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.
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.)
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