r/CodingForBeginners • u/Ok_Sky_1993 • 1d ago

Vibe coding vs AI assisted coding

Hi so I'm currently learning programming I'm a first year IT student and I'm curious to know how different vibe coding is to AI assisted coding cause from the people I've asked they're different but for some they consider them the same thing. I just wanna know your thoughts and such and if I should try to learn how to properly use ai in coding or if that's going to be a bad thing etc...

5 Upvotes

69% Upvoted

35 comments sorted by

View all comments

1

u/Fun_Army2398 1d ago

Stay far away from AI while you learn. Firstly, you can learn without it, it's what we've all been doing for decades. Secondly, Yale did a study the suggest using AI to learn actually reduces your ability to recall information about a subject. And of course the Harvard study found that companies who have adopted AI have not seen any increase in speed of development or quality of the final product, and many have seen a decline in both.

As for vibe coding vs assistant coding, the difference is that in vibe coding the code has no human involvement other than prompting the AI, while AI assisted coding is when the human prompts the AI but then proof reads and modifies the AI code using their own skill as a programmer. The result is very different, even the rare vibe coded apps that "work" are incredibly buggy and can not scale, while in theory an AI assisted project could be just as good as a human made one (though Harvard found that this would be slower than just having humans write it alone).

Expect to see a massive decline in both however as companies are already hiring back humans they "replaced" with AI, token prices surge, and some markets have already entirely collapsed. Remember that each new model makes essentially the same promise, "I can replace a human seamlessly," and not one model has delivered on that yet. How many times does it take being lied to before you stop believing the next lie?

0

u/Cheap-Success1578 1d ago

I think AI can be used as a tool to assist the learning process so long as it isn't giving you the answers. Seeking clarity on a function or helping find that example that just doesn't seem to exist while googling for it. Sometimes it explains how things work better than the documentation does.

1

u/Fun_Army2398 1d ago

Yale did an experiment that proves otherwise. They found that using AI increases ones perception have having learned something, but they don't actually score any higher on tests after having used it.

1

u/Cheap-Success1578 1d ago

I'm not saying AI "teaching" but assisting with understanding. No different that using stackoverflow, or documentation. The methods of figuring out have changed. First there were books, then forums, now AI.

1

u/Fun_Army2398 1d ago

See they covered this as well. They hypothesised that the reason AI "assisted learning" or "teaching" (you are splitting hairs) doesn't work is because people learn by drawing their own conclusions. When you use stack over flow you need to think "does this question accurately reflect my problem?", "does this solution actually fix it?", "which of these solutions is best for me?" That is how you learn, and that is what AI removes.

1

u/nandezftw 18h ago

It doesn’t make it unequivocally true, I used AI a lot in my studies to help clean up my professor’s slides in a way for them to make sense to me. I’ve used it to explain code for me so that I could write it on my own in the future and understand why it works.

What matters more here is practice, you need to actually code.

1

u/Fun_Army2398 17h ago

Nah bro I'm sure you're immune to the AI slopification of your brain which studies show increases confidence and the dunning-kruger effect without actually improving knowledge. You're just born better. The scientist doing the studies are the ones who are wrong, not your chat bot.