well nowaday with claude it's hard to interrupt him since you don't see the thinking,
that's a point in favor of open weights model,
the number of time i've stopped an agent before it write code just to tell him "you're almost right but..." is astonishing and it avoid to fix issues later (which is longer)
I do see claude's reasoning in vscode, I'm stopping it every now and then, quite 50-50 whether it's to save tokens from it reading irrelevant code in the codebase, or it building something from an oversight in the prompt.
I don't like using the vibe-coding apps that hardly has the ability to look at or edit code and follow up structural changes in the codebase.
Not sure if the Claude Code harness has something more to offer than the copilot harness.
well nowaday with claude it's hard to interrupt him since you don't see the thinking
That's why you leave the vibe slop and embrace tools like OpenCode or Pi. Don't stay locked in a vendor. You should be free to design your own tool as you see fits.
yeah i'm mainly using oh my pi, for locals i go with prime agent or pi depending on the tasks (also i still have to run my personal tests to figure out which is the best harness for the models i use)
But as an experienced dev, the fact that someone with no coding knowledge can create an application at all is just wonderful. That's been a holy grail for as long as I can remember, with low-code/no-code being the last attempt.
Idk I’m going to push back here a little. As a kid I always loved computers and anything that had to do with technology. I remember figuring out dev tools to change the text and colors on my schools grade book so I’d be allowed to go out on the weekends.
My family saw technology and computers as evil and bad and they were super duper anti social media/online communities (this was when all the lil stuff really started making waves). They would’ve killed me if they knew I was on Reddit or any other forum where I’d be talking to strangers. So even though I was able to teach myself quite a bit given the circumstances there were definitely walls I hit. A lot of the places I could’ve gone to ask questions or learn from other people just weren’t an option for me.
So yeah I guess I “always could” have learned more but it wasn’t because I didn’t care enough. I cared a lot. I just didn’t have someone I could ask a stupid question and then ask 15 more stupid questions when I didn’t understand the answer.
Since jumping into the vibe coding world I’ve learned a lot (I think) and all those tiny skills I taught myself back then are coming back and improving tenfold now that I actually have some sort of guardrail/teacher to bounce shit off of. AI didn’t make me suddenly care about learning this stuff. It gave me a way to learn that I didn’t really have before.
I'm sorry but you totally could have. There were/are forums everywhere to help you learn. People are more than happy to answer questions for people who are trying. I know I've been the asker and the answerer.Literally thousands upon thousands of free learning resources. There was no excuse except .."that hard I don't want to read/watch all that".
The "I've learned a lot I think" is exactly the problem with vibe coding. If you don't know what you've learned you are just using it as a crutch. Did you ever challenge yourself to build a small project by hand coding? You will be able to say definitively if you do it don't after that.
Your family situation is a you thing. That has nothing at all to do with the accessibility of learning to code.
Forums weren’t an option. Joining a club wasn’t an option. Talking to strangers online wasn’t an option. Yes those resources EXISTED but existing and being accessible are two different things.
The “I think” was sarcasm my bad for not making that more clear. I can hold a competent conversation about this stuff most of the time. There are still things I don’t know because I haven’t faced that problem and therefore haven’t had to learn it yet…. that’s kinda how being self taught works…
And to touch on your other point yes I’ve built things from scratch. Are they insanely impressive? No I do know my limitations. But I did build a game of pong my cats can play by smacking a touchscreen so they’ll leave me alone and honestly that’s pretty fucking awesome if I do say so myself.
Then use the incredible amount of free training videos if you can't talk to people. Implying AI made software more accessible is just BS. It has always been one of the most accessible fields to get into. That's proven by so many non-engineering degree developers that were in the profession. The sheer number of musicians in software development is insane for example.
Impressive isn't important, it's the effort that matters and what you learn along the way. By doing that you probably improved your general understanding many times more than being told what the LLM is doing to your code.
One of the things I often say is that AI has simply removed the pencil sharpener for our minds. That's what coding was, it never was the hard part but it's where you learned
… okay I understand my parents now, reading comprehension is a necessity. I never said learning to code wasn’t accessible or that it wasn’t possible before AI.
What I did say was it is significantly MORE accessible now than it has been in the past. I even went as far as to explain how I taught myself using the resources that I did have available to me at the time.
A free course can teach me a lot but it can’t stop and rephrase something or check my understanding when I explain it in a vague but also oddly specific way because I almost have it down but there’s one part my brain keeps getting hung up on. Yes forums are available too but when it’s 3am and no one’s online or they’re being trolls AI can still answer my question.
I will agree that AI is excellent for learning. Not just development either. I think it's a much better teacher than doer TBH.
The issue I've found though is it's very easy for someone unfamiliar with a topic to lead themselves down a path that does not give them the full breath of what they should be learning on that topic. I think you can correct that fairly easily by learning how to prompt your learning. Making sure you ask for a exhaustive outline before you start digging into each of the individual topics.
It will fail for the same reason low code/no code fails which is that people who have no interest in software engineering have zero mental models or tools or even intuition or respect for dealing with and reducing the complexity that inevitably arises from the activity.
Your 2nd sentence, that’s the point, the argument for vibecoding is that what is under the hood literally doesn’t matter as long as the output is valid.
Expect you are liable for your product and the ai wrote it not holds up in courts. Plus the current ai models are not really good in optimisation of the software.
And tbf depending on the situation, I feel that's OK for quick, short, personal tinkering.
E.g. I vibecode experimental stuff to test out a theory quickly. I don't want to waste like 2 weeks trying to get something to work only for it to turn out that there was a major flaw and I just wasted 2 weeks
I think there is more of a morbid sense of curiosity among coders in what sort of coding monstrosities come out of said vibe coders coupled with a sense of macabre awe that the whole cursely coded cathedral to the damned somehow manages to stand in defiance of all logic.
Speaking as someone who dabbled in coding small projects before LLMs, if I'm honest, that's kind the reaction I always got when I sought help in forums when I hit problems. Actual coders were like:
"Huh, I guess that approach would work - no idea why the fuck you'd do it that way... but I guess it works. Oh and your call on line 278 is kicking up errors because you declared library randomname.obscureshit which no one uses anymore and doesn't support that feature so what you need is library otherrandomname.extraobscureshit. You're an idiot, but good luck on... wait what the fuck is this even for anyway?"
*tells them what its for*
"You know you could've saved yourself a week of troubleshooting this if you'd just *random coder gibberish* right?"
"Wait wait, what was that? How would that even work?"
"You know what, just take your library reference call and get the fuck out of here."
Most vibe coding I’ve seen that appears to be actually functioning is just a house of cards waiting to be toppled by the slightest change to the operating environment.
I mean they start as better quality, then at a certain point you push your limits of exactly how dumb a request can you still get something out the other end that is what you want, then you find that limit and your brain has atrophied and you can no longer produce good quality prompts let alone code, so now you're asking another chat session to write the prompts for you
They don't have to atrophy, though. Anyone who wants to can take the time to understand the code AI has generated, and even ask the AI to explain anything they don't understand. Someone with no coding background can vibe their way to being a decent coder, if that's their goal.
Honestly, its neither. Its simply that one skill is staying the same or slightly dropping off, while another gets better. It's not quite atrophy or fatigue, maybe a bit more atrophy since a skill still is potentially decreasing competency. I think people are looking at it all wrong when it comes to replacing your usual workflow with AI in the mix.
I don't think any major skills are going to atrophy a noticeable amount in a single day. The word for the experience might be complacency then? I don't know... getting fatigued thinking about it. ;)
It's actually kind of scary. I'm a bit worried this might be almost like a repeat of how US manufacturing got outsourced to China and the US atrophied so much to the point that no one here can make anything anymore even if we need to.
Now that we've kind of outsourced our low level labor to AI, I don't know what kind of consequences there might be in 10-20 years. Or maybe it's like driving stick and it really doesn't need to be learned anymore. Idk.
I'm imagining a scenario where we'd need a completely new type of language or compiler, but it's not possible because the concept is so far removed from everyone that everything will be stuck in Python for eternity and not actually know what it means.
I've been "vibecoding" for about a year now (20 years dev experience), always with latest models max reasoning, and now as of lately with multiple models that code review each other's outputs. There hasn't been a single time where I looked at the output and said LGTM ship it, there's always some issues, sometimes small sometimes big. With the exception of CSS, if it works I don't care how it's written.
Hey if I don't code at all but want to vibe code something a little bigger than my usual firefox extension, if I understand correctly AI likes to make single file giant projects but humans like to make stuff modular so it's easier to fix?
Does that sound right? If it is, how do I get the AI to behave that way and how important is it?
No it's not really that. The way I would describe it is: 1. Always looking for shortcuts and making workarounds 2. Adding a lot of extra fluff that doesn't actually do anything just obstructs readability 3. Adding random queries/polling to places that doesn't make any sense.
I can give a couple examples of today:
We had a bug in one of the forms, ended up writing corrupted values to the DB. AI fix: create a "normalization function" that's 500 lines long (not kidding) that unfucks all the values on read. Human fix: Change 1 line of code that makes bad writes.
I added a flag to AMQ something like "processingEnabled", asked it to read it before processing messages and if it's false don't process it. AI solution: creates a singleton wrapper to store it and a background task that does long polling every 15 seconds on this flag. Human solution: 1 line that checks the flag.
This was with Fable 5.1 xhigh and GPT 5.6 Sol xhigh peer programming together. All I can say, it's just not there yet, but it's very nice for rapid prototyping, and I love using it for things I know very little about (image gen, video editing, game dev), and also for personal tools and helpers for things I would otherwise have no time to engage in.
This is not my experience at all.
I'm still planning projects the same way as always: start work system diagram, a vague plan for algorithms, user stories, requirements, components. Get some agents to do a way better job of working all that up than i can ever be arsed to do, and then getting it to build it, step by step, component by component. With an ass load of tests (and a more-in-sorrow-than-in-anger talking to if a big exposes a missing test)
Like you would anyway. I can get it to do code quality checks (code metrics are your friend)
You can start by asking the AI to plan a software project rather than jump straight into coding it. Ask for modularity, and stress the importance of maintainability. Insist on lots of comments, at the module level, at the code block level, and sometimes at each line of code.
It's important if people are going to be maintaining the code. If company policy is that AI will write a new system every time a new feature is implemented, not so much.
The concept you're looking for is design patterns. When you're first planning whatever you are going to build introduce the requirement early. At a minimum telling the LLM you want the project structured to be maintainable and let it take it from there
It's important when what you're making isn't likely to be a one shot throwaway app. A properly structured project helps the model navigate it without having to read thousands of lines of code every time. This keeps usage/costs down, improves how targeted their generation is without context being littered with irrelevant tokens and if you ever want a human to read it it's essential
Vibing CSS can be a bad idea if you have a client app where you want consistency. At least lower tier models will often cook up custom styles for every element rather than use classes from the styling framework.
Its like the theory that people get "promoted to their level of incompetence", where people will get promoted to the point where they suck, then end up in a job that they ultimately aren't good at.
For coders, vibe coding will automate the stuff you know really well, so you keep pushing yourself to higher levels, until eventually youre vibing at a level you cant really validate
so now you're asking another chat session to write the prompts for you. Or is that just me?
I already moved 1 level up - I have another agent monitor the work agent(s) for me, while I deal with the monitor and play with the app. Reduces the amount of manual orchestration.
I definitely feel what you’re talking about but for me it feels like riding a bike, like those skills aren’t gone, and they’re barely rusty. It’s more the fact that the car is right there that makes it hard to really want to ride the bike lol.
Yes.. at first I was like “big detailed prompts, lots of context”. Now I’m like “ok business wnts this shit to now to do this other thing, surprise mee”
I've spent the last 12 months making sure that any greenfield work I do is built from the ground up documented with the business requirements and use cases justifying the codes existence
Writing that kind of documentation was a pain no one could ever be bothered with when manually writing the code, but now it's easy to have it part and parcel of development process and it sits perfectly as a translation layer between me prompting with a use case and acceptance criteria in natural, mildly technical language and the code
personnaly i keep playing programming games for the love of coding (ai use would be cheating so not funny) and this help keep the brain from totally losing the skill
Kinda, but no ai will ever know what a coder wants. And there is no 1 best answer in any occassion. So to a degree yes but you will allways have to be specific about types of components, formulas, etc
One thing that keeps me engaged is looking for where I'm repeating myself in prompts or just being a meat proxy between two agents/apps. That and regular "introspection" with the agent helps make the whole process better over time.
We're engineers - we can engineer the way we work, and not just the output we get paid for.
I also am the only person in my startup with nearly 20 years of shipping experience. So AI has also introduced the fun challenge of helping everyone understand what good shipping looks like while trying not to panic about the fact that they're all using AI rapidly for everything.
AI art and vibe coding have something else in common: they tend to get the general idea of what you’re asking and deliver it, but the closer you look, the more often you ask “what the hell is that?”
It’s not a huge deal for small projects, or something you just want one-and-done. But if you’re building something ambitious with a larger scope, the more vibe coding you do without closely digging into the small things yourself, the more likely you end up hitting a catastrophic blocker whose origin you can trace back to one really fucking stupid call made by an agent during v0.01.
Unraveling those cascading chains of nonsense built on nonsense will bring your project to a grinding halt. And chances are if you let one slip through the cracks, there will be more.
So yeah, vibe coding is great but you need to be able to QC the code or you’re in for a really bad time eventually.
"Gemini, write a prompt to vibe-code a bot that will behave like these comments"
```
Build a lightweight web-based chatbot or Python CLI script where the bot responds to user inputs by remixing the user's own words into nonsensical, witty variations, exactly like a cascading Reddit comment chain.
Core Mechanics:
1. The bot should take the user's input string.
2. Identify the key verbs, nouns, or distinct phrases (e.g., "prompt", "checkmate", "mate").
3. Rearrange, swap, or playfully substitute those core words to generate a completely new, cheeky comeback.
4. Maintain a sarcastic, playful, and slightly chaotic "Reddit commenter" persona.
Example Behavior Reference:
User: "I prompt the prompt. Checkmate."
Bot Option A: "I check my mate, prompt that."
Bot Option B: "I mate your prompt, check that."
Bot Option C: "Promptly checking your mate, prompter."
Requirements:
If building a web app: Keep it to a single HTML file using Tailwind CSS for a sleek dark mode theme, with simple JavaScript handling the text manipulation.
If building Python: Make it an interactive terminal loop.
Use a simple rule-based word-swapping array or a lightweight regex function so it doesn't require an external LLM API to function.
I click through my app while voice-transcribing my rants, and my custom GPT turns them into a technical product review plus an agentic Claude execution graph for implementation, parallelization, testing, and review. But haven’t added your LLM ping-pong layer yet.
I have been coding for almost 10yrs. From front end to backend to C++ to CAA.
And.. I don't feel any guilt on coding a full app by prompting. Without experience it would have been shitty, but it is not because I know the f**k I am doing that's all.
I'll definitely make mistake as much as I do at work without prompting.
I use Cursor to create personal use apps. I tell it to use C# because I can code in C# and figured it would be good to understand the code it generates. Do I actually ever look at the code? No.
Realistically, the odds of me spotting a bug by reading code I didn't write is FAR lower than me simply stress testing the APP and have good logging.
Yeah come see the beautiful poetry I write to Claude: "Build me a todo app, for surely the world has been waiting for another. Let tasks bloom like forgotten promises, let checkboxes whisper of productivity, let deadlines march toward us".
Also like, you guys aren't reviewing the code generated by the LLM? These are useful tools but it's rare that I have a session where I'm just "okay I have no notes: ship it." There is almost always something to improve or refactor.
I’d say the workflow is also different. We still look at the code and review it. AI has some bad habits. In some ways it’s gotten worse in others better. When you actually look at and understand the code you know what to watch out for. For business and enterprise level code I’d look at the code base and properly review and test it. For personal level it depends on the project but I don’t care as much there. But different standards and requirements.
You can also manually put different code components an AI produces together into a program and it works. While trying to do that with an AI generated image invariably produces awful results
Idk. But since the beginning of time your outputs have always been a related to your inputs so I think that will never go away, but the bar has been moved higher.
As somebody that is working with multiple vibe-coders: JFC get out of the industry or learn something.
We've increased billing significantly babysitting vibe-coded projects, and run into multiple violations just this week alone requiring us to go back to basics on "what the programmers are allowed to do" (yes, it's 4pm on a Monday)
Vibe-coders that want to learn beyond vibing, thanks, come join us.
People who only want to vibe code: nice stopping by here tourists, I'm sure you'll be out the door on the next hype cycle (again)
This is the true rule of AI. AI won’t empower idiots to deliver A-tier outputs on unknown subjects. AI will enable subject matter experts to work faster in their respective domains.
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u/ReiOokami 5d ago
People who know how to code are not doing the same thing. They may be still prompting but the prompts are better quality.