I am still not sold on vibe coding… I believe letting AI solve your issues, stops you from growing. And once the AI hits its ceiling you are not prepared
Discussion
I am still not sold on cars. I believe letting a car solve your transportation issues stops you from growing. And once cars hit their ceiling, you are not prepared.
To be fair, if people would use cars as excessively as some vibe coders would use AI, their legs would probably stop working.
Which is my point. Letting AI solve all your problems means not learning how things work. Not going in depth. You will not become an expert in any field AND you will be replaceable
To be even more fair, cars suck and we should still be using horses more
To be fair, if people used nail guns as often as some carpenters use hammers, they’d probably forget how to hammer.
Which is my point. Letting nail guns solve all of your problems means not learning how hammers work. You will not become an expert in any field that utilizes hammers AND you will be replaceable in any task that uses hammers.
Ok. I’m done with these but my point is it’s a tool and you can get really good at a tool and unlock an entire new position that relies heavily on this tool. You can still use hammers occasionally.
Using a hammer doesn't really develop anything about your human abilities that a nailgun won't develop
Using a hammer builds muscle and burns calories, doing the shit you do with a nailgun also builds muscle and burns calories
To add on, hitting grannies (or dogs) with hammers is mean and best avoided.
You comparisons are stupidly far off. I get it’s a joke, but it’s important to understand this. LSPs and IDEs are tools. AI CAN be a tool, but people use it as an all in one solution. It’s a nailgun that drives a nail in, after having drawn all the blueprints. I wouldn’t let a nailgun draw my blueprints, and I guess you wouldn’t either
To me this sounds like an argument of manual vs automation and automation always wins. Anything that can be automated will eventually be automated. It may not be right now but eventually it will be.
I agree. Using LLMs to automate mundane tasks is a great idea. Using it to create things beyond you personal understanding might not be. You will not be able to sort things out if it breaks. It might contain serious flaws that you wouldn’t even be able to spot.
I know people that are unable to change a tire, install a socket, or fix a weld because these are tasks that are done for them. I feel bad for them
All of the things I’ve vibe coded are beyond my understanding. Yet they exist, I use them and others use them. If they contains major flaws, nobody has reported them to me yet.
I am able to change a tired and do all sorts of stuff around the house, yet I would rather pay someone to do it because my time is better spend doing other things.
Let me ask you this then: would you vibe code “critical” software? Software that NEEDS to work. If you wouldn’t, would you try to hire a senior engineer that knows this particular domain in and out, or would you hire a college grad with AI skills?
For now I would definitely hire a human. Or, at least have a human audit a vibe coded version before relying on it fully. But if I needed something as a quick workaround, I wouldn’t care how it was made as long as there’s time for pro to look under the hood.
I would not vibe code anything that deals with people directly putting their money into it. If it’s an integration with another service that handles the money then fine, but I would not trust any vibe coded solution to handle money.
I am glad you came to that conclusion; I was worried there for a second!
See, I want to be that “pro” and I believe to become such a person, you simply cant embrace the vibe and instead sit down and actually learn how stuff works.
Again, I am not saying that you can’t use AI. It’s a great tool to do research and dig through knowledge. But building projects is a great way to learn software engineering. Letting AI do this for you takes away from the learning experience.
Don't even understand why we would go as far as critical software.
I haven't ever seen any vibe-coded software in production that is more than a hobby project.
The error vibe coders make is thinking that you don't really need human understanding to write code that works in reality. I would stop wasting my time with sweating over learning new programming stuff if that was even just directionally true.
But it's not. Perhaps some day we will get there, with a different technology. But LLMs will never replace the need for human understanding. They are really useful to bounce off and refine ideas, and learn/look things up much faster than googling stuff. That is still far off though, and ppl don't appreciate how amazing human beings are, if they don't realize the huge gap.
No one needs talk big about vibe coding. Just demonstrate your work. Publish your app and we'll see.
It already blueprints better than I do 50% of the time I’d say.
Worst still are when cars hit your granny or even worse, your dog.
Cars suck, we should still be using horses
If you think cars are good and vibe coding is good, you just aren't thinking shit through
The correct place to keep a horse is the meat aisle at Tescos.
No
Horses are friends & we will need them again when dumb cars run out of cheap sustenance
A friend of mine married a woman who owned five horses.
Now she owns twenty-two, and most are Palominos - dumb blondes that get skin cancer. A cocaine habit would be cheaper.
Horses need to be made into cheap sustainence.
Those palominos will feed you by transporting grain and bread and stuff when the trucks are out of fuel
Plus they'll stay sober to drive you home if you drink
Have you any idea how much those useless things eat?
Driving you home drunk, though, is a major benefit I hadn't thought about.
Should we split the difference and endorse donkeys as a compromise candidate?
Yes, donkeys are excellent
However, donkeys are not as smart, more likely to take you to the wrong place if you fall asleep in the carriage
Wait my other reply was wrong, donkeys are smarter than horses
But I've heard it is also true that they mess up stuff like navigation - maybe because they're more independent minded?
I'm now imagining a Western, where in the end the horse comes up lame, and the donkey takes the drunk anti-hero to his wife's home instead of the brothel he intended to go to.
Now I just need an AI to vibe-produce it :p
Perhaps donkeys are better than horses when you factor in how bad humans ourselves are at decision making
This stayed in my head and I ended up with a whole different idea
Gunslinger has lent out his horse to a friend
Receives letter about a check he sent to his bank not getting there, says he needs to contact them to deal with it by a certain day, which is the day he's getting the letter
Only has his 2 donkeys to pull him in a cart 100 miles into the city. They've always been fine for trips around town but he's not sure if they have the speed and energy for this
After leaving town, donkeys immediately take wrong turn and stop following instructions
Gunslinger cannot abandon his donkeys and is now stuck with them on a wild adventure to Mexico
Mexican villagers think it's very funny to see this American gunslinger on such a detour
Donkeys are looking for some cactus or something they ate as baby goats in Mexico. Today is their opportunity to travel with their gunslinger as an armed guard to go eat some of that cactus again
They find the cactus pretty early in the movie but it's already way too late for the guy to get to his bank so he's lost like $20 in late fees that was a lot of money back then
The rest of the movie is the trip home
Some Mexican gangsters decide this guy will be easy to rob because he can't even control his donkeys, but the donkeys themselves foil the robbery
The border guards are mad when they get back across the border. The donkeys facilitate an escape
The main character stops and gets drunk at some point because they've had such a stressful day
He falls asleep in the cart and the donkeys take him home instead of to a brothel
*baby donkeys not baby goats
Early morning brain
Love it.
This should be a movie!
Or perhaps a computer game, where you play through as the gunslinger, the donkey, or the cactus, with different mechanics and victory conditions. Single player or multiplayer?
Single player is usually more story driven but maybe there could be a co op mode where 2 players play as the donks 🤙
Locally-manufacturable alternatives to oil-based ICE vehicles are sorely needed, that I strongly agree with.
I am split in 2. I do not vibe code perse but i do throw in questions to llm's. It's good to see they also come up with stuff that is better or different than what i thought of myself. I learn a lot from this as well.
But if aforementioned ceiling turns out to be a lot higher than whatever i could hope to accomplish i'd prefer to discover this sooner rather than later.
I am still super sceptical if this will happen, but it would not be the first type of job that would see severe obsoletion in history.
Getting lost on the way teaches you which questions to ask next time around.
If can definitely put your finger on AI’s ceiling you’re probably the only one.
I am not talking about the theoretical ceiling. I am talking about today’s AIs limitations. Like context across a huge codebase or simply remembering stuff for long enough.
I haven't done very much vibe coding, but I've done a lot of vibe testing.
The sweet spot is getting the ai do boring work why you focus on more critical aspects within the software development process.
AI is terrible at creating code structure so if it is a project that one plans to work on for a long time and could need contributions for others, you want to oversee that things are done correctly.
If you already have the skills, you could instruct the AI to do things correctly, the way you would.
An example I ran into recently was getting the ai to build a computational intensive action which was obviously blocking the UI thread. It wasn't obvious to the AI to move that work to a worker thread but after informing the AI about the issue, it fixed it correctly
full autopilot ai - i agree completely; but supervised coding and showing the work hits a good sweet spot.
I agree 🤷♂️
see it as better input, not output. it can only "solve" at the moment pretty mechanical work so you can focus on the real interesting stuff.
That is a great way of putting it. I use it a lot for research and better “docs”. Sometimes I even let AI validate ideas I had and code I have written.
The essence of my original post was supposed to be that people should not solely depend on it and instead develop understanding and knowledge in the domains that are most crucial to their craft.
Just like I always try to do math in my head before picking up a calculator. Simply because it keeps your mind sharp.
Exactly! Allowing for a lot less screen time and a lot more fooling around decoding your partners pleasure points. 😘🍯❤️🔥
Originality.
You lack imagination