[ffsm8]

Fwiw, the article mirrors my experience when I started out too, even exactly with the same first month of vibecoding, then the next project which I did exactly like he outlined too.

Personally, I think it's just the natural flow when you're starting out. If he keeps going, his opinion is going to change and as he gets to know it better, he'll likely go more and more towards vibecoding again.

It's hard to say why, but you get better at it. Even if it's really hard to really put into words why

[snovv_crash]

Given how addictive vibecoding is, I think it's very hard to be objective about the results if you are involved in the process.

[delusional]

It's a little like asking a cokehead how the addiction is going for him while he is high. Obviously he's going to say it's great because the consequences haven't hit him. Some percentage of addicts will never realize it was a problem at all.

Its not random that AI happens to be built by the very same people that turned internet forums into the most addictive communication technology ever.

[59nadir]

> he'll likely go more and more towards vibecoding again

I think "more and more" is doing some very heavy lifting here. On the surface it reads like "a lot" to many people, I think, which is why this is hard to read without cringing a bit. Read like that it comes off as "It's very addictive and eventually you get lulled into accepting nonsense again, except I haven't realized that's what's happening".

But the truth is that this comment really relies entirely on what "more and more" means here.

[devmor]

[flagged]

[ffsm8]

really?

have you ever learned a skill? Like carving, singing, playing guitar, playing a video game, anything?

It's easy to get better at it without understanding why you're better at it. As a matter of fact, very very few people master the discipline enough to be able to grasp the reason for why they're actually better

Most people just come up with random shit which may or may not be related. Which I just abstained from.

[SpicyLemonZest]

I've learned a number of skills, and for me none of them worked in the way you're describing. I didn't learn to cut good miter joints by randomly vibe-sawing wood until I unlocked miter joints in the skill tree. I carefully studied the errors I made, and adjusted in ways I thought might correct them, some of which helped some of which did not. Then eventually I understood the relationship between my actions and the underlying principles in enough detail to consistently hit 45 degrees.

[eszed]

Isn't that example pretty reductive, in that you have a directly-measurable output? I mean, the joint is either 45° (well, 90°) or it's not. Zoom out a bit, and the skill-set becomes much less definable: are my cabinets good - for some intersection of well-proportioned, elegantly-finished, and fit for purpose, with well-chosen wood and appropriate hardware.

Mind you, I don't think the process of improvement in those dimensions is fundamentally different, just much less direct and not easily (or perhaps even at all) articulable.

[devmor]

You can get better at something without understanding why, but you should be able to think about it and determine why fairly easily.

This is something everyone who cares about improving in a skill does regularly - examine their improvement, the reasons behind it, and how to add to them. That’s the basis of self-driven learning.

[danielmarkbruce]

This is an absurd statement. There are many complex undertakings in sport where even the very best get better with practice and can't tell you why. In fact, the ones who think they can tell you why are the one's to be most skeptical of.

You are just making stuff up or regurgitating material from a pop science book.

[skydhash]

They can't tell you (not everyone is eloquent), but they sure know why. Struggling to put something in word is not the same as not knowing.

[threethirtytwo]

Much of human behavior is evolved so that we don't understand why. For example human morality is an evolved trait, but you wouldn't know it.

Please explain walking to me so that I can explain it to a person who forgot how to walk such that he can walk after the explanation.

[danielmarkbruce]

Nope, they don't.

[ffsm8]

Not really. I can obviously say something, like you learn which features the models are able to actually implement, and you learn how to phrase and approach trickier features to get the model too do what you want.

And that's not really explainable without exploring specific examples. And now we're in thousands of words of explanation territory, hence my decision to say it's hard to put it into words.

[devmor]

I think you’re handwaving away vague, ungrounded intuition and calling it learning.

For instance, if I say “I noticed I run better in my blue shoes than my red shoes” I did not learn anything. If I examine my shoes and notice that my blue shoes have a cushioned sole, while my red shoes are flat, I can combine that with thinking about how I run and learn that cushioned soles cause less fatigue to the muscles in my feet and ankles.

The reason the difference matters is because if I don’t do the learning step, when buy another pair of blue shoes but they’re flat soled, I’m back to square one.

Back to the real scenario, if you hold on to your ungrounded intuition re what tricks and phrasing work without understanding why, you may find those don’t work at all on a new model version or when forced to change to a different product due to price, insolvency, etc.

[eszed]

You're always free to stop at the level of abstraction at which you find a certain answer to be satisfying, but you can also keep digging. Why are flat shoes better? Well, it's to do with my gait. Ok, but why is my gait like that? Something-something musculoskeletal. Why is my body that way? Something-something genetic. OK, but why is that? And so on.

Pursued far enough, any line of thought will reach something non-deterministic - or, simply, That's The Way It Is - however unsatisfying that is to those of us who crave straightforward answers. Like it or not, our ground truth as human beings ultimately rests on intuition. (Feel free to say, "No, it's physics", or "No, it's maths", but I'll ask you if you're doing those calculations in your head as you run!)