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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

#561

Post by bandrami »

vidarh wrote: post #159
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 (…

> A good analogy here is programming in assembler. Manually crafting programs at the machine code level was very common when I got my first computer in the 1980s. Especially for games. By the late 90s that had mostly disappeared. Indeed, a lot of us looked with suspicion and disdain at people that used those primitive compilers that generated awful, slow code. I once spent ages hand-optimizing a component that had be…

> And the world didn't fall apart.

Software got significantly worse in that time period, though

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

#562

Post by leptons »

josephg wrote: post #420
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.

I graduated about 15 years ago. In that time, I’ve formed the opposite opinion. My degree - the piece of paper - has been mostly useless. But the ways of thinking I learned at university have been invaluable. That and the friends I made along the way. I’ve worked with plenty of self taught programmers over the years. Lots of smart people. But there’s always blind spots in how they approach problems. Many fixate on to…

>I’ve worked with plenty of self taught programmers over the years. Lots of smart people. But there’s always blind spots in how they approach problems.

I've worked with PhDs on projects (I'm self-taught), and those guys absolutely have blind spots in how they approach problems, plenty of them. Everyone does. What we produce together is better because our blind spots don't typically overlap. I know their weaknesses, and they know mine. I've also worked with college grads that overthink everything to the point they made an over-abstracted mess. YMMV.

>you just don’t get from watching back-to-back 15 minute YouTube videos on a topic.

This is not "self taught". I mean maybe it's one kind of modern-ish concept of "self taught" in an internet comment forum, but it really isn't. I watch a ton of sailing videos all day long, but I've never been on a sailboat, nor do I think I know how to sail. Everyone competent has to pay their dues and learn hard lessons the hard way before they get good at anything, even the PhDs.

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

#563

Post by concats »

foobarchu wrote: post #488
hn_acc1 wrote: post #458

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My dad was a machinist, apprenticed in Germany after WW2. Always somewhat overweight (5'9", 225 lbs during his "peak" years), but he could lift guys up by their belt with one arm, and pick up and move 200+ lb metal billets when he got too impatient to wheel the crane over. Even at 85 now, he's probably stronger in his arms than most 60 year olds. But I'm also not saying ALL of his co-workers were that strong, either.

Takes mass to move mass. Most of the strongest people in the world look "fat" and usually have a hefty gut. Strong and jacked are orthogonal characteristics.

Food is anabolic. It's significantly easier to build muscle if you're willing to also put on fat.

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

#564

Post by andai »

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'…

Part of the issue here is that you can look at something and think "oh yeah I understand that, it makes perfect sense!", but then completely fail to reproduce it yourself.

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

#565

Post by f1shy »

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'…

This is a good point. Letting people learning to code to use AI, would be like letting 6 to 10 yo in school just use pocket calculators and not learn to do basic arithmetic manually. Yes IRL you will have a calculator at hand, yes, the calculator will make less mistakes, still, for you to learn und understand, you have to do it manually.

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

#566

Post by [deleted] »

sltr wrote: post #231
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'…

LLMs are not bicycles for the mind. They are more like E-bikes. More assist makes you go faster, but provides less exercise. https://www.slater.dev/2025/08/llms-are-not-bicycles-for-the...

[deleted]

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

#567

Post by volkanvardar »

orev wrote: post #27
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'…

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

I think a better analogy is a marathon. If you're training for a marathon, you have to run. It won't help if you take the car. You will reach the finish line with minimal effort, but you won't gain any necessary muscles.

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

#568

Post by bryan2 »

frankc wrote: post #46
orev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

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…

You don’t need to be strong to operate a forklift but you definitely need to be able to write the simple code to be a SWE.

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

#569

Post by EagnaIonat »

boredtofears wrote: post #440
CivBase wrote: post #360

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Programming with AI is like tutoring a child. You teach the child, tell it where it made mistakes and you keep iterating and monitoring the child until it makes what you want. Who are you people who spend so much time writing code that this is a significant productivity boost? I'm imagining doing this with an actual child and how long it would take for me to get a real return on investment at my job. Nevermind that…

Here's an example: I recently inherited an over decade old web project full of EOL'd libraries and OS packages that desperately needed to be modernized. Within 3 hours I had a working test suite with 80% code coverage on core business functionality (~300 tests). Now - maybe the tests aren't the best designs given there is no way I could review that many tests in 3 hours, but I know empirically that they cover a major…

> maybe the tests aren't the best designs given there is no way I could review that many tests in 3 hours,

If you haven't reviewed and signed off then you have to assume that the stuff is garbage.

This is the crux of using AI to create anything and it has been a core rule of development for many years that you don't use wizards unless you understand what they are doing.

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

#570

Post by b112 »

jrm4 wrote: post #64
orev wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s like weightlifting: sure you can use a forklift to do it, but if the goal is to build up your own strength, using the forklift isn’t going to get you there. This is the ultimate problem with AI in academia. We all inherently know that “no pain no gain” is true for physical tasks, but the same is true for learning. Struggling through the new concepts is essentially the point of it, not just the end result. Of cou…

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…

If observing was as good as doing, experience would mean nothing.

Thinking through the issue, instead of having the solve presented to you, is the part where you exercise your mental muscles. A good parallel is martial arts.

You can watch it all you want, but you'll never be skilled unless you actually do it.

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