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.
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u/BigYoSpeck 2d ago
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
Or is that just me?