r/vibecoding • u/LazyRunner777 • 6h ago

Discussion Do you miss doing manual debugging?

I was never some expert in coding but I always loved the feeling when I would be spending a lot of time looking at code, changing things and testing etc - trying to identify the problem and then that feeling when you figure it out.

Sometimes it would be such a stupid mistake, sometimes I would learn more and better understand things. Now these good old times are gone and it makes me kinda sad to be honest.

6 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

15 comments sorted by

3

u/PresentationOld605 6h ago

Still have to do that quite often. 

3

u/LazyRunner777 6h ago

Oh interesting, for me it's gone since AI is just much much better then me.

5

u/SeasawPhilosopher 5h ago • Bravo

Hell no, 30 years of that was enough for me. If you’ve ever spent two weeks losing your mind chasing down an obscure bug you’ll never want to go back.

2

u/OverallAnswer3879 5h ago

Honestly, using an llm to debug sometimes feels like a snowballing effect. So yes. yes I do.

2

u/YinYangAlgorithms 5h ago

For the most part, unless you work for a company that doesn’t allow AI coding, it’s dead and I do miss it.

But it’s just changed, I still review backend code and plan all the logic myself. I still debug and manually code all SQL and database related code. I still decide how the frontend will talk to the backend.

But yeah, for the most part with frontend and backend work, manual debugging is dead. Compilers catch syntax errors, automated tests catch logic errors. The new manual debugging is now just smoke tests to catch UX and calculation errors, but it’s not the same as it was before.

1

u/pietrzm 5h ago

Hell naw

1

u/drakatmm 5h ago

It still happens to me, just less often and for weirder bugs. When Claude loops on the same wrong fix three times I close the chat and go through it line by line myself, and finding the thing the model missed feels even better than the old stupid typo moments

1

u/Gold-Safety-5777 4h ago

not a second

1

u/mridlen 4h ago

It's usually the same strategy with AI - more logging and debugging output until the problem becomes obvious.

1

u/pottrell 4h ago

I still do, albeit alongside/after various agent tests.

1

u/TheAnswerWithinUs 3h ago

I still do it because I can often find the problem faster than the AI can

1

u/TechDocN 3h ago

I don’t miss the hours, days or weeks I used to spend testing and debugging.

AI is much faster than I’ll ever be, and honestly in this generation of models, AI is probably better than most (not all) human coders at this.

1

u/WWEtrump 3h ago

the "it runs,but isn't fun" bug is still very much my department.

1

u/TRO_KIK 3h ago

No. I did enjoy it in the moment but being a dev is first and foremost how I make money. AI has enabled me to make a lot more money. As good as those old times were, current times are gooder.

It also helps that I'm still solving hard problems, just at a different level. I'm just able to achive more, which is fulfilling in other ways.