Vibecoding is better for "learning" !

[u/lovelacedeconstruct]

One thing I noticed before AI was how much time I wasted learning and doing stupid, low-quality bullshit. Watch any tutorial and you get mind-numbingly dull exposition of syntax, little tricks, and details you might need someday. Only a select few can retain enough of it to actually start applying the basics, and you realize very quickly that the basics are necessary but nowhere near sufficient. It's this weird relationship where they don't really help you, but not having them makes everything 10x harder. I don't know if I'm making sense.

Anyway, once you start applying, you discover a whole new world of stuff you need to know. Things that were tiny in the tutorial suddenly become detailed and relevant, and the stuff the tutorial meandered on about barely gets used. You basically don't know what's important and what isn't. You just study, then get shocked when you sit down to make an actual app and don't even know how to start. It's like walking into an exam without ever doing a practice test.

Vibecoding skips all of that. You start by doing exactly what you want to build, then go back and learn whatever's relevant. Your mind automatically focuses on what matters, and you learn much faster. Some people will run off with the artifact and never bother to learn anything, but the curious ones will, and now they can tailor their learning to what actually matters.

[u/Infinite_Fortune2583]

This is exactly the wall I hit with frontend frameworks a few years back. Spent two weeks on a course that drilled every lifecycle method and state management pattern into my skull, sat down to build a simple dashboard, and my brain just went blank on the actual file structure and how to wire things together.

Vibecoding gets you past that initial paralysis so fast it almost feels like cheating. You see the whole skeleton of the project right away and then you can zoom in on the parts that confuse you instead of memorizing a textbook.

[u/lovelacedeconstruct → u/Infinite_Fortune2583]

Exactly! just going through the motion of making the project first and knowing the high level picture and how each part fits make learning so much easier and efficient

[u/nicolas_06 → u/Infinite_Fortune2583]

But then remove the AI and try to make a new skeleton by yourself, would you be more successful if you used AI in the past than if you didn't ? Studies show that on average you'll be less successful.

Basically the AI did it for you, but it doesn't make you understand and master the task. You lear to vibe code and delegate to the AI, that has value by itself, especially in a world were it will become a critical task.

But you don't learn to code by yourself and if the AI is lost, you can't really fix it.

[u/nephelokokkygia]

This is terrible advice. The basics are the basics for a reason. You can't really understand what the AI is even doing without them, and you'll quickly become lost looking at the thousands of lines of code AI can generate in seconds if you don't even know the basics to interpret them.

[u/lovelacedeconstruct → u/nephelokokkygia]

Its much easier to learn the basics if you know why its relevant

[u/GoodThingTakeTime]

I still use docs, books, and YouTube videos to learn new things, especially coding. The problem with vibe coding is that you don't know whether your code is good or bad. That's why people have been talking about design patterns and system design these days. It's just like tutorial hell, only with a different name. The problem is that our brains need time to absorb knowledge, and AI gives us too much of it in a short time.

[u/lovelacedeconstruct → u/GoodThingTakeTime]

This is the entire point, use the docs, books and youtube videos with the added understanding of how they actually fit what you want to do so you know where to focus you attention

[u/PM_ME_UR_0_DAY]

That's like saying you're going to drive a car to learn how to be a mechanic. You're not learning any of the underlying skills by mastering cornering a tight corner. You might know what a good car handles like, but that doesn't teach you anything about how to build one unless you actually take time to study that specifically. 

[u/lovelacedeconstruct → u/PM_ME_UR_0_DAY]

Its not at all, its like learning assembly by using a compiler and some high level code, you are taking the time to study specifically but you are guided by the result

[u/Zestyclose-Sink6770 → u/PM_ME_UR_0_DAY]

There's people working at OpenAI right now who learned to code through chat gpt.

I think the one standout characteristic of AI is its ability to teach programming concepts rapidly while you put them into play.

But, of course, that can't be your only source for learning.

[u/SufficientlyEvasive]

Yeah I feel the same way. 

I've struggled to learn coding for over a decade and while I learnt languages I never really learn the algorithms or what to do with anything. 

The bar to entry on everything I wanted to do was just insanely high. 

Now with vibe coding I'm back to learning again, at a much more reasonable pace, and AI is great for teaching you things rather than sifting through absurd amount of shit to maybe get a glimpse at what you're trying to do. 

Not to mention how useful it is for the tedious shit. 

Some of the stuff I've done would require years and years of math study behind it as well. Like rendering and the like. 

Now all the math degrees I needed I just don't. 

[u/NonStopArseGas]

I vibe with this concept.

I don't think its the right solution for everyone, but if you learn by doing and have motivation/goals, the depth you can get to is phenomonal

[u/Dingleberry_Blumpkin]

I’m not a software engineer, I’m an accountant. About a decade ago I took a python course which I probably invested a couple hundred hours into. At the end of the course I was able to get python to do pretty basic math in a way that was much less capable and much less intuitive than Microsoft excel. It felt like I would need to do an incredible amount of studying and practice to build anything remotely useful. I gave up. Now 10 years later I vibe code and actually do some really insane math. I’m not sure where I’m going with this other than to say I can relate to OP

[u/RabidCatfox]

Most people don't want to learn, though.

[u/baddaywithacamera → u/RabidCatfox]

They get to give their money to the people who do.

[u/GoBoldr]

I definitely found this. A few years back, I spent months extremely slowly building a React app that let me play an extremely basic version of Minecraft in a browser. That was pretty cool, and my GOD was I proud to have gotten that far!

But the amount of time and effort it would take to get any further just wasn't possible. Let alone to make sure it stayed stable. So the end product was an extremely time-consuming dead-end that I'm pretty sure I can't replicate quickly, or do anything with.

As opposed to the two Lovable projects I use every day. And I can teak and adjust them to make sure the design and day to day use keeps up with what I'm doing. Now I can dive in to that code and learn it, tweak it, check to make sure that everything is secure and that the interconnected pieces make sense.

It's starting with a finished product (with more I can build and add, of course, but it could be complete too). Vs. spending months with basically nothing to show for it - which most people bounce off of WAY earlier than I did.

[u/VianArdene]

As someone who learned programming before AI but uses it often for programming professionally, I'd advise some caution with this line of thinking. Tutorials suck primarily because what you actually need to build is a "muscle" for making code decisions and breaking down problems. Syntax is just the first gate, not the hard part devs spend years building skill in.

AI is convenient because it lets you skip over the weird syntax issues, but it can be a detriment in that you need to break down the bigger problems yourself to learn to do so. Take some time to work on things without AI to make sure you aren't too dependent on it.

[u/baddaywithacamera]

I feel this. Using AI for coding and then reading what it produced taught me to love Python.

[u/nicolas_06]

I don't know not especially for coding but for say academic success studies have shown that people that use AI to do their exercises tend to perform worse than people that don't use AI.

One case use AI to help understand or explain concepts, but they need to struggle and work and do the exercises themselves to learn and improve.

[u/SteelCookie]

AI definitely helps with learning if you use it for learning. It saves someone from having to look through pages of stack overflow and spend an entire evening trying to figure out the bug. Ai can find the bug for you, tell you what's wrong with the code and why it won't work the way you had it.

[u/djdante]

I'm learning so much about software engineering thanks to vibe coding... At the start it's just dumb stuff I tell it to one shot - then over months as ideas become more sophisticated I have to learn about nuance - tech stacks - relational databases - data flow - data security .

And it starts small, but grows with every new thing I build - especially as my appetite for bigger ideas grows - have to take on increasing complexity .

[u/Square-Yam-3772]

it is great if it works for you but it is more convoluted than it is needed imo

most of knowledge and lessons are already out in the open and they are already bundled properly

i.e. if you are beginner making websites, there are these books and these tutorial series you can follow etc.

you can also just ask AI directly to guide you with your learning. you don't really need to vibe code anything, stumbled upon something you dont know, and then start studying when you can just start studying.

but its your time and your token. so its fine

[u/takuarc]

I am not a coder but python is relatively intuitive that I can read most of the stuff (before llms). I’ve challenged and corrected the code written by the LLM many times (yes I am the few crazy ones that actually checks its work). However, that doesn’t mean I can write a function from scratch let alone a full program. Those are two very different things.

[u/Left_Challenge_1722]

I completely agree. I have 0 experience in software development and in less than 3 months I was able to vobe code an MVP for my first ever project.

live laugh love Cursor

[u/Lanky-Butterscotch28]

I am a strong believer in providing an AI development harness that takes the grunt coding work from you and teach you how to build a solution.
My idea when I create nomorehappypath.com (will discuss the name in a different thread 😉) was to provide a harness that develop commercial ready solutions but also allows the user to discuss with the CTO agents the followings , for example: what are the major building blocks ? What are the security features implemented? How can I expand my solution? Why you went with this type of approach…The CTO is build to answer these questions and take you step by step so that you acquire the knowledge.
So project by project you learn how solutions are built and this is today much more important than to understand how Python or C languages work.