4d ago

skills for rent

161 comments

I have no idea what vibe coding is, can someone ELI5 it to me?
I have tried AI to get some rough C# for my hobby game but even that was unusable.
- ‘Vibe coding’ is where you code only with prompts and never look at the generated code.
  Seems like a great way to create insecure unmaintainable code if you ask me.
  
  Also I just dont get why you would ever generate code
  Like, you have no idea how to code something? Sure, just ask it about methods how to do it. But generating code too? Cant you RTFM?
  
  I think you're severely underestimating how lazy some people are, lol. I totally get what you're saying, and from a logical perspective it makes sense. It's just that if you survey enough people, i really think you'd be surprised at how little effort some are willing to put forth for just about anything
  
  Isn't the reason obvious? To save time? I'm not saying it's a good thing but it seems prettyyyy obvious why people are doing it.
  
  But it's going to take hours of debugging every time. If you actually learn how to write code, you'll get better at it over time and reuse common functions. It'll take less time as you get better.
  
  Well... Just because you can code does not guarantee you will find it enjoyable. It's pretty common for people to like certain aspects of coding but not others. For instance, I personally find writing unit tests boring. So if something came by that made writing them less mundane I would certainly be enticed.
  
  Yeah no. For example microcontrollers, which are how I learned it. There are so absurdly many traps to fall into that even within the first 10 things I did I ran into some obscure detail of the ATmega328p. And the kept happening ever since, each time lots of googling and trial and error. Now with GPT you know how much time this saves? Not just the coding itself, but also these absurd details that only an expert knows. Yes perhaps it does the same error, but after reiterating it usually sees the problem. I can also throw some datasheet for some chip at it and get exactly how to program it with what setting etc. It enables me to do FAR more advanced things. And the new 3o and 4o mini are really much better again. Code often works out of the box now.
  
  I love how people simply downvote me for saying these things. As if me repairing an E-Bike is somehow a bad thing, just because an LLM was what enabled me to actually do it. As is programming for some reason should be an arcane art. As if technology has not always been changing in exactly the same way. With people saying "The way you do it is wrong!" and 20 years later nobody does it the old way. LLM have exploded in a few years and have come extremely far, what do you think they are capable of in 10 years? All those silly little mistakes they still do, gone.
  
  I think we're still in the Win95 plug and play phase. Granted I have been using Claude 3.7 thinking and I will try o3 mini or whatever I have access to via Kagi tomorrow, but today I spent 2.5 hours trying to get AI to vibe code me a bash script that could read a system group member list and write it into a users .k5login file when run. It came up with lots of stuff that looked good but in the end still made an empty file. I even tried to help it with what I guess are oddities of our system but it didn't work. I tried editing it enough to where I felt like I was very close to just writing it myself with documentation hints and ran out of time.
  Idk if it's me not prompting right (but if so then I'm going to have to learn a proxy skill rather than just learn the skill which seems silly when it seems so opaque to learn the proxy skill. Like if I need to ask for help to prompt and it's complicated why not just learn the code?) or just that as soon as you hit a non public even slightly customized environment AI just doesn't have the context necessary and there's no easy way to get it to it securely yet or maybe Claude isn't that good (but it was pretty loved for like 6 months for writing code)... Or the hype works in very limited ways and IDK when that'll change.
  
  Save Time where? If you want to code more than snake, you need to have a basic knowledge of coding anyway, and once you know how to code, you will want to code in your own style. And if you just want to make basic programs, just fork someones github project and change a few lines.
  
  You're saying this with your understanding of the field. The people pushing this are either untrained (and thus don't know what's going wrong) or are trying to milk money out of the former.
  
  Not all code needs to be held to the highest standard. Sometimes you really just want a throwaway script.
- Vibe coding is basically having no idea about coding and using the AI to make snippets of Code for you
  Like if you want to programm snake, you would prompt it:
  Tell me what parts of code are required to programm snake in python
  then it would tell you like:
  you need a programm to make a grid system
  you need an array which can go down a tickrate
  etc pp
  so you tell it like:
  Generate me code, that does xy
  Generate me code that takes the input of xy and does z with it
  and so forth, then you just paste everything into a txt and ask the AI to debug it for you and hope it works
  
  The people who need vibe coding shouldn’t be using it. And the people who can use it, don’t need it.
  
  Idk about the last bit. I've done some vibe ~~coding~~ debugging to fix game mods written in languages and frameworks I don't know and have no interest in learning at the moment. I still look over the output, but given a lack of knowledge, I'd still consider it vibe based
  I don't have the bandwidth to know enough about everything I encounter to be passable, and sometimes I just want to make some random thing work with the minimal amount of effort so I can get back to the actual task at hand.
  
  This sounds terrible, lol! Are there any examples that can be pointed to? I'd love to see one of these constructs.
  
  On tilvids.com some dude called picopixl is doing tutorials about this
  https://tilvids.com/w/oyddhsnfHUFToBEmpEZpEg
  And yeah, its pretty great what it could do, but for someone who (is his own words) can tweak the code so it works, it tool longer to make a Prompt than just coding the Game yourself
  Also, Tetris in JS is like Babys first JS project, so even if you really wanted to just get Tetris from somewhere, you could have just git pulled any github project

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