4 ms·
In a world of vibe coders, those who can still debug on their own, will have quite a valuable skill.
by lukan 1y ago
In a world of vibe coders, those who can still debug on their own, will have quite a valuable skill.
- zelphirkalt 1y agoI already imagine future devs wide-eyed saying things like: "He/She can _debug_!!"
- fao_ 1y agoI mean I already heard comments about myself when I went and RTFM'd "You read manuals?!?" "... Yeah? (pause) Wait, you don't?!?!?"
- vbezhenar 1y agoImagine reading in 2025, when you can just watch tiktok about it! /s
- johnisgood 1y agoPretty much. The hesitancy to read documentation was there long before TikTok and LLMs. "Teach me how to use Linux [but I hate reading documentation]". It infuriated me.
- lukan 1y agoTo be honest, I do find most manuals (man pages) horrible to quickly get information how to do something and here LLMs do shine for me (as long as they don't mix up version numbers).
- johnisgood 1y agoI love manual pages, at least on/from OpenBSD.
- skydhash 1y agoFor man pages, you have to already know what you wants to do and just want information on how exactly to do it. They're not for learning about the domain. You don't read the find manual to learn the basics of filesystems.
- Avicebron 1y ago(Anecdote) Best job I ever had, I walked in and they were like "yeah, we don't have any training or anything like that", but we've got a fully setup lab and a rotating library of literature. <My Boss> "Yeah I'm not going to be around, but here are the office keys" don't blow up the company pretty much.
- lukan 1y agoI don't really see the connection here, but it was a nice anecdote of a trusting environment.
- RUnconcerned 1y agoThis reminded me of Asimov's short story "The Feeling of Power" https://hex.ooo/library/power.html https://hex.ooo/library/power.html
- Reefersleep 1y agoThank you for that, what a fun read :D
- mprovost 1y agoI have a strong memory from the start of my career, when I had a job setting up Solaris systems and there was a whispered rumour that one of the senior admins could read core files. To the rest of us, they were just junk that the system created when a process crashed and that we had to find and delete to save disk space. In my mind I thought she could somehow open the files in an editor and "read" them, like something out of the Matrix. We had no idea that you could load them into a debugger which could parse them into something understandable.
- bigfatkitten 1y agoI once showed a reasonably experienced infrastructure engineer how to use strace to diagnose some random hangs in an application, and it was like he had seen the face of God.
- XenophileJKO 1y agoAre least for a few more generations of model. I just finished creating a multiplayer online party game using only Claude Code. I didn't edit a single line. However, there is no way someone who doesn't know how to code could get where I am with it. You have to have an intuition on the sources of a problem. You need to be able to at least glance at the correct and understand when and where the AI is flailing, so you know to backtrack or reframe. Without that you are as likely to totally mess to you app. Which also means you need to understand source control and when to save and how to test methodically.
- goeiedaggoeie 1y agoSurely there is a scale limit to how big the application can be using this approach.
- a1j9o94 1y agoWhy do you say that? I would argue that as long as your tests and interfaces are clearly defined no reason it couldn't scale indefinitely.
- XenophileJKO 1y agoPractically there is with Claude Code at least. Hypothetically, if you codified the architecture as a form of durable meta tests, you might be able to significantly raise the ceiling. Decomposing to interfaces seems to actually increase architectural entropy instead of decrease it when Claude Code is acting on a code base over a certain size/complexity.
- nurettin 1y agoI was thinking of that, but asking the right questions and learning the problem domain just a little bit "getting the gist of things" will help a complete newbie to generate code for a complex software. For example in your case there is the concept of message routing where a message that gets sent to the room is copied to all the participants. You have timers, animation sheets, events, triggers, etc. A question that extracts such architectural decisions and relevant pieces of code will help the user understand what they are actually doing and also help debug the problems that arise. It will of course take them longer, but it is possible to get there.
- gala8y 1y agoYesterday I tried to vibe install (TM) marker-api docker image and failed miserably. Still, I was able to try. :)