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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

#551

Post by charcircuit »

daotoad wrote: post #507
charcircuit wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. Th…

But you can also meet experts at a company and get access to a company's machinery. To top it off the company pays you instead of you paying the school.

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

#552

Post by eslaught »

logicprog wrote: post #465
b33j0r wrote: post #253

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I usually do most of the engineering and it works great for writing the code. I’ll say: > There should be a TaskManager that stores Task objects in a sorted set, with the deadline as the sort key. There should be methods to add a task and pop the current top task. The TaskManager owns the memory when the Task is in the sorted set, and the caller to pop should own it after it is popped. To enforce this, the caller to…

Yeah, I feel like I get really good results from AI, and this is very much how I prompt as well. It just takes care of writing the code, making sure to update everything that is touched by that code guided by linters and type-checkers, but it's always executing my architecture and algorithm, and I spend time carefully trying to understand the problem before I even begin.

But this is what I don't get. Writing code is not that hard. If the act of physically typing my code out is a bottleneck to my process, I am doing something wrong. Either I've under-abstracted, or over-abstracted, or flat out have the wrong abstractions. It's time to sit back and figure out why there's a mismatch with the problem domain and come back at it from another direction.

To me this reads like people have learned to put up with poor abstractions for so long that having the LLM take care of it feels like an improvement? It's the classic C++ vs Lisp discussion all over again, but people forgot the old lessons.

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

#553

Post by aunty_helen »

lucianbr wrote: post #50
Quothling wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm an external examiner for CS students in Denmark and I disagree with you. What we need in the industry is software engineers who can think for themselves, can interact with the business and understand it's needs, and, they need to know how computers work. What we get are mass produced coders who have been taught some outdated way of designing and building software that we need to hammer out of them. I don't partic…

> I don't particularily care if people can write code like they work at the assembly line. I care [...] That they can deliver business value quickly. In my experience, people who talk about business value expect people to code like they work at the assembly line. Churn out features, no disturbances, no worrying about code quality, abstractions, bla bla. To me, your comment reads contradictory. You want initiative, an…

> You want initiative, and you also don't want initiative. I presume you want it when it's good and don't want it when it's bad, and if possible the people should be clairvoyant and see the future so they can tell which is which.

The word you’re looking for is skill. He wants devs to be skilled. I wouldn’t thought that to be controversial but hn never ceases to amaze

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

#554

Post by zenlot »

byronic wrote: post #361
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 was so lucky to land in a CS class where we were writing C++ by hand. I don't think that exists anymore, but it is where I would go in terms of teaching CS from first principles

[dead]

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

#556

Post by b33j0r »

eslaught wrote: post #552
logicprog wrote: post #465

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, I feel like I get really good results from AI, and this is very much how I prompt as well. It just takes care of writing the code, making sure to update everything that is touched by that code guided by linters and type-checkers, but it's always executing my architecture and algorithm, and I spend time carefully trying to understand the problem before I even begin.

But this is what I don't get. Writing code is not that hard . If the act of physically typing my code out is a bottleneck to my process, I am doing something wrong . Either I've under-abstracted, or over-abstracted, or flat out have the wrong abstractions. It's time to sit back and figure out why there's a mismatch with the problem domain and come back at it from another direction. To me this reads like people have l…

I think of it more like moving from sole developer to a small team lead. Which I have experienced in my career a few times.

I still write my code in all the places I care about, but I don’t get stuck on “looking up how to enable websockets when creating the listener before I even pass anything to hyper.”

I do not care to spend hours or days to know that API detail from personal pain, because it is hyper-specific, in both senses of hyper-specific.

(For posterity, it’s `with_upgrades`… thanks chatgpt circa 12 months ago!)

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

#557

Post by WalterBright »

MarsIronPI wrote: post #483
WalterBright wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also, in college, I'd follow the derivation that the prof did on the chalkboard, and think I understood it. Then, doing the homework, I'd realize I didn't understand it at all. Doing the homework myself was where the real learning occurred.

I guess there's a reason why you don't spend most of your time at school in class with a professor.

The general rule was 2 hours of homework for each hour of lecture. With a 5 class load, it worked out to 45 hours a week.

This kind of workload was a shock to me. It more than a year to adapt to it.

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

#558

Post by godelski »

stahorn wrote: post #257
goostavos wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sounds a little bit like the stories from Feynman, e.g.: https://enlightenedidiot.net/random/feynman-on-brazilian-edu... The students had memorized everything, but understood nothing. Add in access to generative AI, and you have the situation that you had with your interview. It's a good reminder that what we really do, as programmers or software engineers or what you wanna call it, is understanding how computers and…

There's a quote I love from Feynman

  > The first principle is that you must not fool yourself and you are the easiest person to fool.
I have no doubt he'd be repeating it loudly now, given we live in a time where we developed machines that are optimized to fool ourselves.

It's probably also worth reading Feynman's Cargo Cult Science: https://sites.cs.ucsb.edu/~ravenben/cargocult.html

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

#560

Post by TheCapeGreek »

GorbachevyChase wrote: post #362
threethirtytwo wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think it’s usage patterns. It is you in a sense. You can’t deny the fact that someone like Ryan dhal creator of nodejs declared that he no longer writes code is objectively contrary to your own experience. Something is different. I think you and other deniers try one prompt and then they see the issues and stop. Programming with AI is like tutoring a child. You teach the child, tell it where it made mistakes and yo…

My personal suspicion is that the detractors value process and implementation details much more highly than results. That would not surprise me if you come from a business that is paid for its labor inputs and is focused on keeping a large team billable for as long as possible. But I think hackers and garage coders see the value of “vibing” as they are more likely to be the type of people who just want results and vi…

My 2c: there is a divide, unacknowledged, between developers that care about "code correctness" (or any other quality/science/whatever adjective you like) and those who care about the whole system they are creating.

I care about making stuff. "Making stuff" means stuff that I can use. I care about code quality yes, but not to an obsessive degree of "I hate my framework's ORM because of ". So, vibe coding is great, because I know enough to guide the agent away from issues or describe how I want the code to look or be changed.

This gets me to my desired effect of "making stuff" much faster, which is why I like it.

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