[esalman]

What is coding without critical thinking?

I never vibe coded, and I don't understand this trend AT ALL.

I read how copilot and such are detrimental to critical thinking, and I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now.

[colechristensen]

Every time I've tried to get LLMs to create something they quickly get to the point where they fail miserably. It can do boilerplate, it can do straightforward things which have been done a billion times, it can come up with 50 ideas 10 of which are decent and not obvious... but it can't go beyond a certain complexity, it can't use mildly obscure libraries, it can't get major versions of libraries straight, it invents API calls that don't exist.

One of the biggest wastes of human talent is corporations hiring people to solve the same problems over and over and over. Every company has to reinvent so many wheels for themselves because sharing code between for profit companies just isn't done outside of the occasional breaking a whole project off into an open source project. This is what LLMs are good at, the very repetitive boilerplate connecting the dots and doing obvious things. Companies are going to have to retool themselves to only really be doing "the hard part", and the rest left to LLMs. In the same way languages will have to change to accommodate the hard part and the easy part.

[Terr_]

There is a disturbing overlap between the things LLMs are most helpful with... and the things that are arguably deficiencies with root-problems to be fixed in the realm of framework/library design, project onboarding, or documentation.

If it's really "boilerplate", nobody should need to get a half-regurgitated approximation out of a statistical model.

Instead there should be a default implementation someone can choose until they need to customize, or a generator-script as part of the project, etc. Sometimes what people want is already right there in the docs, but nobody bothered to look.

[esalman]

> One of the biggest wastes of human talent is corporations hiring people to solve the same problems over and over and over.

It's not the same human who is doing the same thing over and over though.

I have a toddler. He's learning addition and substraction now. I could had him a calculator or LLM and let him skip the entire learning process and do something productive instead. I don't. Because it'll destroy his critical thinking and ability to do anything productive later in life.

[colechristensen]

that's not the level i'm talking about

more "everybody who wants toast is designing their own toaster"

the actual business logic is making up a tiny proportion of work done while everybody spends most of their time plumbing frameworks and libraries together to do substantially similar things

[rocqua]

Vibe coding hasn't really hampered my critical thinking. It just means I get ideas into practice faster, and it means that for new concepts I can get to itterating much faster.

Perhaps I have the concept wrong, because half the time I'm still editing code by hand.

[danielbln]

I agree, and I think it's a continuum. I can say "make me an Instagram clone" and then come back after 100 agent loops and no looking at the code. Or I can outline the architecture, the components, service layer, data structures etc in a back and forth with the LLM and then have it do the minutia implementation.

You still get code hell after a while unless you review the code and refactor where needed, but I can absolutely imagine a future where the code is just a compile target for the architecture and design I specify. A little bit like a compiler spitting out assembly (caveats apply, LLMs being non-deterministic etc etc and at current state probably not reliable enough for full unsupervised coding)

[SAI_Peregrinus]

If you edit the code, instead of the prompt to the AI, it's not vibe coding. Vibe coding is letting the AI write the code, and only testing the output application.

[pliuchkin]

"I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now."

Very soon we will run out of human written articles.

[lcnPylGDnU4H9OF]

This implies that humans will stop writing such articles, which won't happen. It may be more difficult to find them but some sites will likely cater specifically to this so you know you can just search for that site.