4 ms·
> When you spend two years making useless Arduino projects, you develop instincts about electronics, materials, and design that you can’t get from a tutorial. W
by rglover 8mo ago
> When you spend two years making useless Arduino projects, you develop instincts about electronics, materials, and design that you can’t get from a tutorial. When vibe coding goes straight to production, you lose that developmental space. The tool is powerful enough to produce real output before the person using it has developed real judgment.
The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
- bool3max 8mo agoYou're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.
- james2doyle 8mo ago> You're absolutely right Bot detected
- the_af 8mo agoI think that's the joke.
- names_are_hard 8mo agoI found the key insight -- when a human tries to sound like an LLM, that's perceived by other humans as humor.
- groestl 8mo agoNot sarcasm. Not cynism. Just pure humor.
- johnisgood 8mo agoOh my God, this is peak GPT.
- teaearlgraycold 8mo agoThe issue is clear
- tootubular 8mo agoBut crucially they used "--" and not "—" which means they're safe. Unless it's learning. I may still be peeved that my beloved em dash has been tainted. :(
- the_af 8mo agoOf course they'll learn. LLM bots have been spotted on HN using that hipster all lower case style of writing. i can write like this if i want. or if i were a clever ai bot.
- johnisgood 8mo agoNo need to be clever, just add the instruction to write in that way.
- cracki 8mo agoNever admit when someone else is right. They'll forget they were right and begin to think they won a fight. Or something. You're right.
- Aurornis 8mo agoIf you didn't catch it, this is a joke calling out the comment above it for using a couple obvious LLM-isms. The comment above may have been a joke, too. It's hard to tell any more.
- the_af 8mo ago> It's hard to tell any more. Wait, I think I have the answer! "You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"
- cracki 8mo agoHm... Why? Ah! Because you are also a tortoise
- wavefunction 8mo agoTortoise have been observed righting other tortoise that have become stuck. https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DZ57D608fiM https://www.youtube.com/shorts/DZ57D608fiM (two tortoises helping a third) this has a terrible voiceover but you get the idea
- mmustapic 8mo agoThey're just questions
- cobolexpert 8mo agoWhat do you mean I'm not helping?
- the_af 8mo agoI mean you're not helping. Why is that?
- alwa 8mo agoThen again, sophisticated manufactured electronics had long been cheap and available by the time somebody thought to create Arduino as a platform in the first place. And even today, people hack on assembly and ancient mainframe languages and demoscene demos and Atari ROMs and the like (mainly for fun but sometimes with the explicit intention of developing that flavor of judgment). I predict with high confidence that not even Claude will stop tinkerers from tinkering. All of our technical wizardry will become anachronistic eventually. Here I stand, Ozymandius, king of motorcycle repair, 16-bit assembly, and radio antennae bent by hand…
- epiccoleman 8mo agoI might be tilting at a strawman of your definition of vibe coding - apologies in advance if so. But LLM-aided development is helping me get my hands dirty. Last weekend, I encountered a bug in my Minecraft server. I run a small modded server for my kids and I to play on, and a contraption I was designing was doing something odd. I pulled down the mod's codebase, the fabric-api codebase (one of the big modding APIs), and within an hour or so, I had diagnosed the bug and fixed it. Claude was essential in making this possible. Could I have potentially found the bug myself and fixed it? Almost certainly. Would I have bothered? Of course not. I'd have stuck a hopper between the mod block and the chest and just hacked it, and kept playing. But, in the process of making this fix, and submitting the PR to fabric, I learned things that might make the next diagnosis or tweak that much easier. Of course it took human judgment to find the bug, characterize it, test it in-game. And look! My first commit (basically fully written by Claude) took the wrong approach! [1] Through the review process I learned that calling `toStack` wasn't the right approach, and that we should just add a `getMaxStackSize` to `ItemVariantImpl`. I got to read more of the codebase, I took the feedback on board, made a better commit (again, with Claude), and got the PR approved. [2] They just merged the commit yesterday. Code that I wrote (or asked to have written, if we want to be picky) will end up on thousands of machines. Users will not encounter this issue. The Fabric team got a free bugfix. I learned things. Now, again - is this a strawman of your point? Probably a little. It's not "vibe coding going straight to production." Review and discernment intervened to polish the commit, expertise of the Fabric devs was needed. Sending the original commit straight to "production" would have been less than ideal. (arguably better than leaving the bug unfixed, though!) But having an LLM help doesn't have to mean that less understanding and instinct is built up. For this case, and for many other small things I've done, it just removed friction and schlep work that would otherwise have kept me from doing something useful. This is, in my opinion, a very good thing! [1]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e355986821c1cba87fec2cb044894ea6912ac98 https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e3... [2]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes
- gowld 8mo agoCouldn't one rebut that Arduino is plug-and-play without getting your hands dirty in lower-level electronics?
- rglover 8mo agoThe article addresses this by making the point that prototypes != production. Arduino is great for prototyping (authors opinion; I have limited experience) but not for production-level manufacturing. LLMs are effectively (from this article's pov) the "Arduino of coding" but due to their nature, are being misunderstood/misrepresented as production-grade code printers when really they're just glorified MVP factories. They don't have to be used this way (I use LLMs daily to generate a ton of code, but I do it as a guided, not autonomous process which yields wildly different results than a "vibed" approach), but they are because that's the extent of most people's ability (or desire) to understand them/their role/their future beyond the consensus and hype.
- bigfishrunning 8mo agoI think even calling them MVP factories is a bit much. They're demo factories. Minimum Viable Products shouldn't have glaring security vulnerabilities and blatant inefficiency, they just might me missing nice-to-have features.
- relaxing 8mo agoNot, because it isn’t. A plug and play arduino is useless without some level of circuit building expertise.
- HerbManic 8mo agoYep. Increases output but reduces understanding.
- samusiam 8mo agoIt doesn't have to reduce understanding. It completely depends on how you use it. See, for example, this study https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2 https://arxiv.org/html/2601.20245v2
- utopiah 8mo agoPublished by Anthropic. It's a bit like a "study" by Coca Cola "proving" that one can lose weight by just drink their product rather than doing sport. Sure, it's not impossible, but that's definitely not the normal usage.
- samusiam 8mo agoI agree some skepticism is warranted. However I think we need to avoid essentialist thinking about what effects AI usage will have on a person. > that's definitely not the normal usage The way I look at it, AI use -- proper AI use -- is something that needs to be taught / learned. It's not unlike other "computer literacy" skills. There are ways of using it more or less effectively to achieve your goals.
- ytoawwhra92 8mo agoNah. There are corners of the industry where people still write ASM by hand when necessary, but for the vast, vast majority it's neither necessary (because compilers are great) or worthwhile (because it's so time consuming). Most code is written in high-level, interpreted languages with no particular attention paid to its performance characteristics. Despite the frustration of those of us who know better, businesses and users seem to choose velocity over quality pretty consistently. LLM output is already good enough to produce working software that meets the stated requirements. The tooling used to work with them is improving rapidly. I think we're heading towards a world where actually inspecting and understanding the code is unusual (like looking at JVM/Python bytecode is today). Future liabilities? Not any more than we're currently producing, but produced faster.
- sarchertech 8mo agoCompilers take a formal language and translate it to another formal language. In most cases there is no ambiguity, it’s deterministic, and most importantly it’s not chaotic. That is changing one word in the source code doesn’t tend to produce a vastly different output, or changes to completely unrelated code. Because the LLM is working from informal language, it is by necessity making thousands of small (and not so small) decisions about how to translate the prompt into code. There are far more decisions here than can reasonably fixed in tests/specs. So any changes to the prompt/spec is likely to result in unintended changes to observable behavior that users will notice and be confused by. You’re right that programmers regularly churn out unoptimized code. But that’s very different than churning out a bubbling morass where ever little thing that isn’t bolted down is constantly changing. The ambiguity in translation from prompt to code means that the code is still the spec and needs to be understood. Combine that with prompt instability and we’ll be stuck understanding code for the foreseeable future.
- ytoawwhra92 8mo agoThe problem you describe is real, but I think it can be addressed by improving tooling without any improvement in available LLM technology.
- tsunamifury 8mo agoHA hey before you code then hope you roll your own silicon because otherwise its just shortcuts. This is such high minded bullshit.