Mastodawn

for whoever needs to hear this: you're not alone. i'm not vibecoding any of the software i write. i'm writing it by hand, but i've leveled up my emacs with eglot/lsp. i'm modernizing my stacks and use languages with excellent compilers. i think about how to do more with less. i'm trying to combine the best human-written libraries and modules and assemble them with minimal boilerplate. i enjoy reading your manuals and references. i believe in robust, secure, human-written software.

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vashbear Mar 4

@mntmn

Hi Lucie, I love the sentiment. I do think it is important to understand what good coding is, and coding is enjoyable.

But... sorry, I have a "but"

I am an experieced 30 year coder. The truth is that the best human coder cannot keep up with what AI coding can do. I was shocked when I realized this but it's true.

AI can keep the entire code base in its buffer and scan and find things instantly that I would not know. It can refactor, debug and redeploy. It can generate documentation instantly. Any API, even ones I have never seen to some esoteric endpoint, it can master instantly. it has been trained billions and billions of lines of code. That is more than I have by a factor of over 100,00 million.

It is like having a team of 10 cross-disciplinary developers working with you plus a documentation writer , a QA person and project manager.

If I have a question about how something works, I can ask it, and it describes it and gives me links to the relevant section.

It is only getting better. Every few months its capabilities leap incredibly.

It still needs a team leader. It needs someone to guide what it can do. That is the role to embrace. You will be a much better team leader if you understand the fundamentals.

Believe me, I understand that there are plenty of downsides to this. And .. it scares the hell out of me. But wishing it were not so will not make it go away.

I dont know if you have tried the most recent releases - I use Claude Code -- but you owe it to yourself to try it if only to gauge what you are up against.

And by all means -- keep learning to code on your own -- but if that is the only tool in your quiver, it should be a hobby, not a means to make a living.

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Magnus Ahltorp Mar 4

@vashbear @mntmn If what you’re saying is true, and not cherrypicked, there is no excuse whatsoever to not move on to better programming languages. Are you? Are other vibecoders?

To languages and toolchains where the ”compilation process” isn’t using an unconstrained random number generator, but where you describe your problem formally and succinctly and get the same result every time.

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vashbear

@ahltorp

> If what you’re saying is true, and not cherry-picked, there is no excuse whatsoever to not move on to better programming languages.

The main constraint on this is where the application is deployed. The code that is generated still needs to be deployed and run somewhere, and it depends on the hosting provider and what is available under the client's paid plan. So in practice, that limits the language and libraries that can be used, and what I have tried.

But outside of client work, you make a good point. It would be interesting to experiment with other languages, like Rust for example.