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#coding#don#vibe#more#off#brain#turn#using#better#code

Discussion (15 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

throwaway6977•about 1 hour ago
Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route.

I've never been more informed or understood more about my code, pipelines, and stack than now- and its 100% due to AI reasoning about my projects, and me making an effort to learn.

1718627440•about 1 hour ago
> You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding

You have too, because that's the definition of vibe coding. If you use an LLM to assist you, but still keep your brain on, that's not vibe coding.

jubilanti•37 minutes ago
Feels like a No True Scotsman fallacy.
1718627440•17 minutes ago
How so?

The property Scotsman is existing a priori and then a causality to behaviour is assumed. But here the term is defined by behaviour.

pdpi•9 minutes ago
There's multiple ways to program using LLMs, so using different words for different styles is a useful distinction.

Of course, you absolutely can build a No True Scotsman argument on top of that distinction, but I don't think that's what GP was doing.

alostpuppy•40 minutes ago
I agree. It’s actually more exhausting in some ways.
prohobo•about 1 hour ago
I never said you have to turn your brain off to feel the limitations.

Actually, for more complex work I think it's pretty common to spend a long time crafting some elaborate prompt, and then arguing with the agent for 10-20 turns, getting a "passable" plan, accepting it then arguing with the agent every step of the way because it's doing it wrong. It's incredibly frustrating, even with models like Fable.

Even after that, I'll often find out during later sessions that some feature that was supposed to be deprecated was actually silently left in "because I wasn't sure you wanted it completely gone" or something.

I agree that exploring a codebase through prompts is actually quite nice! But the mental model you get from that is almost always warped - you have to supplement that with reading the code, where 9 times out of 10 you will find some kind of discrepancy that you're unhappy with.

Why not optimize that process?

HappySweeney•36 minutes ago
Your experience is night-and-day from mine. Both myself and the AI correct and remove each other's gaps in understanding. There is never what I would call arguing. Disagreements are resolved by back and forth discussion and reaching consensus.
nadis•38 minutes ago
This piece is more thoughtful than the title initially led me to believe. However, I feel like it's sort of like advocating for us all being able to read/write binary (using a bit of an extreme to prove a point). While there might certainly be benefits to understanding less abstract layers, I don't think it's necessary or even necessarily helpful. That said, I don't think the answer is "turn your brain off completely" but I think that there should be tools that facilitate thoughtful ways of vibe coding with natural language, which is basically another abstraction layer from writing the code and tests yourself.
prohobo•19 minutes ago
I'm making the case that we should make tools for the higher abstraction, not a lower one. You said it yourself: why should we read/write binary? We don't, we shouldn't. It might be useful in some cases, but working with assembly is much easier.

Intent is more natural to us than code, for the same reason assembly is more natural than binary.

jamal-kumar•about 1 hour ago
I enjoyed the article, I think you're right that the tooling to get out of making things too automatic is definitely lacking. AI coding is cool if you have something in a certain valley of simple enough for it to get but not so complex or low level that it will screw it up, but commercial models don't really do the following yet:

1. malware development

2. anything security tooling related

3. reliable assembly

4. reliable and somewhat more obscure programming languages like blockchain programming langs or distributed programming with elixir

I feel that https://maldevacademy.com has been keeping my skills relatively fresh, it's fun in the discord where sometimes we try using models to do this stuff and it just chokes

On the other hand I "vibe coded" (Although I've heard more nuanced distinctions in terminology here about doing it right rather than just letting it rip automatically or without much thought) a fairly large and profitable software project in about a month recently that would have probably taken me over three if I hadn't used claude.

In the end and as you mentioned, these things are just tools and if you're busy complaining about them rather than finding what they can't do yet and having a bit of fun with working within those limits, you might be able to find a good niche to make better use of your time and avoid the skill atrophy

Supermancho•41 minutes ago
While my CONTEXT.md's are a hodgepodge of general ideals and specific do's/dont's, my AGENTS.md are demonstrable.

I can instrument to observe the instructions being executed.

* Delegation

* Execution (better rules than rtk)

* Response

* Logging

When I want to turn off the printf style confirmations, manually editing saves the tokens. Using RFC 2119 (language) doesn't make a substantial difference. I'm in search of something better.

arisAlexis•34 minutes ago
We can also go back to the telegraph
thenatureboy•about 1 hour ago
Economics will dictate that working bespoke on coding will simply not be profitable anymore. Great article but there is no stopping this trend at this rate.
Towaway69•about 1 hour ago
Howabout: just turn off AI.

I scanned the article, never made it to the bottom, didn’t find the point the author was trying to make.

Howabout just learning to code better as a human without using AI. Just like learning a craft. Just refuse to use AI. Not possible because of peer pressure? Well then stop worrying and continue to vibe.

Either stop or stop complaining but don’t make excuses or write long articles that ramble and rant … sorry but I don’t understand what’s so hard about stopping.

ls-a•about 1 hour ago
Vibe coding is the new way forward. Please adapt or you will lose so much
Supermancho•about 1 hour ago
> Vibe coding is the new way forward. Please adapt or you will lose so much

This is a reaction to the title, by someone who did not read the article.

ActionHank•39 minutes ago
Title-vibed comment