5 ms·

Vibe Coding Is Making Braindead Coders

42 points by namanyayg 1y ago

orionblastar 1y ago
I remember Macworld published an article in 1990 or close to it, "Does the Mac make you stupid?" claiming that Mac users using MacWrite compared to DOS users using WordPerfect made more grammar and spelling mistakes on the Mac than on DOS. Supposedly, the brain's creative side takes over the Analytical/logical side of the brain, and the GUI and mouse confuse the brain. Almost everything is GUI and mouse, except for FreeDOS, GNU/Linux command line shells, etc. Even macOS has a UNIX command line now. Vibe coding is no different; it uses the creative side of the brain. Not stupid or braindead, just different. It is a problem to solve, and whoever does it will be rich.
- Wolfbeta 1y ago
  Think different.
- ahartmetz 1y ago
  "Write creative, proofread analytical"?
atonse 1y ago
For almost all of my professional coding life (~25 years), I don't think I've ever seen the "code" as my product, but instead, an actual business/real-world outcome produced or improved by that code. Even though I loved programming, the satisfaction usually came from the tools that enabled actual real-world benefit rather than coding for the sake of coding. Which is why I used to find the debates about TDD or tabs/spaces silly. Does this provide faster iteration or more stability/maintainability to solve a real world problem? if it does, great. if it doesn't, you're just wasting everyone's time and money, let's move on. So in that vein, using things like Claude Code allow me to provide that real world value FASTER, which is ultimately what my clients appreciate. It's allowing me to spend more time being a product manager and less time fiddling around with day to day stuff. And it's not like the code is horrible or anything. I still apply strong architectural principles (code reuse, organized modules, separation of concerns, clear APIs, etc). I'm just not writing every line anymore. I will be the first to say it's probably going to result in making me a bit more rusty in coding. But I haven't really seen that yet in the last 6 months, mostly because I haven't had to just say "ok forget it, let me just code it" more than once or twice, especially in the last 2 months since I moved over fully to Claude Code. And in those situations, I was able to take over pretty easily. So far I'm not too worried, but it's hard to tell what the long term impacts will be.
- zamalek 1y ago
  I worry about the brain rot because, while I am not purely vibing, I am relying on Claude for most of my typing. I still routinely need to work those hard-earned brain muscles with what it produces; it's terrible at factoring things into components, I've seen it write SQL injection vulnerable code frequently, and it litters the code base with TODOs. If I were to describe it, it's extremely lazy - and you constantly have to remind it to do the work, do it correctly, and course correct it when it's making bad long term decisions. If I end up brain rotting I am seriously concerned about the quality of code that I will be producing. But I do agree with the core of your argument. Code is a tool, one that I don't mind replacing.
- MoreQARespect 1y ago
  >Which is why I used to find the debates about TDD or tabs/spaces silly. Does this provide faster iteration or more stability/maintainability to solve a real world problem? if it does, great. I mean, yeah. IDK why you find that silly.
  - atonse 1y ago
    Because people used to get very riled up about these things. And I never understood why back then. But then again, if you see code as the final product (rather than the outcome enabled by the code), then I can understand why.
    - MoreQARespect 1y ago
      You seem to believe that it's a side effect of code fetishism. Cant think why, but ok.
h4ch1 1y ago
I have been seeing a lot of so-called self proclaimed vibe-coders swearing by LLMs making them 10x or 100x devs, but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects hitting the markets. Whenever I see said projects, on Github or non-technical friends vibe coding their next new startups asking for a code review, all I can see is boilerplate hell, 100s of lines of redundancies, problems that could've been solved using 5-6 procedures being blown out to 4-5 directories with 20-30 procedures, basically over-engineered beyond belief. The positive part of this is people who would've never thought of programming/writing code are beginning to do so but their confidence is highly misplaced because they simply don't understand what's going on to a certain degree and don't possess the necessary knowledge nor skillset to review the generated code. A successful compile or output on the web browser is not a very good metric for projects. Great writeup that captures the current state of affairs. ---- Tangential, but hi Nommy :) glad to see you out there, remember competing against you back in school; those web dev comps used to be the shit. Think Exun 2013 was when we went head to head making that fake currency haha.
- crinkly 1y ago
  I’m currently enjoying a competitor in our market make a wonderful mistake in this area. They want all in on vibe coding and AI and announced to their customers that they’d rewrite their 25 year old rotting platform using it in 12 months. 6 months late and I know a clean up contractor who is making bank there with no hope of recovering it apparently. They saw it as a way out from their cheap assery, lack of talent and lowest bidding outsourcer over the years and it’s a dead end. I wonder how many other projects are in this situation.
  - h4ch1 1y ago
    Selling shovels during a gold rush seems to be an enticing avenue honestly. Think I need to scope out some projects like this haha.
    - faangguyindia 1y ago
      and you'll fail, mostly because top projects in space have moat, ClaudeCode, Codex etc...
another_twist 1y ago
The way I use AI for coding is that I type in the business logic in english and have AI take over the typing. Sometimes I fill in a skeleton and have AI write the boring stuff. But I agree with the author - outsource labor never knowledge. I found AI actually made me a better programmer (judging by feels not metrics) because I know have to explain my thinking which clears up the mud in my head. After which writing the code is leg work better outsourced.
Havoc 1y ago
I’ve noticed the granularity/size of the output matters greatly to whether I learn anything. When generating a cohesive big thing then I can’t be arsed to go through it. While troubleshooting a specific line or problem is likely to still yield engagement and learning. In that respect fully agree with author that the vibe coding style (ie IDE) is particularly bad. Substantially more than chatbot style help with coding
api 1y ago
I’m old enough to remember stories from people older than me about developers bemoaning GUIs (“point and drool”), IDEs, and high level languages. As with all past dev tools shitty developers will generate shitty code with AI and good developers will learn how to use it well.
aurareturn 1y ago
I'm sure they said the same thing when electronic calculators were invented.
- y0eswddl 1y ago
  Would you mind explaining how using a calculator to crunch numbers is the same things as asking an LLM to build your application for you?
  - aurareturn 1y ago
    Before: Do the math by hand, physical tools, shapes, geometry. After: Punch it into a calculator and skip all the intermediate steps. Writes a blog titled: "Calculators is making braindead physicists, engineers, and anyone who needs to use math".
willtemperley 1y ago
Vibe coding is making me far smarter. It took me three weeks to rewrite a PostgreSQL client for Swift, adding structured concurrency and channel binding and completely rewriting the network layer. I knew nothing about the Postgres wire protocol or channel binding. LLMs changed that. Now I have a good working knowledge of these things because the LLMs can explain everything at my level. It's game changing for me because there was simply no way I could have done this without LLMs teaching me the concepts I needed. The current version: https://github.com/willtemperley/swift-postgres-client https://github.com/willtemperley/swift-postgres-client The original: https://github.com/codewinsdotcom/PostgresClientKit https://github.com/codewinsdotcom/PostgresClientKit
PUSH_AX 1y ago
Braindead? Or better architects of systems? The abstraction an LLM provides almost forces you to take more of a tech lead/architect approach, which I find really interesting. Maybe we should be more agnostic to the lower level details as we trust the abstraction more (I know we're not there yet!), decades ago we needed to write ASM, there was probably a point in time when higher level languages came out and we were still double cheking the machine code, then a point came when we no longer cared or needed to care much and could focus on the higher level. I see LLMs as creeping towards this paradigm (again, not there yet).
admiralrohan 1y ago
Most likely the role of "programmer" will go away as we conventionally know Anyways, we have evolved a lot like from assembly language to using npm packages and we are going to see the next evolution. On inability to solve hard problems, I think we are going to tackle even harder problems in future with AI in our side, just like corporations manage to handle more complex problems than an individual.

42 points by namanyayg 1y ago

I remember Macworld published an article in 1990 or close to it, "Does the Mac make you stupid?" claiming that Mac users using MacWrite compared to DOS users using WordPerfect made more grammar and spelling mistakes on the Mac than on DOS. Supposedly, the brain's creative side takes over the Analytical/logical side of the brain, and the GUI and mouse confuse the brain. Almost everything is GUI and mouse, except for FreeDOS, GNU/Linux command line shells, etc. Even macOS has a UNIX command line now. Vibe coding is no different; it uses the creative side of the brain. Not stupid or braindead, just different. It is a problem to solve, and whoever does it will be rich.

Wolfbeta 1y ago
Think different.
ahartmetz 1y ago
"Write creative, proofread analytical"?

atonse 1y ago

For almost all of my professional coding life (~25 years), I don't think I've ever seen the "code" as my product, but instead, an actual business/real-world outcome produced or improved by that code. Even though I loved programming, the satisfaction usually came from the tools that enabled actual real-world benefit rather than coding for the sake of coding. Which is why I used to find the debates about TDD or tabs/spaces silly. Does this provide faster iteration or more stability/maintainability to solve a real world problem? if it does, great. if it doesn't, you're just wasting everyone's time and money, let's move on. So in that vein, using things like Claude Code allow me to provide that real world value FASTER, which is ultimately what my clients appreciate. It's allowing me to spend more time being a product manager and less time fiddling around with day to day stuff. And it's not like the code is horrible or anything. I still apply strong architectural principles (code reuse, organized modules, separation of concerns, clear APIs, etc). I'm just not writing every line anymore. I will be the first to say it's probably going to result in making me a bit more rusty in coding. But I haven't really seen that yet in the last 6 months, mostly because I haven't had to just say "ok forget it, let me just code it" more than once or twice, especially in the last 2 months since I moved over fully to Claude Code. And in those situations, I was able to take over pretty easily. So far I'm not too worried, but it's hard to tell what the long term impacts will be.

zamalek 1y ago
I worry about the brain rot because, while I am not purely vibing, I am relying on Claude for most of my typing. I still routinely need to work those hard-earned brain muscles with what it produces; it's terrible at factoring things into components, I've seen it write SQL injection vulnerable code frequently, and it litters the code base with TODOs. If I were to describe it, it's extremely lazy - and you constantly have to remind it to do the work, do it correctly, and course correct it when it's making bad long term decisions. If I end up brain rotting I am seriously concerned about the quality of code that I will be producing. But I do agree with the core of your argument. Code is a tool, one that I don't mind replacing.
MoreQARespect 1y ago
>Which is why I used to find the debates about TDD or tabs/spaces silly. Does this provide faster iteration or more stability/maintainability to solve a real world problem? if it does, great. I mean, yeah. IDK why you find that silly.
- atonse 1y ago
  Because people used to get very riled up about these things. And I never understood why back then. But then again, if you see code as the final product (rather than the outcome enabled by the code), then I can understand why.
  - MoreQARespect 1y ago
    You seem to believe that it's a side effect of code fetishism. Cant think why, but ok.

h4ch1 1y ago

I have been seeing a lot of so-called self proclaimed vibe-coders swearing by LLMs making them 10x or 100x devs, but I've yet to see actual vibe coded projects hitting the markets. Whenever I see said projects, on Github or non-technical friends vibe coding their next new startups asking for a code review, all I can see is boilerplate hell, 100s of lines of redundancies, problems that could've been solved using 5-6 procedures being blown out to 4-5 directories with 20-30 procedures, basically over-engineered beyond belief. The positive part of this is people who would've never thought of programming/writing code are beginning to do so but their confidence is highly misplaced because they simply don't understand what's going on to a certain degree and don't possess the necessary knowledge nor skillset to review the generated code. A successful compile or output on the web browser is not a very good metric for projects. Great writeup that captures the current state of affairs. ---- Tangential, but hi Nommy :) glad to see you out there, remember competing against you back in school; those web dev comps used to be the shit. Think Exun 2013 was when we went head to head making that fake currency haha.

crinkly 1y ago
I’m currently enjoying a competitor in our market make a wonderful mistake in this area. They want all in on vibe coding and AI and announced to their customers that they’d rewrite their 25 year old rotting platform using it in 12 months. 6 months late and I know a clean up contractor who is making bank there with no hope of recovering it apparently. They saw it as a way out from their cheap assery, lack of talent and lowest bidding outsourcer over the years and it’s a dead end. I wonder how many other projects are in this situation.
- h4ch1 1y ago
  Selling shovels during a gold rush seems to be an enticing avenue honestly. Think I need to scope out some projects like this haha.
  - faangguyindia 1y ago
    and you'll fail, mostly because top projects in space have moat, ClaudeCode, Codex etc...

another_twist 1y ago

The way I use AI for coding is that I type in the business logic in english and have AI take over the typing. Sometimes I fill in a skeleton and have AI write the boring stuff. But I agree with the author - outsource labor never knowledge. I found AI actually made me a better programmer (judging by feels not metrics) because I know have to explain my thinking which clears up the mud in my head. After which writing the code is leg work better outsourced.

Havoc 1y ago

I’ve noticed the granularity/size of the output matters greatly to whether I learn anything. When generating a cohesive big thing then I can’t be arsed to go through it. While troubleshooting a specific line or problem is likely to still yield engagement and learning. In that respect fully agree with author that the vibe coding style (ie IDE) is particularly bad. Substantially more than chatbot style help with coding

api 1y ago

I’m old enough to remember stories from people older than me about developers bemoaning GUIs (“point and drool”), IDEs, and high level languages. As with all past dev tools shitty developers will generate shitty code with AI and good developers will learn how to use it well.

aurareturn 1y ago

I'm sure they said the same thing when electronic calculators were invented.

y0eswddl 1y ago
Would you mind explaining how using a calculator to crunch numbers is the same things as asking an LLM to build your application for you?
- aurareturn 1y ago
  Before: Do the math by hand, physical tools, shapes, geometry. After: Punch it into a calculator and skip all the intermediate steps. Writes a blog titled: "Calculators is making braindead physicists, engineers, and anyone who needs to use math".

willtemperley 1y ago

Vibe coding is making me far smarter. It took me three weeks to rewrite a PostgreSQL client for Swift, adding structured concurrency and channel binding and completely rewriting the network layer. I knew nothing about the Postgres wire protocol or channel binding. LLMs changed that. Now I have a good working knowledge of these things because the LLMs can explain everything at my level. It's game changing for me because there was simply no way I could have done this without LLMs teaching me the concepts I needed. The current version: https://github.com/willtemperley/swift-postgres-client https://github.com/willtemperley/swift-postgres-client The original: https://github.com/codewinsdotcom/PostgresClientKit https://github.com/codewinsdotcom/PostgresClientKit

PUSH_AX 1y ago

Braindead? Or better architects of systems? The abstraction an LLM provides almost forces you to take more of a tech lead/architect approach, which I find really interesting. Maybe we should be more agnostic to the lower level details as we trust the abstraction more (I know we're not there yet!), decades ago we needed to write ASM, there was probably a point in time when higher level languages came out and we were still double cheking the machine code, then a point came when we no longer cared or needed to care much and could focus on the higher level. I see LLMs as creeping towards this paradigm (again, not there yet).

admiralrohan 1y ago

Most likely the role of "programmer" will go away as we conventionally know Anyways, we have evolved a lot like from assembly language to using npm packages and we are going to see the next evolution. On inability to solve hard problems, I think we are going to tackle even harder problems in future with AI in our side, just like corporations manage to handle more complex problems than an individual.