One of my coworkers was excited to tell me about the vibe coding workshop he did over the summer. He's not a programmer much at all, and I think he just... enjoyed programming. I tried to hide the deep horror from my face but I don't know if it worked.
I think he did learn some things but I am not convinced it had anything to do with having an LLM giving him code to fix and modify instead of simply copying and pasting bits of code from message boards as we did in olden times.
I live in dread for the day when my husband will come home and tell me how he's been vibe coding at work with all of the bad influences in his office.
I need to have a talk with him. You know what they say:
"If you don't talk to your husband about vibe coding he will learn about it at the office!"
@futurebird If I had children, I feel there'd be a similar obligation to have "The Talk" with them, too.
And of course, it's not just one talk. It's consistently modeling good behavior and engaging in frequent open conversation about shared values and responsibilities over the course of life.
(Given the lifelong importance, I'm shocked at the number of parents who never have The Talk even just once with their children. The power of stigma: Terrorizing parents to silence with their own kids.)
@futurebird we need to ask Zach to add another one of "the talk":
I'm an educator so it's not really helping me much. I work with examples that I understand inside and out. Easier to write them myself or take them from a book.
Yes in HS.
@independentpen @futurebird There may be some cases where llm coding tools may help with new projects but the evidence for any established project is much less rosy than the hype would suggest.
Lol, I remember copying and pasting Excel (and Lotus 123 !!!) formulas off of CompuServe when I was learning how to wrangle spreadsheets.
As a developer and hobby programmer, I cannot comprehend how someone who enjoys programming would like vibe coding.
AI automates away the fun, creative parts of the work, badly. And the parts that you still have to do--the unpleasant stuff--is even less pleasant now because of that.
@suetanvil @futurebird it depends. As an actual experienced dev you can tell it “Oh this class should have been a singleton. Convert it and make any other necessary related changes.” and it actually does it for you. (Total neophyte vibe coders, there’s no chance they would ask for that, see the need, or get the AI to generate it). Some of that refactoring or boilerplate stuff isn’t really all that fun.
The *actual* vibe coding for hobby stuff I did was actually fun for me because I could bang out a quick and dirty utility program that I never would have had the time or energy to do otherwise.
Personal preference, I guess. I find the whole AI thing deeply unpleasant, so I'm kind of glad it doesn't actually help because then I'd have to use it.
WRT your example, converting a class to a singleton is pretty simple--write a trivial method, add a `private` and you're done. It's less work than writing a prompt, plus I can be confident in the code quality.
(ctd)
Admittedly, I haven't looked very hard, but I have yet to see an example of LLM assists that can't be done just as easily with existing code transformation tools (e.g. language server transformations, interactive search-and-replace, etc.)
(Also: apologies to the non-nerds in this thread for the digression.)
@suetanvil @futurebird I don’t think that’s a singleton you’re thinking of. My point was it’s not even a word (or design decision) an uneducated vibe coder would even think of using. Use the tool as a professional though, and do a lot of stuff with very little effort.
If you haven’t used it, you can’t really have an informed opinion on it? I used to be very opposed to it until I got some guidance and experience with it, and yup it’s an *extremely* powerful tool to have in your kit.
@arclight @futurebird I’ve been struggling with a similar dynamic at work: project managers are using LLMs for generating at-desk-style automation code, and I am happy that they are solving their problems, but I can also see that they are not learning from application to application of this approach.
Each time, I have to consciously force myself not to horse-stomps-on-snake react to it. I want to be supportive, but I also feel the urge to tell them to stop skating on thinner and thinner ice.
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