and give rote O notation answers about how long execution takes ?

Just checking I have that right... is that what you meant?

I think that's what you were implying but it's just want to check I have that right? if so

... that ... is .... wow ...

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

#548

Post by smj-edison »

aunty_helen wrote: post #544
smj-edison wrote: post #521

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I looked to see if BYU had made the source code available, but it doesn't look like they've published it. It's called code recorder, and before we do an assignment we have to enable recording. It generates a .json file that lists every single edit made in terms of a textual diff. They must have some sort of tool that reconstructs it when they grade. Sorry I don't know more! Edit: I expect it wouldn't be super hard to…

Very interesting, thanks for the insight into modern uni. It’s been a long time since I was there and struggle to imagine what it must be like now. It does seem like they’re going the wrong way, repelling tech to keep things easy instead of embracing new tech by updating their teaching methods. But I also think we’ve collectively fallen flat in figuring out what those methods are.

I think it's fair for the projects, since when you first write code you're learning to think like a computer. Their AI policy is it's fine to ask it questions and have it explain concepts, but the project assignments need to be done without AI.

The one requirement I think is dumb though is we're not allowed to use the language's documentation for the final project, which makes no sense. Especially since my python is rusty.

Since you mentioned failure to figure out what better teaching methods are, I feel it's my sworn duty to put a plug for https://dynamicland.org and https://folk.computer, if you haven't heard about them :)

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

#549

Post by abustamam »

bccdee wrote: post #418
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…

> Everyone knows that debugging is twice as hard as writing a program in the first place. So if you're as clever as you can be when you write it, how will you ever debug it? — The Elements of Programming Style, 2nd edition, chapter 2 If you weren't even "clever enough" to write the program yourself (or, more precisely, if you never cultivated a sufficiently deep knowledge of the tools & domain you were working with),…

I think this goes for many different kinds of projects. Take React, for example, or jQuery, or a multitude of other frameworks and libraries. They abstract out a lot of stuff and make it easier to build stuff! But we've also seen that with ease of building also comes ease of slop (I've seen many sloppily coded React code even before LLMs). Then react introduced hooks to hopefully reduce the slop and then somehow it got sloppy in other ways.

That's kinda how I see vibe coding. It's extremely easy to get stuff done but also extremely easy to write slop. Except now 10x more code is being generated thus 10x more slop.

Learning how to get quality robust code is part of the learning curve of AI. It really is an emergent field, changing every day.

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

#550

Post by feifan »

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…

> Feedback helps, right. But if you've got a problem where a simple, contained feedback loop isn't that easy to build, the only source of feedback is yourself. And that's when you are exposed to the stupidity of current AI models.

That's exactly the point. Modern coding agents aren't smart software engineers per se; they're very very good goal-seekers whose unit of work is code. They need automatable feedback loops.

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