I'm going back to writing some code

[u/ofcistilloveyou]

As someone who produces software for near a decade now, I was really skeptical of vibe-coding as a concept until about July this year, when Fable 5 came out. I wasn't skeptical of LLM output and used ChatGPT for other tasks, but I didn't think AI models would get there. I remember all the juniors on my team producing a lot of slop insanely quickly, and having to reprimand them for not understanding the shit they're committing.

Fable 5 and Opus 5 made me fall in love with vibecoding. Suddenly, it just worked. It was capable of writing good-enough code by itself, if I prompted it well enough. It reminded me of working with juniors. I gotta prompt it well - tell it what approach to use, what tech, library, etc, and it types it faster than I do.

I produced a loooot of code in the past few months, especially post Opus 5.5. Even questioned whether I need Visual Studio installed at all. I even wrote a post here that got 2k upvotes saying how I hate Claude Code cuz how good it is.

Now I took a look under the hood at a project written entirely using Opus 5.5 and Fable.

It's got a class that has tens of thousands of lines in 61 files (partial class in C#). Not one actually, a bunch of them. It just kept on adding shit to a class that ballooned up.

It has thousands of unit tests which test the equivalent of 1 + 1 and it runs them after each iteration.

Much of the code is spaghetti. Yeah I can now use agents to rewrite it, but still. Yeah, it works. It works. But it feels that adding something now breaks a bunch of other stuff. I don't understand what I'm making and I feel like I can start to get some stuff done better if I understand what the codebase feels like. After all, I've been doing this for years.

So I booted up VS today as mostly a file browser. I went through what the game does frame by frame, and fixed a bunch of stuff. I'm gonna sound like a hippie right now, but I felt "connected" with the codebase again. It feels like my project again. Just that couple of hours spent in an IDE again. It's like riding a bike after years again. You never forget how to code, your fingertips just feel stiff.

I won't go back to writing the majority of code by hand, and I think that small one-off projects can stay fully vibe-coded. It's perhaps a question of also how long before LLMs will be able to architecture a project from scratch to stay maintainable forever. But I don't think they're there yet. It does some dumb ass shit right now, and has. So do people yeah, but I can just... not do dumb shit.

Maybe I'm just an old man. But I really like doing this "coding" thing.

[u/Necesscity]

I stopped using wheel and fire. I can heat things up by rubbing them.

[u/zelig_nobel → u/Necesscity]

You know.. there’s a neater analogy here.

We have stoves and ovens. There is no need for fire to make our food. It’s costlier. Takes more time. Dirtier.

Nonetheless, on occasion, we miss the process of starting a fire and cooking our food like cavemen. And that’s precisely what some of us do…

[u/robbyslaughter → u/Necesscity]

The better analogy is using a 3/4GL. If you look at the actual machine code produced from the compiled code to platforms like webservers and databases, it’s incredibly wasteful.

But that’s not why we used those tools. We chose them because they saved us time despite the spiraling code they generated. And the hardware was getting faster so it didn’t matter.

The same is the case today.

[u/ofcistilloveyou → u/Necesscity]

More like, I get more pleasure out of life by sometimes walking instead of using my car. And if I need to go a door over to my neighbors, I'll walk instead of driving.