[bsza]

This might be a very naive take on my part, but I don't think of vibecoding as a competitor to actual coding the same way I don't think of doing amphetamines (even if they make you more productive in the short term) as a competitor to being clean. I think it's a self-destructive behavior that is ultimately going to degrade your critical thinking skills, especially if you're a beginner. As with everything, the smarter your tools, the dumber you get. People often claim to acquire "higher level thinking" skills from it (as do meth users), but even if that's true, they are also currently teaching those skills to the very tools that try to replace them.

The question is why would you fare any better if you don't use it. I don't know how it will play out, but this much I know: I will never pay for AI music, because I can replicate it for free. I'm still buying music from real musicians (in fact tons more than ever before), because I can't. Similarly, I have contributed to many FOSS projects (both financially and in PRs), but will not (knowingly) do the same for the ones that are vibecoded. Whether that will amount to anything or is just a fart in the wind, we'll see.

[pyth0]

I take amphetamines prescribed by a doctor for ADHD, and without them I am considerably less effective. And the same way your amphetamine analogy doesn't work, I think it similarly doesn't work for LLMs either. At the end of the day if you are more effective with something than without it, it would be silly to avoid it out of some sense of "purity".

[bsza]

I definitely did not mean using it as a prescription drug for a known condition. I meant using it without any medical indication, like many of us do. We know that amphetamines can lead to cognitive impairment [1] [2]. We know much less about reliance (over-reliance?) on AI, but what we know doesn't look good either [3] [4]. Of course, if you already live with a condition that makes it hard to concentrate, the benefits can outweigh the risks. But for most people they don't.

(Aside wrt being more effective with something than without: this is anecdotal, but my paragliding instructor once said that modern wings are often designed to correct for various pilot errors. He advised against buying those because he had seen people make worse mistakes after getting accustomed to them. In his own words: "you become dumber under a smart wing". Sharing because I think this applies to many things in life.)

[1] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3639428/

[2] https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC2670101/

[3] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S074756322...

[4] https://www.dailycal.org/news/campus/academics/failing-grade...

[ian_holt]

<In his own words: "you become dumber under a smart wing". Sharing because I think this applies to many things in life.>

Applies a lot in life, eh. The old expression re muscles "if you don't use it, you lose it" applies a lot to coding or even in just normal day to day systems maintenance. Asking an AI agent, do to simple task just because "an agent is quicker or more effective" will quite often end up costing more in the long run do to one not remembering "how" to do something

[remexre]

I take (prescribed) amphetamines and use LLMs, and I think "I wrote this while on amphetamines" will leave you with way better understanding of the code than "I vibecoded this?" Like, to an absurd degree?

Vibecoding $x gives you pretty much the understanding of "someone else did $x," which seems unsurprising to me. There's a lot of usecases for code where "someone else did $x" is a perfectly fine way to accomplish $x! There are also many cases where "someone else did $x" is not a substitute for "I did $x."

"I want a tmux theme that fits with my existing zsh and neovim themes." Is it useful to me to learn how tmux themes work? Eh, marginally maybe? I'm personally kinda hoping I'm not using tmux in 10 years, so probably not.

"I'm writing code for work, where a bad correctness bug would be very expensive." If I'm pulling in someone else's code, I /better/ be auditing that code.

Like, this seems like the obvious framing and a useful heuristic? Maybe the problem is the subject of "vibecoded" is usually "I vibecoded this with Claude," not "Claude vibecoded this with me?" IDK