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"Vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell" in coding education

283 points by wagslane 1y ago

om22shree 1y ago
read through the article, pretty much agree with everything you have said ... there are certain skills that AI can't even hope to teach or solve especially in the field of DevOps/Cloud ... too often it recommends the more expensive answer out of the box simply because its the most popular. Its trained on masses ... well, unfortunately, masses are wasting a lot of dough
thoughtlesslabs 1y ago
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scott_w 1y ago
I'm biased as I've not been a beginner dev for nearly 20 years, however I have found Copilot is pretty helpful for is learning Rust. In combination with Intellisense, it helps ease some of the mental overhead of the syntax, letting me focus on learning the important bits of the language. It helped me go from opening up a book on Rust to having a working tool in about a week. I won't pretend that it's turned me into a senior engineer, of course, but it's definitely gotten me over the 0 to 1 problem much quicker than I think I could have without it nudging my code in the right direction. For what it's worth, I don't ask Copilot to write the code, I just use it as an advanced auto-complete, reading the suggestion to see if I agree with it before hitting tab.
- adlpz 1y ago
  I think it's become a running theme: senior devs who have been coding for a while now are able to extract value from these tools because, even if you don't know Rust, you know how to code. BS code smells the same in any language. Beginner devs don't even know what smelling means.
  - adamddev1 1y ago
    Maybe this is the answer to the ageism problem people have complained about in tech. In the land of vibe-coders, the old man is king.
  - alganet 1y ago
    Seniors being able to extract more from any new tool is a time proven constant. That hasn't changed. What happened is that companies tried to push an idea that this new AI thing would be inhospitable to whoever is already an experienced programmer. The idea of "new land", fair and equal to all. Smelling woudn't matter, because all smells would be new and unfamiliar. After insisting on this silly mistake for a while, they realized that experienced programmers were actually their only viable target audience, and attempted to change their approach accordingly. It's embarassing.
- f311a 1y ago
  I thought the same until I tried coding things manually in Rust. It was so hard to write Rust without any assistance. I turned off AI to learn things properly. It was an illusion that I know what I'm doing until I disabled AI.
adlpz 1y ago
I thought this was going to be yet another post about how AI is ruining Junior devs so we'll have a Senior replacement crysis in a few years. It sort of is, indirectly, and I agree with pretty much everything. But the bit about sycophancy was particularly enlightening. I actually thought "plain" ChatGPT-like interfaces could be good for learning. But the Youtube ROAS example is really powerful. If the student can skew the teacher's conclusions so much just by the way they phrase their questions/answers, we're going to mislead new programmers en masse. I'm not even sure that the extensive prompting they say they use for their "Boots" is good enough. I guess in the age of AI you still need someone to repeatedly reject your pull requests until you learn. And AI won't be that someone, at least for now.
- A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
  I think I agree. From personal experience, even when I ask for scathing critique, the need to placate and make me feel better seems to bleed through ( both on 4o and 5 as far as I could tell ). I am not sure what to make of it. We go back to this original prediction that the tool will help those, who both want help and are painfully aware of LLMs peculiar issues.
  - Eisenstein 1y ago
    The incentives align: when the success metric is engagement, it will be optimized for engagement. It makes perfect sense that it is going to agree with you.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  > But the bit about sycophancy was particularly enlightening. I always try to stay above this by prompting the question twice, with the opposite biases. But I of course don't know, which hidden biases I have that the LLM still reinforces.
skovranek 1y ago
"Learning must be uncomfortable." Critical thinking is hard.
- dude250711 1y ago
  Also, not aligned with modern society, since you kind of need free speech for that.
- password54321 1y ago
  People just don't want to face the uncomfortable truth that they are probably not as smart as they want to believe they are.
  - mattgreenrocks 1y ago
    It’s not about being smart as much as staying engaged with the problem even when it mentally defeats you several times.
    - password54321 1y ago
      That's what I mean. People are uncomfortable being wrong. We are taught from school that being wrong makes you less adequate.
      - mattgreenrocks 1y ago
        I see. You are correct. Wrong is merely feedback on something outside of us, not a value judgment of us as people. But education and other systems need us to believe the latter at some low level so they can retain authority.
lordleft 1y ago
I completely agree with this article. AI (in a pedagogic context) is best when treated like a super-powered man page.
- collingreen 1y ago
  A super powered man page that has wrong info often enough you need to have ways to verify either through simple experiments or alternate sources
jasonthorsness 1y ago
> Don’t use: > AI auto-complete in your editor > Agent mode or agentic tools for your educational projects While I am not learning "coding" as a beginner anymore, I am constantly learning new frameworks, language features, algorithms etc. as is the norm in the industry, and I disagree it's bad to use AI auto-complete. Pre-AI IntelliSense-style autocomplete from Visual Studio or ReSharper makes learning new libraries and language features much easier. ReSharper for example will suggest taking advantage of new language features when you write something an older way, and many times this was my introduction to that new feature. The new AI-based autocomplete can be even better; it demonstrates one way to do something and regardless of whether you use it or not, you can learn from it. You have to be curious enough to actually read what it is doing, but if you lack that curiosity it isn't AI's fault (before AI this was just "copy-pasting from Stack Overflow").
- wagslane 1y ago
  Yeah I think there's some nuance. As a relatively experienced dev I still use autocomplete when using a new language, but I think it's different when you already have a strong grasp of coding fundamentals. Learning your 3rd or fourth language when you already understand the constructs is much different than baby's first for loop
- vpShane 1y ago
  100%. I enjoy AI Agentic programming because I make new things to tinker with and/or try out ideas. I'm not trying to code to push to some production, and I'm not worried about what others think of my code. I want to be able to say I've tried and done things when speaking with highly technical people. I've been a 'programmer' since I was 10, I'm 35 now but never joined the work force as a programmer; I don't know why, but now that AI is here, the love for coding, tinkering, making system level things, trying things like WASM which may be the future of our www; these all give me that joy. I found my limitations as a programmer and excelled because I have different skillsets. I love learning that doing something MY way is a good idea, but has been thought of and some amazing programmer already built the ground-work for it. My Cursor AI agent even setup git for me for my projects so I can easily push with my SSH keys: do I know I can do that myself? Yes. Do I want to? no. > ReSharper for example will suggest taking advantage of new language features when you write something an older way, and many times this was my introduction to that new feature. That's actually news to me and sounds amazing. I started coding with C syntax when I was young. You learn habits then, it sticks with you. I'm since enjoying python for backend things, flask for little webserver stuff and javascript for front-end things. WASM Python ain't there yet, but I _love_ tinkering. I _love_ finding bugs. I _love_ poking and prodding at how things work. I'm almost always re-inventing the wheel with concepts but you know what? At least it's mine and I can tinker and learn. Some of us enjoy the craft as a hobby and learning. Even within my teams some are more sophisticated tech wise than I am; to get on their level remotely requires me to tinker. Often times, I find a solution for my problems that were the most simple; engineering minds like to overcomplicate things.
dehrmann 1y ago
> "I don’t understand the docs, anyone have a video?" As an experienced dev, I hate this trend. I don't need my hand held for 10 minutes; I need to see three specific lines of config that may or may not be somewhere in the video.
- havefunbesafe 1y ago
  I think this is similar for anyone who reads a lot of documentation: A 90 minute video explaining documentation and quickstarts can usually be read in 30 minutes and you don't have to constantly pause/restart/rewind.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  A video can be helpful to me in some cases. Demonstrating how to set up a project or run a utility that scaffolds something. Or even some basic coding idioms. But these should be focused and short, i.e. 5-10 minutes. Show one thing, maybe a couple of examples of common scenarios, and that's it.
  - 1718627440 1y ago
    How can that not be done in a tutorial showing you the shell prompt and the files you need to modify?
0xbadcafebee 1y ago
I commend all the ideas the author has here about better education. I agree it's a big problem. But perhaps the biggest problem is the idea of one curriculum. I grew up with a learning disability. I was extremely curious and able to hyper-focus on learning, but only when I found it interesting or easy to pick up and run with ideas. Other kids didn't have the same problem as me, so they excelled while I dragged behind. What I learned (after attending 5 schools in 2 years) is that I have to find my own path to learning that works for me. It's impossible for me to focus on dense text. You could point a gun at my head and I still couldn't absorb the information. I need spatial learning. Moving pictures, flow charts, multi-level cutaways. Lists and sections broken up into hierarchies with clear simple headings and compartmentalized concepts. This way my brain can organize a literal map of the information for me to traverse later. But some other people might find that a nightmare. At the same time, I learned programming extremely slowly, because I only used the methods that were easy to me. I just gave myself projects to accomplish and used trial and error to slowly learn how the language worked, along with a book for reference. It took me years to finally understand the academic underpinnings of how languages (and software) worked. I wish I could've seen a map of the different concepts, to reinforce what I needed to know to learn the next thing. But there's also different kinds of information which need different learning methods. What's a sine, cosine, and tangent? I honestly still don't know, because the words themselves are foreign to me. For that I would need some kind of Duolingo-style repetitious-card-memory-trick-thing to even remember what word is what concept. I don't know any framework to break up any subject into multiple course methods. And AI can't do it either. AI sucks at visualizations, and it doesn't have a deep understanding of how to teach things in multiple ways. EdTech needs to be extremely careful not to put all its cards into one "thing" if that thing can't do what people need. (That said: AI is great at quickly explaining things you don't know, and providing you an insanely fast path to the information you need) In terms of CS itself, I feel like what we're lacking is a big-ass wikipedia or knowledge base. A lot of it is in Wikipedia, but not nearly detailed or interlinked enough. Once you have all the content, then you can reorganize them into different curriculums for different learning styles. But these are two separate problems. The tutorials are way too shallow, and the dense academic verbiage is far too detailed. You need a way to intermix them that's tailored to the user.
- 1y ago
viccis 1y ago
This is true of lots of educational shortcuts. I've noticed students misusing college tutors. They have the tutors do their homework and explain it, then they think they're good to go and ready for the exam. Problem is that any solution seems obvious after it's explained, but to have to come up with it yourself is a separate skill than simply understanding it.
whatever1 1y ago
Organizations now generate 10x the amount of code, because everyone can do it. But we have exactly the same number of reviewers. How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Like literally yesterday I had a not-technical person who used codex to build an optimization algorithm, and due to the momentum it gained I was asked to “fix the rough edges and help with scaling”. The entire thing was trash (was trying to do naive search in a combinatorial problem with 1000s of integers, and was violating constraints with high probability, including the integrality). I had to spend all my day reviewing it and make a technical presentation to their leadership that it is just a polished turd.
- LPisGood 1y ago
  The problem can probably almost certainly be solved to provable optimality using HiGHS or even CBC - the open source Python package PuLP comes with CBC. If you want to be seen as the hero who solves things instead of the realist who says why other solutions won’t work, this could be worth exploring.
  - whatever1 1y ago
    Of course it can be solved using the proper tools by a domain expert/practitioner (even with chatGPT since the expert will know what to ask). But why didn't the AI expert solve it using chatGPT? If it has to land to an expert for reimplementation from scratch after wasting a day on reviewing slop, did we gain productivity?
    - LPisGood 1y ago
      Gain on productivity, maybe nothing. I didn’t mean to comment on the broader scope, just an actionable suggestion for GP.
- lezojeda 1y ago
  It's basically a scheme letting less scrupulous people offload work on others while at the same time making good impressions to manager, PMs and CEOs who want to automate our job and fire us.
alexchantavy 1y ago
> They’re doing sweet battle with bots that are more interested in getting their newly-generated test suite to pass than solving the user’s problem in the simplest way possible. Makes having good tests even more important. One technique I've found super helpful for coding with agents is to make the agent do TDD. Basically ask the agent to come up with the test cases first, manually review those to make sure they make sense, then have the agent game itself to write code to pass the tests. I feel like doing TDD on my own manually is very tedious but having it be AI-assisted helps me move a lot faster.
theobeers 1y ago
“If AI doesn’t literally take all the white-collar jobs over the next few years, we won’t just have a stock market bubble to deal with. We’ll have a drought of educated workers.” Indeed. For me this feels like an “I saw the best minds of my generation” moment.
s_ting765 1y ago
Vibe code hell is the wrong term to be used here. Vibe coding is used in reference to people now rediscovering low code and who have no interest at all in learning about nor owning the code the LLM generated.
Waterluvian 1y ago
> feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. I had a deep rooted emotional response to this. One of the most gruelling and somewhat distressing experiences of learning to program was going through a tutorial, kind of getting it, then trying to make my own spin of the same idea and getting completely stuck. But I’m also convinced that this gruelling process was the highest density learning I’ve ever done. I’ve learned much more since then, and a lot of considerably more complex things. But I’ve never matched the same density of learning. The closest was probably high school math. That deeply uncomfortable “this hurts my brain and is stressing me out” feeling that I suspect isn’t normal for everyone.
multiplesof4 1y ago
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travisgriggs 1y ago
Disclaimer: I use Zed Pro and GPT daily to code. I have been coding for money since 1989. I view the rise of these tools and particularly efficacy in programming as an indictment against modern programming. The modern web is both amazing and horrific. If bureaucratic is "using or connected with many complicated rules and ways of doing things" (Britannica), then modern programming may be the ultimate poster child. Sure, we love to slap this on "civil institutions", but the fact that I need an automaton, answers based on probability, to guide me in how to navigate doing some of the simplest things, is pretty sad (IMO). I used to counsel aspiring new programmers, "It's not about knowing a certain language or framework. Your single most important asset will be an aptitude to constantly keep relearning. Some trends will stand out along the way, but you'll never quit learning new tools and languages". Maybe it's just my age, but it feels like we've overflowed at some point. Early programming was too electrical, too mathematical, so pioneers sought to close the gap between coding and human think. And yet, after years of speculative funding, what we're left with, is a whole different set of problems.
- simultsop 1y ago
  A few more speculative years, there will be no programming left.
- jmhmd 1y ago
  I agree with this sentiment. I have always wished, maybe naively, for the type of computing environment that makes possible things you see in sci-fi movies and shows, where someone can simple "route all power to the forward lazers!" or "use the power cells from your rifle to keep life support systems online!" This imaginary world where technological components are trivially interchangeable, compatible, reusable. My impression is that if you even asked a smartphone hardware engineer to replace a broken iPhone camera with a leftover working camera from an Android phone that, at best it would be an extraordinarily difficult task, and at worst, just may not be possible.
- heisenbit 1y ago
  A lot what has been heaped upon us is accidental complexity in Brook‘s silber bullet sense. LLM‘s cut straight through it, collapsing the silos of knowledge (and eco systems) build around languages and frameworks.
solomonb 1y ago
> After all, it might just allow me to be more lazy, not more productive. Is this not the true promise of technology?
gota 1y ago
Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship. You, the junior, tag along a senior. You work under a shop that is led by a senior-senior that is called a master. Apprentices become craftsmen, craftsmen become masters. AFAIK, the master does not 'offload' project guidance into non-craftsmen, it is an expected part of the craftsmen role to be project/product managers/owners. I've said this a million times to close friends and at this point I'm only half joking. We, and I'm including myself in the 'developer' crowd although I may not deserve it, have really dropped the ball in not being a 'guild' since way back when. At least since the late 1980's; and certainly since before the Original Boom of software dev as a profession (I'm assuming it was late 90's? I know not) (Although I suspect that if that were the case we'd have fewer developers throughout the 00s and 10s, which may have impacted the development of the field itself in unexpected, but likely negative, ways)
- pfortuny 1y ago
  Actually, even before apprenticeship comes drilling. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
- rhetocj23 1y ago
  You learn by doing and thinking. Not reading and watching. Pure and simple.
  - gota 1y ago
    Yes, but even if we all agree the problem with education at scale remains - there is a very finite and limited amount of 'attention' from craftsmen/masters to distribute, which limits the amount of apprentices. The alternative has been to massify education for 'students' (not apprentices) in passive lectures with 'exercises/homework', which does not work as well for most things and particularly for crafts. BTW for a very minor portion of the population the 'student' route is just as effective as the 'apprentice' route, but these are in my experience the exception
groos 1y ago
'Learning must be uncomfortable' - this is the key reason there are some professions which pay more than others. Some people are willing to bear the mental discomfort while others aren't. A lot of people are far more willing to bear physical discomfort but that's almost never monetarily rewarded.
dang 1y ago
I tried to find a representative phrase in the article that would make a good replacement for the baity title*, but I didn't find one, so I did a best guess. If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. * in keeping with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."
SoftTalker 1y ago
When I was a beginner in school we got "hello world" as an example, and were on our own from there. Of course things were much simpler. You had an editor, and a compiler that you ran from the command line. At some point you would learn about Makefiles, but not before you would appreciate their value. And there was no CI, no source control, no IDEs, no TDD frameworks. I can see that throwing a brand new developer into something like Visual Studio would be overwhelming. Even I find it overwhelming after three decades. I still use emacs and a shell.
sfarshid 1y ago
tried reproducing the "Sycophant Problem" example in ChatGPT but couldn't. A: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e940a1-953c-8011-a8f2-3a1a0c51bee8 https://chatgpt.com/share/68e940a1-953c-8011-a8f2-3a1a0c51be... B: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e94067-ec74-8011-88e5-9d27670f3133 https://chatgpt.com/share/68e94067-ec74-8011-88e5-9d27670f31...
paxys 1y ago
Agree with everything in the article, but this isn't a new phenomenon. As long as I can remember (20 years, probably longer), for every student or professional who is seriously and diligently learning to code there are many orders of magnitude more who are simply there to take shortcuts and pad their resume. Vibe coding is just the latest iteration of this. This is why CS programs have such low graduation rates. This is why coding bootcamps don't produce many industry-ready engineers. Coding is hard, and the salaries of software engineers, even in the AI age, reflects this.
kazinator 1y ago
> We’ll have a drought of educated workers. That's scary, because you cannot escape from the repercussions just by not being one of the dummies who relinquished all learning to AI. You depend on being surrounded by other people who know what they are doing. And not just immediately surrounded, but in a broader scope.
JohnMakin 1y ago
If you are writing a tutorial, please for the love of all that is holy do not just make it a bunch of copy/paste steps without much or any explanation. Make me work through it, debug it, take me down the wrong path on purpose for the "aha!" moments. Leave copious amounts of explanation and documentation. Tell me what can go wrong and how I can fix it. I do not want a video. I hate videos. I know not everyone does and people learn differently but videos suffer even worse from the copy/paste problem, I'm essentially just parroting what I'm watching usually without much explanation either. And also, going back and referencing is difficult without taking copious notes. "Now we do x,y, z, and voila! here you have it, a fully fledged (whatever)." Ok, but what did you just do? Why doesn't it work on my machine? etc. I've seen tutorials that do this stuff right and it's a very obvious night and day difference.
- SoftTalker 1y ago
  With any tutorial, don't just passively read it or copy/paste the code. Take notes as you go. Type the code manually. Experiment with variations of the code. It does help your brain encode the information.
- zahlman 1y ago
  Applying the diátaxis (https://diataxis.fr https://diataxis.fr) wisdom here: what you describe is really a how-to guide rather than a tutorial. These are also important, and you should seek them out (and ask for them) when they're what you want. Tutorials fundamentally exist to serve a different purpose: to orient people within the subject matter, when they don't even know what question to ask. Going through steps in order is important so that the student can focus. Intentionally going down wrong paths can be counterproductive for the neophyte, because it means having about as much experience doing the wrong thing as the right thing. Debugging is a general skill, but technology-specific debugging can and probably should be taught separately from the "happy path". A properly done tutorial will properly show the steps, and will have been tested to ensure that it can in fact be expected to work on everyone's machine. The parameters for success will be controlled as tightly as possible.
0x457 1y ago
Tutorial hell...if I had a dollar for every "Anyone has a tutorial on how to build X" where X is some very specific business idea. I feel the same about "what books do you recommend reading to learn Y" Have you tried looking at the online documentation? Usually see it from people that have formal CS education. They learned one way to learn things and refuse to adapt to real life.
- Muvasa 1y ago
  Documentation is not meant for learning. It's to be used as a reference. It's like learning medicine by reading a medical dictionary.
  - 0x457 1y ago
    Yes, and? You can definitely learn how to do something by reading relevant references.
    - Muvasa 1y ago
      How would you go about it. Let's say I want to learn how to do x in library y. How am I gonna find x. When library y has it's own idiosyncraties. In the library the concept is named differently so searching through the documentation yields nothing. Let's say you find what you are looking for. You read the documentation. And it makes no sense like if I was learning haskell and I searched for a monad and got "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors". It's a ineficient process. Documentation is the most helpful when you already know something and want to learn the specifics. Or when you are already using something and have an issue and want to figure out why. EDIT: Another issue I just came up. Structure is very important. It's good to know how to sum before how to multiply. It's so important having a hand crafted pathway leads to rapid success like MathAcademy does.
      - 0x457 1y ago
        To be clear, that is not the way I'd recommend for someone with zero knowledge in software development. The assumption is that you understand something, just not this language/library. I don't think following a tutorial is a good way to learn anything besides doing this very specific thing in a tutorial. You won't learn things like how to consume documentation and evaluate libraries, which is IMO required to develop anything there isn't a tutorial for. Maybe use libraries (and language) with better docs? I don't know much about Haskell beyond fixing other people outdated software, but I was able to do these fixes without watching any tutorials and reading books, just by reading docs. If I were to build web service in rust, Google would lead me to axum, and https://docs.rs/axum/latest/axum/ https://docs.rs/axum/latest/axum/ pretty much gives me everything I need to know to get started. Then I will want to add some sort of CLI to start that service, clap.rs docs are pretty clear. Then I will want some configuration management, I will search crates.io for crates providing such functionality and evaluate how they work (by reading the documentation), pick one and implement. When I wanted to build an android tv app, I've read android docs and built it. If I were in tutorial hell, I'd google for "building android tv reddit client" and not found any. Decided to build a small macOS tray app for myself? A few minutes reading the official docs, and I'm ready to start.
j45 1y ago
Vibe code is one way to learn code review and debugging
jrowen 1y ago
Socrates expressed strong reservations about books and writing, primarily because he believed they weaken memory and true understanding, leading to a false sense of knowledge and a reliance on external "marks" rather than internal wisdom. [Pasted from Gemini]
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black3r 1y ago
While I agree with the premise that "vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell", they are very much not the same. To expand on that, let's start with the fact, that a good coder needs both "skill" and "knowledge". Tutorials (at least the good ones) give you some knowledge - the tutorial often explains why they do what they do and how they do it, but don't give you any skill, you just follow what other people do, you don't learn how to build stuff on your own. Vibe coding on the other hand gives you some skill - how to build stuff with AI, but don't give you necessary coding knowledge - the AI does all the decisions for you and doesn't explain why it did what it did, or how it did it, it just does it for you. "I can't do anything without Cursor's help" is not really the problem. The problem is that vibe coders create some stuff and they don't understand how that stuff works. And I believe this is much bigger problem than knowing how stuff works but not knowing how to use it. Learning doesn't need to be "uncomfortable". Learning needs to be "challenging". There is a difference. The suggested approach here vaguely reminds me of the "you must first learn how to code in a notepad before using an IDE" approach. While the real takeaway should be "you must first learn how to learn, before properly learning something". To learn something properly, you need 2 things: To know what to learn, and to know when you've learned it. To know what to learn you need a curriculum - this obviously depends on your specialization for coders, and can be more crude or more detailed, but you still need something to follow so that you can track your progress. "When you've learned it" for coders is when you can explain what some code does to a colleague and answer questions about said code. It doesn't matter if you wrote it, or someone else wrote it, or an AI wrote it. Understanding code you didn't write is even more important than understanding your own code.
drakeballew 1y ago
Great writeup. As a beginner hobbyist, I have found AI to be extremely frustrating to work with much of the time, but extremely enjoyable and actually my best tutor/teacher when I use it the way the author describes, as a conceptual guide rather than an author. Kind of an aside, I also think that ChatGPT is a great car-ride companion, and that the "conversation mode" that currently exist is pretty bad, primarily due to its response length limitation. If you're driving and verbally chatting with ChatGPT, having it only give you 500 word responses is infuriating because you can't really get into any level of depth without going in constant circles, which isn't a problem that text-based chats have to the same extent.
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283 points by wagslane 1y ago

read through the article, pretty much agree with everything you have said ... there are certain skills that AI can't even hope to teach or solve especially in the field of DevOps/Cloud ... too often it recommends the more expensive answer out of the box simply because its the most popular. Its trained on masses ... well, unfortunately, masses are wasting a lot of dough

thoughtlesslabs 1y ago

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scott_w 1y ago

I'm biased as I've not been a beginner dev for nearly 20 years, however I have found Copilot is pretty helpful for is learning Rust. In combination with Intellisense, it helps ease some of the mental overhead of the syntax, letting me focus on learning the important bits of the language. It helped me go from opening up a book on Rust to having a working tool in about a week. I won't pretend that it's turned me into a senior engineer, of course, but it's definitely gotten me over the 0 to 1 problem much quicker than I think I could have without it nudging my code in the right direction. For what it's worth, I don't ask Copilot to write the code, I just use it as an advanced auto-complete, reading the suggestion to see if I agree with it before hitting tab.

adlpz 1y ago
I think it's become a running theme: senior devs who have been coding for a while now are able to extract value from these tools because, even if you don't know Rust, you know how to code. BS code smells the same in any language. Beginner devs don't even know what smelling means.
- adamddev1 1y ago
  Maybe this is the answer to the ageism problem people have complained about in tech. In the land of vibe-coders, the old man is king.
- alganet 1y ago
  Seniors being able to extract more from any new tool is a time proven constant. That hasn't changed. What happened is that companies tried to push an idea that this new AI thing would be inhospitable to whoever is already an experienced programmer. The idea of "new land", fair and equal to all. Smelling woudn't matter, because all smells would be new and unfamiliar. After insisting on this silly mistake for a while, they realized that experienced programmers were actually their only viable target audience, and attempted to change their approach accordingly. It's embarassing.
f311a 1y ago
I thought the same until I tried coding things manually in Rust. It was so hard to write Rust without any assistance. I turned off AI to learn things properly. It was an illusion that I know what I'm doing until I disabled AI.

adlpz 1y ago

I thought this was going to be yet another post about how AI is ruining Junior devs so we'll have a Senior replacement crysis in a few years. It sort of is, indirectly, and I agree with pretty much everything. But the bit about sycophancy was particularly enlightening. I actually thought "plain" ChatGPT-like interfaces could be good for learning. But the Youtube ROAS example is really powerful. If the student can skew the teacher's conclusions so much just by the way they phrase their questions/answers, we're going to mislead new programmers en masse. I'm not even sure that the extensive prompting they say they use for their "Boots" is good enough. I guess in the age of AI you still need someone to repeatedly reject your pull requests until you learn. And AI won't be that someone, at least for now.

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 1y ago
I think I agree. From personal experience, even when I ask for scathing critique, the need to placate and make me feel better seems to bleed through ( both on 4o and 5 as far as I could tell ). I am not sure what to make of it. We go back to this original prediction that the tool will help those, who both want help and are painfully aware of LLMs peculiar issues.
- Eisenstein 1y ago
  The incentives align: when the success metric is engagement, it will be optimized for engagement. It makes perfect sense that it is going to agree with you.
1718627440 1y ago
> But the bit about sycophancy was particularly enlightening. I always try to stay above this by prompting the question twice, with the opposite biases. But I of course don't know, which hidden biases I have that the LLM still reinforces.

skovranek 1y ago

"Learning must be uncomfortable." Critical thinking is hard.

dude250711 1y ago
Also, not aligned with modern society, since you kind of need free speech for that.
password54321 1y ago
People just don't want to face the uncomfortable truth that they are probably not as smart as they want to believe they are.
- mattgreenrocks 1y ago
  It’s not about being smart as much as staying engaged with the problem even when it mentally defeats you several times.
  - password54321 1y ago
    That's what I mean. People are uncomfortable being wrong. We are taught from school that being wrong makes you less adequate.
    - mattgreenrocks 1y ago
      I see. You are correct. Wrong is merely feedback on something outside of us, not a value judgment of us as people. But education and other systems need us to believe the latter at some low level so they can retain authority.

lordleft 1y ago

I completely agree with this article. AI (in a pedagogic context) is best when treated like a super-powered man page.

collingreen 1y ago
A super powered man page that has wrong info often enough you need to have ways to verify either through simple experiments or alternate sources

jasonthorsness 1y ago

> Don’t use: > AI auto-complete in your editor > Agent mode or agentic tools for your educational projects While I am not learning "coding" as a beginner anymore, I am constantly learning new frameworks, language features, algorithms etc. as is the norm in the industry, and I disagree it's bad to use AI auto-complete. Pre-AI IntelliSense-style autocomplete from Visual Studio or ReSharper makes learning new libraries and language features much easier. ReSharper for example will suggest taking advantage of new language features when you write something an older way, and many times this was my introduction to that new feature. The new AI-based autocomplete can be even better; it demonstrates one way to do something and regardless of whether you use it or not, you can learn from it. You have to be curious enough to actually read what it is doing, but if you lack that curiosity it isn't AI's fault (before AI this was just "copy-pasting from Stack Overflow").

wagslane 1y ago
Yeah I think there's some nuance. As a relatively experienced dev I still use autocomplete when using a new language, but I think it's different when you already have a strong grasp of coding fundamentals. Learning your 3rd or fourth language when you already understand the constructs is much different than baby's first for loop
vpShane 1y ago
100%. I enjoy AI Agentic programming because I make new things to tinker with and/or try out ideas. I'm not trying to code to push to some production, and I'm not worried about what others think of my code. I want to be able to say I've tried and done things when speaking with highly technical people. I've been a 'programmer' since I was 10, I'm 35 now but never joined the work force as a programmer; I don't know why, but now that AI is here, the love for coding, tinkering, making system level things, trying things like WASM which may be the future of our www; these all give me that joy. I found my limitations as a programmer and excelled because I have different skillsets. I love learning that doing something MY way is a good idea, but has been thought of and some amazing programmer already built the ground-work for it. My Cursor AI agent even setup git for me for my projects so I can easily push with my SSH keys: do I know I can do that myself? Yes. Do I want to? no. > ReSharper for example will suggest taking advantage of new language features when you write something an older way, and many times this was my introduction to that new feature. That's actually news to me and sounds amazing. I started coding with C syntax when I was young. You learn habits then, it sticks with you. I'm since enjoying python for backend things, flask for little webserver stuff and javascript for front-end things. WASM Python ain't there yet, but I _love_ tinkering. I _love_ finding bugs. I _love_ poking and prodding at how things work. I'm almost always re-inventing the wheel with concepts but you know what? At least it's mine and I can tinker and learn. Some of us enjoy the craft as a hobby and learning. Even within my teams some are more sophisticated tech wise than I am; to get on their level remotely requires me to tinker. Often times, I find a solution for my problems that were the most simple; engineering minds like to overcomplicate things.

dehrmann 1y ago

> "I don’t understand the docs, anyone have a video?" As an experienced dev, I hate this trend. I don't need my hand held for 10 minutes; I need to see three specific lines of config that may or may not be somewhere in the video.

havefunbesafe 1y ago
I think this is similar for anyone who reads a lot of documentation: A 90 minute video explaining documentation and quickstarts can usually be read in 30 minutes and you don't have to constantly pause/restart/rewind.
SoftTalker 1y ago
A video can be helpful to me in some cases. Demonstrating how to set up a project or run a utility that scaffolds something. Or even some basic coding idioms. But these should be focused and short, i.e. 5-10 minutes. Show one thing, maybe a couple of examples of common scenarios, and that's it.
- 1718627440 1y ago
  How can that not be done in a tutorial showing you the shell prompt and the files you need to modify?

0xbadcafebee 1y ago

I commend all the ideas the author has here about better education. I agree it's a big problem. But perhaps the biggest problem is the idea of one curriculum. I grew up with a learning disability. I was extremely curious and able to hyper-focus on learning, but only when I found it interesting or easy to pick up and run with ideas. Other kids didn't have the same problem as me, so they excelled while I dragged behind. What I learned (after attending 5 schools in 2 years) is that I have to find my own path to learning that works for me. It's impossible for me to focus on dense text. You could point a gun at my head and I still couldn't absorb the information. I need spatial learning. Moving pictures, flow charts, multi-level cutaways. Lists and sections broken up into hierarchies with clear simple headings and compartmentalized concepts. This way my brain can organize a literal map of the information for me to traverse later. But some other people might find that a nightmare. At the same time, I learned programming extremely slowly, because I only used the methods that were easy to me. I just gave myself projects to accomplish and used trial and error to slowly learn how the language worked, along with a book for reference. It took me years to finally understand the academic underpinnings of how languages (and software) worked. I wish I could've seen a map of the different concepts, to reinforce what I needed to know to learn the next thing. But there's also different kinds of information which need different learning methods. What's a sine, cosine, and tangent? I honestly still don't know, because the words themselves are foreign to me. For that I would need some kind of Duolingo-style repetitious-card-memory-trick-thing to even remember what word is what concept. I don't know any framework to break up any subject into multiple course methods. And AI can't do it either. AI sucks at visualizations, and it doesn't have a deep understanding of how to teach things in multiple ways. EdTech needs to be extremely careful not to put all its cards into one "thing" if that thing can't do what people need. (That said: AI is great at quickly explaining things you don't know, and providing you an insanely fast path to the information you need) In terms of CS itself, I feel like what we're lacking is a big-ass wikipedia or knowledge base. A lot of it is in Wikipedia, but not nearly detailed or interlinked enough. Once you have all the content, then you can reorganize them into different curriculums for different learning styles. But these are two separate problems. The tutorials are way too shallow, and the dense academic verbiage is far too detailed. You need a way to intermix them that's tailored to the user.

1y ago

viccis 1y ago

This is true of lots of educational shortcuts. I've noticed students misusing college tutors. They have the tutors do their homework and explain it, then they think they're good to go and ready for the exam. Problem is that any solution seems obvious after it's explained, but to have to come up with it yourself is a separate skill than simply understanding it.

whatever1 1y ago

Organizations now generate 10x the amount of code, because everyone can do it. But we have exactly the same number of reviewers. How the heck are we gonna deal with it when we cannot use LLMs for sanity checking LLM code? Like literally yesterday I had a not-technical person who used codex to build an optimization algorithm, and due to the momentum it gained I was asked to “fix the rough edges and help with scaling”. The entire thing was trash (was trying to do naive search in a combinatorial problem with 1000s of integers, and was violating constraints with high probability, including the integrality). I had to spend all my day reviewing it and make a technical presentation to their leadership that it is just a polished turd.

LPisGood 1y ago
The problem can probably almost certainly be solved to provable optimality using HiGHS or even CBC - the open source Python package PuLP comes with CBC. If you want to be seen as the hero who solves things instead of the realist who says why other solutions won’t work, this could be worth exploring.
- whatever1 1y ago
  Of course it can be solved using the proper tools by a domain expert/practitioner (even with chatGPT since the expert will know what to ask). But why didn't the AI expert solve it using chatGPT? If it has to land to an expert for reimplementation from scratch after wasting a day on reviewing slop, did we gain productivity?
  - LPisGood 1y ago
    Gain on productivity, maybe nothing. I didn’t mean to comment on the broader scope, just an actionable suggestion for GP.
lezojeda 1y ago
It's basically a scheme letting less scrupulous people offload work on others while at the same time making good impressions to manager, PMs and CEOs who want to automate our job and fire us.

alexchantavy 1y ago

> They’re doing sweet battle with bots that are more interested in getting their newly-generated test suite to pass than solving the user’s problem in the simplest way possible. Makes having good tests even more important. One technique I've found super helpful for coding with agents is to make the agent do TDD. Basically ask the agent to come up with the test cases first, manually review those to make sure they make sense, then have the agent game itself to write code to pass the tests. I feel like doing TDD on my own manually is very tedious but having it be AI-assisted helps me move a lot faster.

theobeers 1y ago

“If AI doesn’t literally take all the white-collar jobs over the next few years, we won’t just have a stock market bubble to deal with. We’ll have a drought of educated workers.” Indeed. For me this feels like an “I saw the best minds of my generation” moment.

s_ting765 1y ago

Vibe code hell is the wrong term to be used here. Vibe coding is used in reference to people now rediscovering low code and who have no interest at all in learning about nor owning the code the LLM generated.

Waterluvian 1y ago

> feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. I had a deep rooted emotional response to this. One of the most gruelling and somewhat distressing experiences of learning to program was going through a tutorial, kind of getting it, then trying to make my own spin of the same idea and getting completely stuck. But I’m also convinced that this gruelling process was the highest density learning I’ve ever done. I’ve learned much more since then, and a lot of considerably more complex things. But I’ve never matched the same density of learning. The closest was probably high school math. That deeply uncomfortable “this hurts my brain and is stressing me out” feeling that I suspect isn’t normal for everyone.

multiplesof4 1y ago

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travisgriggs 1y ago

Disclaimer: I use Zed Pro and GPT daily to code. I have been coding for money since 1989. I view the rise of these tools and particularly efficacy in programming as an indictment against modern programming. The modern web is both amazing and horrific. If bureaucratic is "using or connected with many complicated rules and ways of doing things" (Britannica), then modern programming may be the ultimate poster child. Sure, we love to slap this on "civil institutions", but the fact that I need an automaton, answers based on probability, to guide me in how to navigate doing some of the simplest things, is pretty sad (IMO). I used to counsel aspiring new programmers, "It's not about knowing a certain language or framework. Your single most important asset will be an aptitude to constantly keep relearning. Some trends will stand out along the way, but you'll never quit learning new tools and languages". Maybe it's just my age, but it feels like we've overflowed at some point. Early programming was too electrical, too mathematical, so pioneers sought to close the gap between coding and human think. And yet, after years of speculative funding, what we're left with, is a whole different set of problems.

simultsop 1y ago
A few more speculative years, there will be no programming left.
jmhmd 1y ago
I agree with this sentiment. I have always wished, maybe naively, for the type of computing environment that makes possible things you see in sci-fi movies and shows, where someone can simple "route all power to the forward lazers!" or "use the power cells from your rifle to keep life support systems online!" This imaginary world where technological components are trivially interchangeable, compatible, reusable. My impression is that if you even asked a smartphone hardware engineer to replace a broken iPhone camera with a leftover working camera from an Android phone that, at best it would be an extraordinarily difficult task, and at worst, just may not be possible.
heisenbit 1y ago
A lot what has been heaped upon us is accidental complexity in Brook‘s silber bullet sense. LLM‘s cut straight through it, collapsing the silos of knowledge (and eco systems) build around languages and frameworks.

solomonb 1y ago

> After all, it might just allow me to be more lazy, not more productive. Is this not the true promise of technology?

gota 1y ago

Minor part of the article, but the thing about "tutorial Hell" is very true: > Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. This is why, across history, the tried and true method of learning a craft is an apprenticeship. You, the junior, tag along a senior. You work under a shop that is led by a senior-senior that is called a master. Apprentices become craftsmen, craftsmen become masters. AFAIK, the master does not 'offload' project guidance into non-craftsmen, it is an expected part of the craftsmen role to be project/product managers/owners. I've said this a million times to close friends and at this point I'm only half joking. We, and I'm including myself in the 'developer' crowd although I may not deserve it, have really dropped the ball in not being a 'guild' since way back when. At least since the late 1980's; and certainly since before the Original Boom of software dev as a profession (I'm assuming it was late 90's? I know not) (Although I suspect that if that were the case we'd have fewer developers throughout the 00s and 10s, which may have impacted the development of the field itself in unexpected, but likely negative, ways)

pfortuny 1y ago
Actually, even before apprenticeship comes drilling. Repeat, repeat, repeat.
rhetocj23 1y ago
You learn by doing and thinking. Not reading and watching. Pure and simple.
- gota 1y ago
  Yes, but even if we all agree the problem with education at scale remains - there is a very finite and limited amount of 'attention' from craftsmen/masters to distribute, which limits the amount of apprentices. The alternative has been to massify education for 'students' (not apprentices) in passive lectures with 'exercises/homework', which does not work as well for most things and particularly for crafts. BTW for a very minor portion of the population the 'student' route is just as effective as the 'apprentice' route, but these are in my experience the exception

groos 1y ago

'Learning must be uncomfortable' - this is the key reason there are some professions which pay more than others. Some people are willing to bear the mental discomfort while others aren't. A lot of people are far more willing to bear physical discomfort but that's almost never monetarily rewarded.

dang 1y ago

I tried to find a representative phrase in the article that would make a good replacement for the baity title*, but I didn't find one, so I did a best guess. If anyone can suggest a better (i.e. accurate and neutral) title, we can change it again. * in keeping with https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html: "Please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait."

SoftTalker 1y ago

When I was a beginner in school we got "hello world" as an example, and were on our own from there. Of course things were much simpler. You had an editor, and a compiler that you ran from the command line. At some point you would learn about Makefiles, but not before you would appreciate their value. And there was no CI, no source control, no IDEs, no TDD frameworks. I can see that throwing a brand new developer into something like Visual Studio would be overwhelming. Even I find it overwhelming after three decades. I still use emacs and a shell.

sfarshid 1y ago

tried reproducing the "Sycophant Problem" example in ChatGPT but couldn't. A: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e940a1-953c-8011-a8f2-3a1a0c51bee8 https://chatgpt.com/share/68e940a1-953c-8011-a8f2-3a1a0c51be... B: https://chatgpt.com/share/68e94067-ec74-8011-88e5-9d27670f3133 https://chatgpt.com/share/68e94067-ec74-8011-88e5-9d27670f31...

paxys 1y ago

Agree with everything in the article, but this isn't a new phenomenon. As long as I can remember (20 years, probably longer), for every student or professional who is seriously and diligently learning to code there are many orders of magnitude more who are simply there to take shortcuts and pad their resume. Vibe coding is just the latest iteration of this. This is why CS programs have such low graduation rates. This is why coding bootcamps don't produce many industry-ready engineers. Coding is hard, and the salaries of software engineers, even in the AI age, reflects this.

kazinator 1y ago

> We’ll have a drought of educated workers. That's scary, because you cannot escape from the repercussions just by not being one of the dummies who relinquished all learning to AI. You depend on being surrounded by other people who know what they are doing. And not just immediately surrounded, but in a broader scope.

JohnMakin 1y ago

If you are writing a tutorial, please for the love of all that is holy do not just make it a bunch of copy/paste steps without much or any explanation. Make me work through it, debug it, take me down the wrong path on purpose for the "aha!" moments. Leave copious amounts of explanation and documentation. Tell me what can go wrong and how I can fix it. I do not want a video. I hate videos. I know not everyone does and people learn differently but videos suffer even worse from the copy/paste problem, I'm essentially just parroting what I'm watching usually without much explanation either. And also, going back and referencing is difficult without taking copious notes. "Now we do x,y, z, and voila! here you have it, a fully fledged (whatever)." Ok, but what did you just do? Why doesn't it work on my machine? etc. I've seen tutorials that do this stuff right and it's a very obvious night and day difference.

SoftTalker 1y ago
With any tutorial, don't just passively read it or copy/paste the code. Take notes as you go. Type the code manually. Experiment with variations of the code. It does help your brain encode the information.
zahlman 1y ago
Applying the diátaxis (https://diataxis.fr https://diataxis.fr) wisdom here: what you describe is really a how-to guide rather than a tutorial. These are also important, and you should seek them out (and ask for them) when they're what you want. Tutorials fundamentally exist to serve a different purpose: to orient people within the subject matter, when they don't even know what question to ask. Going through steps in order is important so that the student can focus. Intentionally going down wrong paths can be counterproductive for the neophyte, because it means having about as much experience doing the wrong thing as the right thing. Debugging is a general skill, but technology-specific debugging can and probably should be taught separately from the "happy path". A properly done tutorial will properly show the steps, and will have been tested to ensure that it can in fact be expected to work on everyone's machine. The parameters for success will be controlled as tightly as possible.

0x457 1y ago

Tutorial hell...if I had a dollar for every "Anyone has a tutorial on how to build X" where X is some very specific business idea. I feel the same about "what books do you recommend reading to learn Y" Have you tried looking at the online documentation? Usually see it from people that have formal CS education. They learned one way to learn things and refuse to adapt to real life.

Muvasa 1y ago
Documentation is not meant for learning. It's to be used as a reference. It's like learning medicine by reading a medical dictionary.
- 0x457 1y ago
  Yes, and? You can definitely learn how to do something by reading relevant references.
  - Muvasa 1y ago
    How would you go about it. Let's say I want to learn how to do x in library y. How am I gonna find x. When library y has it's own idiosyncraties. In the library the concept is named differently so searching through the documentation yields nothing. Let's say you find what you are looking for. You read the documentation. And it makes no sense like if I was learning haskell and I searched for a monad and got "a monad is a monoid in the category of endofunctors". It's a ineficient process. Documentation is the most helpful when you already know something and want to learn the specifics. Or when you are already using something and have an issue and want to figure out why. EDIT: Another issue I just came up. Structure is very important. It's good to know how to sum before how to multiply. It's so important having a hand crafted pathway leads to rapid success like MathAcademy does.
    - 0x457 1y ago
      To be clear, that is not the way I'd recommend for someone with zero knowledge in software development. The assumption is that you understand something, just not this language/library. I don't think following a tutorial is a good way to learn anything besides doing this very specific thing in a tutorial. You won't learn things like how to consume documentation and evaluate libraries, which is IMO required to develop anything there isn't a tutorial for. Maybe use libraries (and language) with better docs? I don't know much about Haskell beyond fixing other people outdated software, but I was able to do these fixes without watching any tutorials and reading books, just by reading docs. If I were to build web service in rust, Google would lead me to axum, and https://docs.rs/axum/latest/axum/ https://docs.rs/axum/latest/axum/ pretty much gives me everything I need to know to get started. Then I will want to add some sort of CLI to start that service, clap.rs docs are pretty clear. Then I will want some configuration management, I will search crates.io for crates providing such functionality and evaluate how they work (by reading the documentation), pick one and implement. When I wanted to build an android tv app, I've read android docs and built it. If I were in tutorial hell, I'd google for "building android tv reddit client" and not found any. Decided to build a small macOS tray app for myself? A few minutes reading the official docs, and I'm ready to start.

j45 1y ago

Vibe code is one way to learn code review and debugging

jrowen 1y ago

Socrates expressed strong reservations about books and writing, primarily because he believed they weaken memory and true understanding, leading to a false sense of knowledge and a reliance on external "marks" rather than internal wisdom. [Pasted from Gemini]

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black3r 1y ago

While I agree with the premise that "vibe code hell" has replaced "tutorial hell", they are very much not the same. To expand on that, let's start with the fact, that a good coder needs both "skill" and "knowledge". Tutorials (at least the good ones) give you some knowledge - the tutorial often explains why they do what they do and how they do it, but don't give you any skill, you just follow what other people do, you don't learn how to build stuff on your own. Vibe coding on the other hand gives you some skill - how to build stuff with AI, but don't give you necessary coding knowledge - the AI does all the decisions for you and doesn't explain why it did what it did, or how it did it, it just does it for you. "I can't do anything without Cursor's help" is not really the problem. The problem is that vibe coders create some stuff and they don't understand how that stuff works. And I believe this is much bigger problem than knowing how stuff works but not knowing how to use it. Learning doesn't need to be "uncomfortable". Learning needs to be "challenging". There is a difference. The suggested approach here vaguely reminds me of the "you must first learn how to code in a notepad before using an IDE" approach. While the real takeaway should be "you must first learn how to learn, before properly learning something". To learn something properly, you need 2 things: To know what to learn, and to know when you've learned it. To know what to learn you need a curriculum - this obviously depends on your specialization for coders, and can be more crude or more detailed, but you still need something to follow so that you can track your progress. "When you've learned it" for coders is when you can explain what some code does to a colleague and answer questions about said code. It doesn't matter if you wrote it, or someone else wrote it, or an AI wrote it. Understanding code you didn't write is even more important than understanding your own code.

drakeballew 1y ago

Great writeup. As a beginner hobbyist, I have found AI to be extremely frustrating to work with much of the time, but extremely enjoyable and actually my best tutor/teacher when I use it the way the author describes, as a conceptual guide rather than an author. Kind of an aside, I also think that ChatGPT is a great car-ride companion, and that the "conversation mode" that currently exist is pretty bad, primarily due to its response length limitation. If you're driving and verbally chatting with ChatGPT, having it only give you 500 word responses is infuriating because you can't really get into any level of depth without going in constant circles, which isn't a problem that text-based chats have to the same extent.

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