It would probably have been safer for the author to explicitly point out that this is true for them specifically, rather than a general rule, because this way they run the risk of never hearing the end of it.
It's not fun to always have to couch your language just in case someone doesn't naturally grasp that you're talking about your individual experience on a blog.
Anyone that assumes an author is speaking for everyone will find something else to gripe about, IMO.
It's not fun to always have to couch your language just in case someone doesn't naturally grasp that you're talking about your individual experience on a blog.
Always a hazard when you use objective language to describe the subjective.
Why does anyone ever have to say “this is, like, just my opinion, man.” Are readers so ignorant to think articles are statements of definitive fact applying to all of humanity unless told otherwise?
It seems like there's a difference between an "opinion" about the facts of the world (like the article you are referring to) and an opinion about subjective experience (like whether something is "fun" or not).
It can make sense to disagree and argue with the former, but for the latter, having different subjective opinion doesn't invalidate or contradict the original.
Low-quality, off topic, don't make sense, violate site rules, rude, abusive, being a jerk, shill, propagandist. Disagree is actually the least negative reason to downvote someone.
the least negative reason is not very clear. do you mean "it's the least negative sentiment against the comment" or the least negative kind of comment? or do you mean "it is the least bad/wrong reason" or the best reason as in: it's better to use downvotes for disagreement than for other reasons (others should then be flagged?)?
i read it as the former, and hence upvoted your comment because i agree, but the downvotes of your comment suggest that others are reading the latter which feels wrong to me. that is of course if they actually agree with me.
Seems pretty clear what they meant. Of all the absurd, pedantic nonsense in this thread, I chose to downvote yours. Purely out of spite, and for giving me the bitter realization that I've wasted too much time on HN today.
well that just made my day. best downvote ever. for two reasons, one is the explanation itself, the other the fact that you explained it. downvotes are frustrating when you have to guess why. here, have an upvote. (if that upvote made you feel guilty for downvoting me, then that's an unfortunate side effect, not intentional ;-)
Why would you think that the author was speaking for anyone but themselves?
When I say "juggling is fun", I'm talking about my own experience. I'm not saying that everyone else should drop their hobbies and take up juggling.
Why should the author have to couch the headline of their article with this kind of defensive language that you suggest? The very first word of the article is "I", it is clear that the author is talking about their own experience.
In particular, writing code by hand is fun for people who are good at writing code by hand. It's not at all fun for people who aren't. For those people, vibecoding means that they can produce something without the pain, something that compiles without all the time fighting the compiler, something that works (or at least mostly works) without all the debugging time.
Who gives a shit? HN holds itself in too high a regard; some peanut gallery on an AI-pilled tech forum will have no effect on the author's life one way or the other.
My account is seventeen years old, and I've been coding more than forty years; is that enough to meet your standards?
I do love the weird new world we're in. I feel as though I've been a player in an orchestra all my life, doing a little one-man-band act on the side, and suddenly I've been handed the baton and now I get to conduct the whole show.
I also have been coding for over 40 years now, and I am going to take your example and expand it a bit: wiggling a baton and hearing nice music come out is fun in its own way, all the years of training allowed you to develop the "ear" so you know what sounds good, and to a certain extent to recognize errors the player you are directing is doing, and isn't it nice to be able to just wave your hands and music comes out without having to work on scales, or embochure, or finger dexterity and so on.
The downside is that of course the further you stay away from actually playing your instrument, the rustier you will get; this might or might not be an issue, but it is a significant downside, also being away from the technique side means that as the years go by, you might not be able anymore to have an intuitive understanding of "this sounds wrong" and why it does.
I don't want to stretch the metaphor too far, but it does feel that agentic coding is a bit like building skill tech debt, the more you do it, the more you'll have to work later to bring back the skills you lost. The meta could be that models will get so good so that only a small percentage of developers will ever need to sully their eyes again with looking at code (same as while when we started most people had at least a passing familiarity with assembly, nowadays nearly nobody does), jury's out on that.
Either way, what before needed a full orchestra of developers, now could be doable by a good conductor and maybe a couple of soloists: how many orchestras will be needed? and what will the section musicians not good enough to be soloists and that don't have an interest in becoming a conductor will do? and how are new conductors going to develop their technical chops if there are no more orchestral jobs?
Many more. There isn't a fixed amount of software needed in the world: the amount will expand to fit the capacity. There's a reason it's been consistently difficult to find good programmers: there's more work than the existing population can handle.
By expanding to use AI, I expect that the amount of programming work will grow, not shrink. However, the amount of programmers may decline.
Yes, and I will also add that there is so much software out there completely unaffected by LLMs. Those apps tend to be the vast majority of internal corporate/financial/government/etc. IT services.
If I were to guess, those devs are at least half of the readers of HN, if not the commenters as well. That's why there's so much push back and arguing against LLMs.
Software like that is almost entirely maintenance work. The requirements trickle in slowly and the changes are small but precise. They require deep knowledge of the broader topic, not just programming.
The deadlines are generous now, but what happens longer term? In the future nobody knows how to code without LLMs, most of the topical knowledge is long gone, and the deadlines are always urgent.
I think there actually is a fixed amount of software needed in the world. FAANG has had de facto unlimited programming manpower for years and years and they've mostly squandered it on enshittifying once-decent software. Honestly, I can't think of anything in my life right now that demands more software. If anything, I'd like the software I already use to be drastically polished and simplified.
But hey, maybe the slopocalypse will incentivize us to disconnect and engage with the physical world a bit more.
The greenfield projects where LLMs make sense will ramp back up when the economics make sense again. It's only been a few years since the "soft landing" BS in 2022-2023.
All of the drama and discomfort since then is 100% caused by that residual economic impact. LLM hype and more aggressive enshittification are just the symptoms, not the root cause. It's not "the new normal", or rather it's totally normal but not the default case for the majority of fiscal years. These dips happen almost every decade.
When that ramp up happens (it kind of already is), the media will do a 180 like the first half of the 2020s never even happened. You will be slightly annoyed, but not complaining because hey we all have more money again.
If Claude/Codex does 90% of the work of figuring out how to build an app while all you did was give it a high level picture of what you wanted, did you build it or did you merely commission it?
So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
and the market takes care of such things. if your app is able to absolutely kill it because your prompt was "make a cool app" then you got extraordinarily lucky, and have zero moat and will inevitably die unless you build a moat in a different area of the business. Taste/skill will always win, the end, full stop.
In my case, I come back that evening, give a few dozen feedback items, and come back in the morning to a new design incorporating them.
It's not much different from assigning a task to a more junior dev. I'm the architect, it's my goals we're working towards, but I don't need to be the one to go wire it together.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong today, but AI assisted coding has gone from autocomplete to functioning as a junior dev very quickly. The labs are obviously not happy to leave it at that. Fewer and fewer senior devs will be needed when the model can also create the architecture, derive the tradeoffs, and interpret product requirements directly. I'm really worried about the future of our field at the current pace of things.
>So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
I never said anything about pride. I was talking about whether terms like "build" apply when the act of building is outsourced to an AI agent.
Also, I would seriously scrutinize the claim that a person vibe coding an application is really getting into the nitty gritty details. These days it seems like people are merely describing what they want and a few high level guidelines, and then letting the AI agents to do the rest of the planning + architecture.
There are (at least) two types of programmers. One type does it because they enjoy problem solving and programming is the best/most effficient way to solve those problems.
The joy comes from the problem no longer existing, being solved, not from the physical act of typing.
I'd wager the former is no programmer at all, just a regular problem solver. At least not a programmer in the way that someone printing a clay teapot is not an artisan.
Anyway, let's burn the data centers and become Luddites. Wait, first become Luddites, the we can burn things.
People are famously terrible at analyzing their own behavior. I would bet that people who "no longer write code" are actually way more hands off about their work than they believe they are.
Random internet commenters are also famously terrible at analyzing others' behavior. My clients are happy, my coworkers are happy, my boss is happy, and I'm happy.
>Random internet commenters are also famously terrible at analyzing others' behavior. My clients are happy, my coworkers are happy, my boss is happy, and I'm happy.
Regardless of the answer (which I don't claim to actually know, but I'll bite), I've heard a related question as well: "Well, all you did was vibe-code it, anyone can do that!"
To which the obvious answer is often: then why didn't you think of it? And if you thought of it, why didn't you iterate on it and polish it to achieve a proper product that actually matched your vision?
For some people, they seem to believe that an idea isn't worth anything, and only the building is. And, even then, they don't really understand that building a proper product (even with vibecoding) takes a lot of effort to get right, because as you build you find more about the domain, about how the product should work, etc. Sure, loads of people vibecode crap, but many don't. They build things with real care over the course of many many many hours.
It's not that I love agile, but this is one of the reasons it exists. I wonder if the people who so openly bash solving a problem through vibecoding (with multiple iterations) also fail to see this value of agile?
To answer your question (acknowledging I don't really know): If all you had to do was get Claude/Codex to work and it came out perfectly very fast, then I believe you did commission it (and I have no problem with that), but, more often that that, you will have built it by iterating on product decisions.
When I "build" products for clients, I am not doing commission development work. In fact, I'm not building it for them -- we are building it together, learning requirements, failing, iterating. Otherwise, I would have just been a code monkey, and that I have sincerely despised for years.
Lastly: at least for now, the impact of knowing how to guide the AI is still very relevant. Good problem solvers who embrace AI completely blow "regular guys" out of the water. Maybe, as models get better, this will not be as prevalent, but you can clearly tell when someone "knows" what they're doing with the AI, even if they NEVER look at the code. The knowledge from the coding days is definitely partly transferable.
I agree with you 100%. I’ve never enjoyed programming for the sake of writing code. I’ve always loved creating products and coding was just a necessary evil to do that. And thanks to AI I can now focus more on the product, its UX, design, etc instead of spending most of the time in the codebase.
But most software engineers I’ve worked with are not like that. In fact, they want to be as far away from the customer/user as possible and they love the coding for coding’s sake. I’m afraid those are the first to be replaced by AI as their skills don’t extend beyond writing code, which is probably why they are screaming so much now.
Been working for a little over 10 years, but coding for double that time.
Building things with LLMs is the closest I can get (perhaps even surpass?) the feeling I had as a kid, learning to code.
I feel rather sad that most (though luckily not all) of my friends despise AI, as I feel a (small, but relevant) part of the connective tissue we had is sort of gone. I'm in love with what I can do, I've re-gained the superpowers I had back in college (and even before that) and I can't really share that with them (and they can't really share their concerns and frustrations with me). In two weeks of vacation (actually: in 1 week of those) I finally got around to tackling 5 different projects I had in the back of my mind, mostly for fun (but one of them is genuinely generating some income as well) -- this is amazing, but I have actively avoided talking about this with them, bar sharing a link to some of the things (and even that I'm feeling some regret over)
It's so fun to tinker around with everything! Modding a game, revitalizing abandonware with custom patches, building a harness to know how it works or just...you know...building what is in my mind, whenever, wherever, without it taking foreeeveeeeeeer.
I used to think what I loved was coding, but I have really come to realize I liked both building and coding. The latter I haven't really done much of in more than a year and....it doesn't annoy me at all? I know for a fact I loved doing it, but I can't really say I _miss_ doing it? Maybe after 20 years it just wasn't the same? Maybe the rush from watching my mind materialize into real things so fast is camouflaging it? Who knows...
Not to mention that most everyone else in my surroundings outside of the tech bubble is doing amazing things with AI. Cool websites, music that moves me to tears, random fun games and just, in general, clearly managing to focus more on what they want, on their goals, on their imagination and less on their work. There are exceptions, but the trend is that AI has enabled them to do more of what they want and less of what they have to, and I love that.
I completely accept that, for some people, the fun is/was in coding by hand. And that it's terrible that they'll likely not be able to earn a living just doing that relatively soon. What I have difficulty accepting is the outright bashing and hating on everything AI-related (and, yes, I hate hype too, but have you LOOKED AROUND AND SEEN THIS NEW WORLD?!). I can sort of accept it based on ethical grounds, but very rarely is it actually that. I guess people are just venting and firing in all directions due to how much this has shaken their lives and livelihood (and that, indeed, I can understand).
Anyway, this world is AMAZING! I am 100% with you. Especially because I don't even type (to the agents) anymore. I just voice-to-text, with barely any filter. I've often described it as the closest I've ever felt to truly controlling the computer with my mind, because I don't have to slow down my thoughts to write them. Sort of incredibly liberating.
I'm still getting used to LLMs as tools. Even searching feels jarring, because they're very confident, yet provide no solid sources unless the harness searches for them. They're very useful, but make hard-to-catch mistakes that makes me distrust them. What scares me most is how they allow people who don't fully know what they're doing to deploy software, especially corporate software.
Unfortunately, LLMs have been shoved everywhere in a years-long desperate scramble to capture the market, so we might as well get used to them while the bubble pops and the winners cash their bets.
> What scares me most is how they allow people who don't fully know what they're doing to deploy software, especially corporate software.
Which is why I also think some people get such disparate experiences. If your organization is allowing clueless people to confidently throw stuff built by LLMs at mission-critical problems, that does seem more like an organizational problem than an LLM problem.
(A related problem: the amount of people who keep shoving claude shit in front of us, thinking they've "edited" it enough to not sound like it came from it. I can spot it from a mile away and usually make myself loud about it if I have the power to stop it. AI is not an excuse for mediocrity.)
There's so much to hate about LLMs, and there's so much to love. And since we've sort of ended up in this world of constant false dichotomies, this kind of nuance gets lost in the trenches.
Of course LLMs in the wrong of clueless people are bad. Of course the way in which these models were trained is shameful and it's criminal that people are having their work stolen. Of course we need to find ways of dealing with slop. Of course it's bad for the environment at the moment (and so on). The list goes on and on, I know that.
But on either side of this debate (which SHOULD NOT HAVE TWO SIDES -- that's THE problem), people just tend to lump everything together. Your example is one some acquaintances repeatedly throw my way, and I'm left wondering if they have even thought that they're just showing me how broken their org is, not how bad the tech is? But, nope, they turn to me and go "AI bad bad"...
We're talking of a medium-size business, most of those are broken because budgets and manpower are limited. Even worse when their line of business is not subject to mandatory regulations.
We can't seriously expect medium-size businesses to become (and stay) unbroken without significant, continuous investment and effort. They will always be broken, and AI is the sprinkle of crack they didn't know they wanted.
This sounds less like someone who has rediscovered a passion for "building", and more like an addict who has discovered a magical button that serves their brain dopamine when pressed.
It's heavily biased by the circles I hang out in, but I'm seeing a loose correlation between how much people enjoy working with coding agents and their depth of experience. I've even seen people come out of retirement because this stuff is so much fun for them.
AI tools amplify existing coding experience, and reward management experience too. Engineers with a decade+ of experience are more likely to have been engineering leads or spent time in engineering management.
Related observation: Anthropic are developing a reputation for hiring former CTO/CEO/founders and putting them back to work as individual contributors.
I think it all comes down to whether or not they enjoyed coding in the first place.
For me it's mixed. There's aspects of coding I do enjoy but also there's tedium that I don't. What I don't like about vibe coding is it has turned me into just a code reviewer in a lot of cases.
This is how I feel. I do enjoy "vibe coding" significantly more at home on my own projects as there just aren't the same consequences I face at work if something goes left. I'm now working a place where there are only three or four of us in the code base and it still makes for some long days where it's mostly review. That part sucks. I can't imagine trying to keep my arms around a codebase at a larger shop in the current environment.
Yeah, that's the other part that's really hard. It seems really easy for the shape and layout of a codebase to change under your feet. It also ends up being hard to know exactly what is where and what it does. It makes it easy for the AI to recreate something that doesn't fit with the rest of the codebase. For example, I've seen LLMs generate code that completely ignored the built in tools for an existing code base and reinvented everything.
I have been coding professionally for 15 years, and while I like coding I was always more passionate about the product design side and the end result, be it business apps or video games, I like what it does, not specifically how it's done. Either at my small agency or for hobby projects not writing code by hand anymore is not a loss a for me, code is just a mean to an end. I get some people are more passionate about the tooling and the code itself, but it's not because someone doesn't share that it's not a real perspective.
(I am currently 18 so you have actually been coding since more than two times my whole lifetime so y'know there's that.)
I wish to ask you for some feedback and clarity and further concrete resources because I feel a little confused/lost regarding the whole vibe-coding situation, I wish to say thanks in general though as nonetheless your comment finally made me concretely express all the nuances brewing in my stomach about vibe-coding and how I often nowadays feel as if I may be falling behind if I don't know how to do it "accurately", I would love and really appreciate to get a more in-depth response if possible.
I have said the same thing as you have said as well sometimes if not mostly that AI is a tool which should be used sensibly (as I think that this is what you are intending to say as well)
Within the contexts of vibe-coding though, I would really appreciate it if you could explain to me in more depth about the whole process and workflow that you follow if possible and how much drastic change has that been in. I would love some concrete examples or repositories or just some pointers that I can help to improve myself further.
Here are some other thoughts that I have on the matter:
When you mean design review, are you just architecturing suggesting it the main architecture itself, for example. I mostly do "create me a golang web application which uses htmx/templ/modernc sqlite about XYZ" and then create a more detailed prompt from it which I then pass onto the agent to complete and give me a single binary at.
Most often than not though after this point, I haven't felt the need to change the architecture after the first initial setup and afterwards I point the changes that I wish to be done like "I want X1 Y1 Z1 changes" and if it breaks something then just showcasing what breaks, and taking feedback then "it just works"
The architecture sounds solid to me, I love golang as a language and I run multiple such apps on same 500mb/1gb ram servers and use cf tunnels in the middle.
For styling, I mostly prefer monospace-web theme because that's what I personally really like a lot but recently I found that giving first prototype to chatgpt and asking it to generate image then it can create a decent UI as well.
So what are the things which I should do though now? Should I attempt at reading the code and trying to understand it completely (I think that golang's mostly standardized method of doing things helps in reading AI code) or should I treat myself as thinking more about (seams?) or other technical terms that I found described within obra/superpowers or matt-pocock and other skill driven development oriented stuff.
Can I learn these stuff through AI itself as well and I wish to generate my own projects as well because I still believe that there's some joy in that as well as I find vibe-coding to be sometimes a bit hollow[1] [not sure though as the atmosphere has changed, earlier people used to be extremely critic of it whereas now more accepting]
I can be wrong, I usually am but what I am finding the most shocking is that although we are constantly seeing new tools and I try to be more well aware of them and always curious about it, yet I don't know at the same time where to actually proceed because the projects are just being built enough yet I don't know if I am doing standardized practices enough or how to really meaningfully improve such practice if vibe-coding is really such valuable then I would prefer to learn the more technical way of doing so and how experts within the field actually do vibe-coding.
Thanks and have a nice day and I would love to hear your/the community's response.
Greybeard coder here. There are two separate problems you get to solve. 1) If AI writes your code, you didn't learn anything about the code. 2) If you don't use AI, you won't learn how to use AI. You need to learn how stuff works and how to code well. And, you can't do that passively. If you didn't type it with your own fingers, you didn't learn it. And, that includes learning "How to use AI?"
You want to learn web dev? Start typing HTML and JS. You want to learn how to use AI? Start typing specs and prompts. You'll need to learn both. But, you can't learn web dev by typing specs and prompts.
You can learn using AI as a research assistant, a tutor, a reviewer, a critic. You can use it to bang out quick tools, prototypes, deal with the hassles that are not your focus at the moment. But, whatever you are trying to learn, you need to do the actual implementation manually. There is no such thing as passive learning.
Thank you for the response, I have a few questions that I would like to ask now as well which jumped on top of my head which I would like to ask though to get more clarity at the same time.
What is the exact learning of the topic that I have to do in it, for example. I can (and I will) learn webdev about valuable if vibecoding becomes the norm (as it is becoming nowadays)
Now I will learn the basics, then intermediate, then expert. Where exactly do you think that the value lies in?
ie. are the advantages put within getting from beginner -> intermediate or to complete beginner -> intermediate -> expert
Another thing is the level of fields that you have to be in or the whole question could perhaps be framed as being the jack of all trades or the master of one? Is this going to be like typing speed [90 wpm vs 130 wpm is somewhat negligible effect] or like chess [ 2100 vs 2400 isn't negligible and becomes exponentially harder when you become expert yet the difference will have genuine real impact maybe?]
Also within the process of vibe-coding, what is the actual value that I am adding given that I have learnt the skill, what I think might be is that I can actually verify if its good or not instead of asking a chatbot [which might be sycophantic or might miss the devil in the details], and say its okay.
Also, how do people naturally move away from the natural tendency to just... not read what AI is saying (when I tried obra/superpowers etc.), this video[0] tries to showcase what I am suggesting perhaps but I feel as if its still quite a slippery slope.
I hope that this question can be taken in good faith (because I like learning about CS for the sake of learning itself) but aside from that, why learn HTML/CSS is still a question that I can perhaps ask, similar to why learn assembly[1], and to what level, and will it help me in getting a job and if that helps in what I will actually do in job, and if so, then how? if the job done via vibe-coding as well. [I think this might tie to the previous questions that I have asked]
I do agree with the overall premise and learning can't be passive granted. Learning requires some form of active involvement which includes the phase of struggle (I think), yet that struggle is done for something meaningfully better and has a purpose. What AI does to many is question that purpose, why learn?
The issue I find which is why I am coming to this again and again is this, I am unable to find how the improvement within this corresponds to actual work/job or in actual terms how so.
Also, what happens if suppose the difference between an expert person with extreme knowledge and a normal~ish person is that it might take normal person is some more time/prompt/tokens to debug the issue with the models itself. Like it might take 2-3 more prompts to fix the issue.
I am finding people with varying opinions on how even the most expert people on some topic are agreeing that most AI can do it good enough already with vibe-coding, whereas some generalists who might not know the other language are porting their projects in it with vibe-coding.
In general, when approaching learning as well, I am not sure which to approach first: the thing which might be approachable (so for example: after HTML/CSS/Js Python, Django [thanks @simonw], golang's complicated full stack application)
and what if I might not like JS so much and python only enough but golang the most ideologically but my skill level still matches mostly python and its what I am most proficient in writing by hand?
I am personally going to go the learning path (the hard way?), I don't know if its the hard way or not but I wish to learn programming quite deeply even if just for the sake of itself and making my brain think about problems better
but my mind does still wonder if people on the other side could be right as well, does everyone need to learn deep ends of programming if programming becomes simpler or operates via just words, similar to how in previous times we used to have a lift operator and now we have all become a lift operator with the press of a button.
My opinion on vibe-coding has been this for quite sometime now: I do vibe-coding not for learning but for if/when the end results/prototypes matter more than the process but I absolutely DO NOT want to do vibe-coding if learning is the goal. before college, I didn't even have time to properly pursue the learning phase but I will now have the time and I will chose the learning path.
Also, when someone suggests that vibe-coding is all good if done right and alright when you do it this particular way or that particular way which causes my mind goes to this chain of thought and I feel a little confused.
As such, many of these thoughts float into my head when someone mentions this and it makes me wonder what should I do to achieve that and the other goal as you mentioned which was learning itself, it makes me question both sometimes if I am feeling p(doom). Learning as in, for all the reasons that I explained above and vibe-coding as in feeling shallow and hollow.
I am extremely sorry if I am being unable to succintly convey what I am trying to say and for the longer post. I really don't know how to express this particular thought because its all over the place. I hope that it's okay though and I might not have wasted the time and thanks for commenting and have a nice day.
[1]: (although there are still good reasons to learn assembly imo, I recently vibe-coded/[vibe-forked?] a scratchpad application in assembly as a way of messing around with AI.): https://github.com/serJaimeLannister/rhunpad
It sounds like you're maybe in a bit of analysis paralysis, trying to find the optimal way to move forward. If you stay in that frame of mind, you'll spin your wheels for hours trying to find the best way to approach it, and then never actually approach anything.
My advice would be, as hard as it might seem, let yourself go slow and just do things. Spend a few weeks on webdev, or learning aseembly, or playing with AI. As long as you are engaged with whatever you're doing, that is enough. You will, via repeated exposure to smart people doing hard things, learn how to navigate and overcome all kinds of problems.
I actually disagree a little with the previous commenter about learning how to use AI. While that is useful, AI becomes second nature once you have been exposed to all these other things.
I write a lot of C++. A long time ago, I learned the basics of writing assembly. Even though I haven't written much assembly, it still helped me a lot over the years. I understand how it works. I can read the assembly output of my compiler and judge how well my C++ translates to machine actions. I can debug individual assembly instructions when stuff isn't going as planned or the C++ is not available.
I write a lot of high-performance code. To do that, I had to learn the details of how devices (drives/NICs/GPUs) work, how buses (PCI) works, how RAM, CPU caches, instruction pipelining work. Now I know how to structure data flow to work well with the machine instead of against it.
I write a lot of APIs. In doing that, I had to learn the hard way about how different API trade-offs drive client decisions. How to foresee problems in the future stemming from interfaces I'm writing now. How to argue with clients to get them what they need in the long term and not just want they want for the next milestone.
At all of these levels, I had to learn how each level works by doing it. By trying it lots of different ways. And, by optimizing it all the way down from "More productive client discussions" to "More performant assembly instructions" :P
Now whenever I do vibe-code, it's because I know exactly what I want and I can get AI to type it faster and with less RSI (carpal tunnel). Or, I know I want to prototype a few options rapidly before committing to implementing one design for realz. In neither of these cases am I telling the AI "Make it performant and easy to use." Because I know how I want to structure the code to make it performant. And, I know how to set up the API to make it easy to use. So, I'm telling the AI how to structure the data flow and how to set up the API. Because, if I didn't, I'd just be generating a big ball of noisy mud that's neat to gawk at, but has no long-term value.
So, what should you learn? You need to learn how the stuff you are interested in actually works under the hood by experimenting with it manually. Not just "Hey chat, make it work somehow..." You need to focus on architecture and systems thinking because otherwise you won't know how to prevent AI from holding your hand deep into a maze neither of you can escape from. And, you should be spending the majority of your tokens on step-by-step refactoring, never one-shotting. One-shotting is for AI tech demos. Not for learning or production.
I've been programming for decades, and I do love vibe coding side-projects. I have a little pixel art / animation tool, a music composition tool, and a little video game builder that agents made for my kids. I haven't looked at a line of code. Instead, I've just focused on getting the UX and features that I want. I did guide it along the tech stack and general philosophy I wanted it to follow, though. I'm sure it's hot garbage, but for projects like this, it doesn't really matter, and it's been a lot of fun.
Would I want to build a business around products that are built this way? Not yet. I'm definitely not comfortable supporting a vibe coded heap of code in a production setting.
This is my approach now. I'm done with programming professionally, but all those ridiculous ideas for my own use I've had over the years? I've built most of them in the past year. I have no time or patience for doing it by hand any more. I used to love programming but I have other things I want to do now and I'm pretty burnt out on putting effort into my code after doing it for my job for nearly two decades.
I've been programming since I got a Commodore VIC-20 when I was seven years old.
I love AI coding because I can use it to automate all the parts that are not fun or that would take far, far too much time to implement by hand. It puts things within reach that would formerly be unthinkable without millions of dollars and a gigantic software development team.
I still also enjoy coding things by hand... interesting, original things.
The technology itself is also absolutely fascinating. I've followed AI research for a long time and played around with it a lot, but the incredible breakthroughs of the last 5-10 years have blown me away. I've been working through the math on attention layers and feel like I've almost got it, and it's genius. Very cool stuff.
(The companies behind marketing and scaling it are, to varying degrees, not cool, but the tech and science and math is.)
I guess the real question then is why were you programming since the 90s instead of getting yourself into a managerial position. After all, that's basically what you have to do with vibe coding; you tell the agents what they should do and specify requirements etc.
Managing humans is hard work. Team dynamics are complicated. Communication is uncertain. Relationships which have power imbalances can be fraught. People's lives get messy, and that leaks into their work. Performance is sometimes uneven, and you have to deal with it.
Or in other words, people actually have agency. They have real opinions, emotions, unique perspectives, and what not, and a robot programmer is an intellectual sex doll, ready to confirm all your previously held beliefs were always /absolutely right/.
Yeah except agents don't get their feelings hurt when you tell them it's not right and to do it all over again. And the iteration loop is light years faster.
I grew up in the 1980s. My HackerNews account is 7 years old.
My first program was in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K. I used to sit for hours typing "listings" from gaming magazines and save them on cassette tapes, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVBX5Iu18I
I love coding manually, and I love AI! This is the first time I've felt the same excitement about computing since the 1980s, when there were new computers and new platforms and new operating systems and new programming languages coming out almost every month.
I use AI where it makes sense, where a quick output matters more than the fact that I manually coded it, like map editors and other internal tools, or quick proof-of-concepts.
I used Codex to convert some of my old Visual Basic 6 apps and games and it was a joy to see them running again after so many decades. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
i found being an IT manager quite a bit more fun. at least i was working with people
the few years i was an IT manager i came to like the repeat offenders and those with chronic learned helplessness. they seemed like "regulars" and were all big personalities. often i wondered if they intentionally disabled bluetooth just to hang out for a few minutes
Or even if we do have those skills, I still do t like when some moron comes by my cubicle to discuss some nonsense, job related or not. I’d rather be vibe coding at home.
I don't know if "fun" is the right word for me, but since AI coding has taken over nearly all of my individual hand coding (or augmented IDE suggestion coding), I find it much less satisfying to solve difficult problems with creative solutions. That always tickled a part of my programming brain, and I didn't realize how much I enjoyed that until I didn't do it anymore. Now, sure, I've broadened out to more systems-level thinking, but now the hard problems that I have generally aren't engineering problems, they're personnel problems, integration problems, planning/priority problems, and solving those usually means taking a deep breath and having a "conversation" with a senior manager, making an annoying business case, whatever else. There's much less satisfaction in that for me.
I've been programming for fun for decades, at work and at home. I have no desire to have someone or something else write my code for me. However, I've managed to convince ChatGPT that I like to be mentored in a way that allows me to build intuition instead of just having the answer given to me (or worse) the code to build it. I'm building something like AlphaZero in C in my own way without any third party libraries, going my own way, building it as I go along and discussing how it all works with the AI. I find this even more fun than just trying it on my own.
Agentic engineering feels like DevOps to me rather than coding.
I dislike DevOps because the feedback loop is quite long with DevOps and it's very declarative rather than imperative. Proper agentic engineering is like that; you don't actually build the thing with the agent, you build the things around the agent that's building the thing.
The skills, the MCP connections, the auth flows and handling, the CI, the deployment strategy, the code review, etc.
I think that's why it doesn't feel as "fun" if you are used to actual coding: long feedback loop from you creating/modifying the scaffolding to actually seeing it connect to an output. I liken it to waiting for CloudFormation to deploy your infra -- like watching paint dry.
Not really, I think this is an ADHD-adjacent thing. Say you have a hobby that could benefit from a 3D printer, and suddenly 3D printing becomes your hobby. Or you want to do some home improvement, and suddenly you’re focused on your workbench and tool rack instead of the home improvements.
When Amazon released Q, I too started building things around it, first rules, then MCP servers, then skills, then Claude Code workflows. Eventually, I was able to break this feedback loop: I have very few extras on top of Claude Code/Codex because there’s no point in competing with them on features.
The slowest part of my current feedback loop is CI.
As a domain expert, I spent all my time learning my scientific niche, and only a small bit on practical coding. Now I can manifest the ideas I formerly needed to hire developers for. WAY more fun.
Yep. Now you get to focus on actually solving the problems at hand rather than messing around typing thousands of loc of irrelevant boilerplate to get something to work.
If the discussion was "Sitting in a submarine is not as fun as scuba-diving", I would recognize the conversation is not about me, and not jump in and tell all of the recreational scuba-divers they're wrong.
it's 2026. people can't understand when things aren't for them. they will see a french onion soup recipe and comment "any dairy and onion free version?"
Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding? People enjoy trying new things and building new products, and coding isn't the goal, it's just the tool you use use to get to your goal. If now you can build things without you doing the coding part, then why is that bad?
I think this berating of people who don't enjoy coding is cope and bile by coders who feel being left behind by an industry who only values the end product and doesn't care about their idealist craft for the code, but this always had been the case. People bought Half-Life because the game was good, not because the code was written with enjoyment by the devs(Valve source code is full of swear words).
There's plenty of products with shit code that sell well, and plenty of products with good code that don't sell and bankrupt the company. The end-product is king, not the code. Did Steve Jobs just care about the end product UX or about how nice the code inside was?
GGP was being judgemental on people not enjoy coding, which means for him the default status quo is that one has to enjoy coding, therefore my assessment was correct.
Nobody. But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind. I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code. The sense of accomplishment is gone.
But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right? I'm planning to leave the industry once my role at this company is up. The fun is gone now and I don't want to do the new form of the job.
Yes, you don't need anyone's permission to be sad.
I enjoy the act of coding, but my ambition to create almost always exceeded my ability and the number of hours in the day. So the transition from coder (and sometimes manager) to agent orchestrator has been fairly positive.
It's not necessarily easy or pleasant to evolve, but that's life.
There is a huge skill gap arising in using LLMs. You have some people (like me) who are able to direct LLMs and get them to produce (nearly) perfect code, while there's others who can't even get them to make a CRUD website without exploding.
Yeah, i've seen this when others shown. We're no longer in the days when you just copy and paste code snippets in the browser window, nor just dump and entire codebase in the harness and letting it rip, there's an entire new skill tree on how to use each model and harness correctly for maximum gains and bypassing various context hiccups.
>You have some people (like me) who are able to direct LLMs and get them to produce (nearly) perfect code, while there's others who can't even get them to make a CRUD website without exploding.
Well it seems unfair to compare anyone to your brilliance.
Didn't you just accuse someone above of not enjoying coding as if that's somehow a must?
>But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
Nobody here is saying that. People are saying whether you enjoy coding or not, doesn't matter for the end product if it does the job just as well. When people buy an iPhone, a pair of Nikes, or some other China made nicknack off Amazon, they don't care if the factory workers who assembled it enjoyed their time on the assembly line making stuff for you, or if they're sweatshop workers assembling your stuff in absolute pain and misery, they care if the end product in their hand satisfies them.
>I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code.
Is passionate code something customers are willing to pay a premium for versus the AI written one, or do customers only care about the end product and nobody gives a shit if it was vibecoded or whether you poured your soul in the code?
>To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
To be fair, after talking to AI devs on the frontline at a local meetup, I learned that models, agents and harnesses have so many edge cases, traps and footguns, that aren't really well documented anywhere, especially visible on large codebases, that you really need to stay up to date to keep up and squeeze the best out of each model for your intended use case.
Fun is a weird thing to measure, it's often tied to things we don't instrument properly and/or account for poorly.
For me, personally, I have learned that fun is often more correlated with social connection and sharing than it is with subjective perception or gratification of the task at hand if removing the social element.
The most fun I had in life was when I had great teams, great people, and great challenges to share both the growth and struggles with. The rest, like what tooling we used, was optional and easy to misjudge as important at the time. Looking back I rarely recall the experience of using certain tooling over another, and often remember the people and the stories.
For me, a big part of it is there is something about the formal structure of a programming language that is very satisfying to me. Same thing with math. There is something about the precision, and the constraints. Writing natural language prompts just isn't the same.
I think there’s a difference in vibe coding and what I call accelerated software construction.
Vibe coding is like a last second weekend trip to Paris.
Accelerated software construction is like planning a four week backpacking trip through Western Europe.
I’m a grey beard so I’m on the far side of “writing code is fun” but I get it. I used to love those ah-ha moments when solving coding problems.
But now I love delivering solutions to the business or creating software that works as I envisioned it and those two things are fun in very different ways.
I've seen boilerplate be brought up as an argument very frequently and I keep wondering, what sort of boilerplate do you deal with that it is a considerable time sink?
I feel like most languages and frontend frameworks have a pretty established template project which gets you going as far as boilerplate goes.
When it comes to backend it's more of the same.
When it comes to gamedev, you have established game engines which cut down on the boilerplate process. If you are writing your own engine in something like Vulkan which require a lot of pre-game ritual, there are still plenty of template projects to get you started, but they are more surface level than the frontend/backend examples due to the nature of the project.
If you are working on popular hardware, like arduinos, esp32s, there are established template projects for most languages.
And if you are working on a niche language or framework for which this doesn't apply, then roughly by the second project in them you'll find yourself just copying over the boilerplate from the first.
So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?
as somebody who does now do 95% of my coding without typing, I wonder the same thing. I've also seen that thrown around and I keep wondering who these people are who are spending so much time and/or effort on boilerplate to the point where they see that as the biggest benefit (??)
It depends on what you consider boilerplate. Unity, Godot, or Unreal cut down on "boilerplate" for alot of things, but they also leave a lot to the developer unless you are aiming for an asset flip.
For me, boilerplate isn't scaffolding out getters and setters, or deferring to templated code generation; using refactoring tools that have been baked into IDEs or third party tools have been available for about 20 years deal with all of those nicely.
On the other hand, the "boilerplate" to stand up a secure web service with appropriate monitoring and scaling capabilities is a fair bit of work when you know that the immediate first users are enterprise businesses.
Building a service that meets or exceeds industry compliance requirements (internal or otherwise) is a lot of work! My harness, skills, and SOPs are set up such that if I spin up a new web-dev project, it gets all of the accessibility, internationalization, observability, authentication and authorization capabilities I would expect, appropriate to the tier. There is a lot of work done to build and implement those at the front end of a project, which I could skip over for experimentation, but for actual, deliverable work, it is a huge accellerator. In addition, by having that scaffolding and boilerplate in place, and a few skills and SOPs to support future feature growth, the agentic coding tools build with them in mind, and wire everything up as they go.
It doesn't replace the need to do the testing and validation, but it sure does break me out of the cycle of "fuck it ship" that takes over when I have my developer hat on, and the "holy shit, burn it all down and start over" that takes over when I put my security engineer hat back on.
99% of most projects is boilerplate. For instance let's say I'm making a video game and I want to add multiplayer. Well, most of the networking code is going to deal with deciding what protocol I will be using (UDP likely) what the packets are going to look like (basically just pushing simple data frames over the wire) and then messing around with writing a UDP reactor (probably epoll backed) to actually get my game to run. This _essentially_ is pointless boilerplate, because you need to mess around with looking up kernel intricacies, how you're supposed to wrangle UDP packets, what the kernel expects what some pointless spec written 50 years ago says (oh no if a UDP packet arrives while the other end has closed connection according to RFC whatever you MUST(!!!!) stop reading otherwise UB occurs). If you want to ignore all this now you need to find some library, hoping it work (it won't) and trying to wrestle it to work in your engine. I do _not_ care about any of this. What I do care about is how my multiplayer game is going to run, how players are going to interact with each other etc. LLMs allow you to focus on that.
I think that's half true because there is a lot of great technology that exists today where you can get anything done without any of the boilerplate. A very brief example is the .NET ecosystem where I get a lot of work done in asp.net and winforms in a pleasant way.
Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World
Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World
^C
Break in 10
Ready.
Still looping. Anything you'd like me to do for real?
After that, I gave it a second instruction:
create a GW-basic interpreter in python
It's 5 characters longer, and gives me the interpreter I need to run the basic code (actually not - I had to change the Basic code to have a second line for the loop in GW-Basic; I should have used a more recent basic, but I actually wrote a GW-Basic interpreter many years ago).
Yeah of course the result is a bit random by nature, probably we should define a threshold of success rate when we make prompt golfing an official sport. It worked on first try with claude.ai
Double edged sword. I started programming in the 90s as a teenager, it was always fun for me to code. Several toy projects on GitHub, later studied CS and became a professional dev of course.
I started a small one-man SaaS in 2022 that I coded by hand, and have gradually adopted AI usage. I don't write a single line of code anymore today, and my speed/performance has supercharged in the last 6-12months. The fun of coding is completely gone, but replaced with me being able to deliver what I need to grow the product (from dev, to design and marketing work).
Not even close. But I can say that for grunt work, it's a dream come true. I was just telling my wife the "high" or "flow state" I used to get in is more or less MIA with letting the AI loose. I've started to just do the stuff I enjoy by hand—front-end design, challenging/interesting back-end stuff—and let the AI do the other stuff that I'm either too lazy or too disinterested in doing.
Honestly, it's quite nice. I wish more people would take a less-binary approach to this stuff. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's just a tool. Like any tool, you can apply it selectively. It sounds like a lot of companies have hand-waved this away as being an anachronism, but I'd argue that's the most foolish way to deploy AI. Trying to augment juniors into seniors with it, too, is just showing how many people haven't the slightest clue what they're doing with it.
It feels to me like what I imagine it world be to transition from developer to a development manager. I like getting the product but the enjoyment of solving the challenges is missing
It's being able to produce the output that formerly took a team of people, without needing to deal with the drama and politics of mananging a team of people.
Personal Context: For our personal ClockStack[0] project, I have decided that I will NOT read code at all. Though at high level, I do decide the architecture, dependency libraries etc. Sometimes even telling database schema. That's it. No code reading. Even ask AI how you implemented is enough. And going for prod/live just by chatting with AI is totally fun. Background: I wanted to do this ~5 years back and read almost 500 pages of H.264/RTMP spec/documentation. Even got valid non-compressing video encoding working in Golang. Then priorities changed. Now with the power of AI: Live within a week. I will absolutely call it vibe coding. It is totally fun.
To me, coding is very similar to modern agriculture. Some people enjoy growing their own fruits and vegetables even though it takes significantly more time than buying stuff from the store. Personally I care more about the end result than the process so I do a lot of vibe coding.
Tell me about the end result you enjoy instead of growing your own food because I somehow suspect it’s premade slop from TJ’s microwaved and eating out. I would not be bragging about that!
Top 5 side projects that I enjoyed doing without having the requisite knowledge:
1. Adding TTL to my gmail to help clean up my account. I have an option to delete my kids' school emails at the end of the school year
2. Allowing my wife or I to add images to Google Drive and have those pics show up on our Frame TV
3. Showing a snapshot of my kids' Google Classroom to show up on the Frame TV
4. Chrome extension that removes the obfuscated LinkedIn links so that I can easily open those links in an incognito browser
5. I created a skill so that my AI will do research for me on a topic, save the information on markdown files and upload those to Gemini Notebook.
At work, I don't vibe code and I need to understand any proposed changes. Where I do like the vibe coding are small annoyances that I don't want to make time to learn everything APIs that I'm unlikely to use again. If they stop working tomorrow, no big deal.
I had fun writing code when I felt I'm growing from it or that it facilitates my knowledge and unique experience. The parts that I felt could as well be written by a robot were so hard I would miss deadlines unable to force myself to do them. For a brief period in 2025 we were in the happy spot when robots were good enough to do the robot thing and I could focus on the interesting parts. But now they are good enough for everything and it's depressing. I can still contribute meaningfully to the overall system and product design, but it seems we are couple of major modle releases away from that being no longer possible either.
For me it really depends whether I'm happy with the result. The code base I work on is such a complex mess, AI often gets lost and I am not able to sufficiently scope the problem and foresee all the subtleties I don't actively remember. That often leads to agents loosing the plot and writing horrendous code. Trying to debug that and steering the agent back is not fun.
But if I can avoid that, keep things small and isolated, so it just allows me to get things done more quickly, it can be a lot more fun. I miss the flow state though, with ai i'm way more distracted and feel a lot less productive after a days work.
I was vibe coding algorithms for research for months, enjoying it. Had to move it into production, doing normal cs work. Disliked it. Began to understand the point of this article. Reviewing, testing, arguing with other dev's is painful.
I don't know. AI is certainly the cause of a lot of anxiety for me about the profession as well as society and the world at large. I also enjoyed my job quite a bit when I had to/could write all the code by hand. I'd been doing it for a few decades, and don't appreciate that the future of this path is now in question. For these reasons, if I had a lever to make it so LLMs never happened, I'd probably pull it.
That being said, similar to OP, I've used AI to create some things I've been thinking about for a long time, and realistically might never have gotten to otherwise. One of them is an app to wean off of Blue Apron for meal prep: it has a (high-quality) scraped database of a few thousand recipes, it works and looks just the way I wanted it to, and it has a lot of functionality I haven't seen anywhere else, that I came up with over time. This morning, I had a feature idea, and before heading out for some errands I outlined its system design to the AI. It wrote a spec, got it reviewed, and built a v1 before I came back home. That's a lot of fun, for me, too: to be able to mostly focus on the higher-level design of a system, and still get where you want to go.
Paradoxically, AI enables workers to feel more connected to the fruits of their labor by reducing their need to specialize; they are now able to field adjacent tasks.
It's fun when you find an actual new boundary and capability that you wanted to build, and the abstraction is clean, and then you materialize it into existence.
It's awful when the boundary breaks down. It might just be inherit to the loop (no mind readers) but I will walk away from an AI task for 30 minutes and all too frequently there will be insane code smells.
I've been doing a thing where I will have "integration" projects between many different subsystems to demonstrate some capability, test it, then destroy the integration folder, folding back what we learned into the subsystems themselves. So far this has been OK for learning and it incentivizes the AI to not throw garbage everywhere. Of course, this assumes you get subsystems right but it prevents direct reaching into them and modifying excessively - try to do the most you can with fixed interfaces, etc.
riding horses is many ways way more fun than driving a car (earliest form of self driving!!!); but I'd never consider riding as a real form of transportation
it's fine to keep riding though as long as you're having fun!! but it will definitely get worse and worse as a form of transportation
The entire process of the ups and downs is such a human experience for all sorts of work. The ups and downs are kinda removed when a ton of that friction is removed.
Can think of almost any task, and there is that likelihood for some small issue to arise, and the person has to adjust to it. Ai for coding, now you just kinda say "i hit this issue", and its usually resolved, this removes the friction that feeds the feeling of accomplishment once you complete something.
But i do think, there is of course a separation of work and play, many modern video games are amazing at the dopamine style rollercoaster it seems like this article is hinting at missing. So i totally get it for personal projects, if its no longer fun because the dopamine roller coaster is dead, it kinda kills it for a lot of people. For work I don't know if it NEEDS to be there at all, ideally less friction makes for more work getting done, even if its less pleasant for the human involved.
I couldn't see myself continuing playing a game if all the happy dopamine was front loaded into the first 10 minutes.
Can't relate. The whole point is to build products and drive value for the customer. It was never to enjoy writing the code. Writing the code was actually the easy part.
There's one thing I struggle to understand when I read posts like this: who is forcing these people to vibe code their side projects? If you want to hand-code because you enjoy it, what is stopping you?
I understand that the work we get paid to do exists in an entirely different context. Capitalism will always push for doing more with less. When you're on the clock, the rules are different.
But if you love coding. By all means, code. What's stopping you?
Also, I think we need to update our terminology. "Vibe coding" served its purpose and still defines a subset of how people are creating software. But I feel that working with coding agents, carefully orchestrated by skilled developers, deserves a term less dismissive than "vibe coding".
To me, vibe coding is pulling the arm of the slot machine until something good comes out. Yeah, that can honestly be a lot of fun. But working with these tools to create code that is as good as, if not better than what you'd write yourself, that's something else entirely. I think we flatten the nuance of this whole crazy situation we find ourselves in when we conflate the two.
Vibe coding means you have no idea how the code looks or works or the architecture. Agentic coding is the same as regular coding, just you had an agent do most of the typing.
I personally really really don’t like working on a code base where I have no idea what the code is actually doing or looks like and I find even the best models eventually start tripping up on messy bloated code bases, though that takes months now vs days like a year ago. I think we’re still early days in the vibe coding experiment and as vibe coded products push into 50k LOC, you start to see the parasitic drag caused by a messy code base on the agents.
I absolutely love the speed that agents give me!
So what I’ve been doing is working myself in a main branch where I’m just tending to the code and writing high level types and architecture, then spinning up agents into work trees and having them work on specific, focused tasks. Then I get and agent to do a merge into the main branch, fix up conflicts, help me go over design decisions etc.
So it’s trying to get the best of both worlds, I’m getting the speed and also my head is in the code and working on the most challenging / important aspects of the code base so my actual technical skills are always improving.
It isn't as fun for those projects that can be written by hand ;)
There are tons of projects that were economically infeasible to write, and now become feasible. Something that needed lots of human time but almost no one wanted to sacrifice anything, including money, to get them. But now we have LLM subscription in which per token cost is almost free.
I'm really enjoying dusting off old projects that I lost interest in and handing them over to Claude to modernize their code and resurrect the ideas. But I'm also starting to miss the grind and feeling of accomplishment when you build stuff yourself, or finally sort out that nagging bug. I think there is a balance to be found, for me anyway, and I'm not sure I've found it yet.
I think you should split the difference and use vibe coding for the parts you don't care about.
Example, the UI for his two vibe coded example apps. Why not let AI do a single pass on that? 30s for a huge improvement. Other than the personal pride of saying you did it all, I don't see why not.
that's strange, for me it is the coolest thing in the world. but I always had a love-hate relationship with with programming which always felt dirty compared to math.
AI just feels so incredibly empowering (and removed the slow drag). You still get the joy of designing systems, trying out new ideas and potentially conquering the world.
I've been a developer for 40 years now. Over that time period - I've had a lot of ideas that were great but were simply too difficult for me to execute on my own.
Today I am executing all of them and it feels amazing to see all these beautiful things come to life.
I understand that some people really really really liked coding by hand. More power to them. I just don't understand why they're so angry at me because I prefer the final product.
EDIT: And I get an anonymous downvote within 30 seconds. I don't get it.
It's not even about having a real life. Agents objectively code insanely fast and produce more and better code than I could have if I devoted all of my time to it. (When used correctly.)
I get that people really hate AI - but they're being incredibly irrational about it. Baby with the bathwater stuff. It's creepy.
> Agents objectively code insanely fast and produce more and better code than I could have if I devoted all of my time to it.
Then you aren't a very good programmer, because LLMs produce worse code than the typical programmer does. They can produce more, certainly. But generating bad code faster isn't actually useful.
Well - more importantly - with the absurd speed you can iterate insanely fast. It's amazing what you can do when you throw 1000 average programmers at a problem.
People who don't use coding agents really should stop making fools of themselves. It's painful to watch.
> because LLMs produce worse code than the typical
I'm not so sure that's true anymore.
But regardless - no one uses just one coding agent. It's a series of agents - a group to plan the work - coders to implement it - and then agents to review the work. Overall it comes out better than human code.
Here - let's test it - give me your GitHub and we can compare your code to theirs.
It's trained on massive amounts of public code, so its output is (at best) average-- like the code it was trained on. My issue isn't really the output itself, but the mindset that accepts average output as good enough. People who make that choice will keep producing below-average software, and that's what the rest of us will have to live with.
You're being silly. With an appropriate dev pipeline it comes out quite nice. A team of agents to design and plan the implementation - a team of coders - and a team of reviewers after the fact.
Here, let's test it. Give me some of your code (GitHub is fine) and we can compare.
Wrong. What you call "vibecoding" is in fact metaprogramming, or essentially the art of writing programs that write programs. Yes, the medium of exchange is common text (or ideas in their purest forms) which may seem different from traditional programming but is no different from typing in Rust or C++ syntax. The reason a large chunk of HN purists _detest_ it is due to them not being able to gatekeep development anymore behind obscure syntax rules or forcing developers to memorize irrelevant programming constructs. And before I get called out, I've effectively memorized the entire C++ standard going back however many revisions, and yes, I can confirm that it's a complete waste of time. LLMs (today, in their current forms) can understand and emit code far better than _any_ human developer. Amortized for time? It's not even close. With half of the tools I've built I've stopped counting my code generation in locs and switched over to KB of code per day. Far more informative at this point.
There are two camps in this industry and I have the chance to meet both.
- There are those for whom coding is a hobby, an art project, an identity. These are the people who debate tabs vs spaces or use Vim.
- There are those for whom coding is a way to build things. Their dopamine comes from the end product and seeing people use it. They couldn't care less about tabs vs spaces.
I'm in the second camp. Vibe coding has removed all the shitty parts of coding. Like I hate figuring out how to do this esoteric thing in this library. Wading through docs and hitting the CI constantly - its a pain. Not fun.
idk man it really looks like an opinion i disagree with. had more fun vibecoding 10 projects last month than writing html tables manually 3 years ago on the same projects
It feels like pulling and building someone else's code. It just happens to be *exactly* what you're looking for.
This is the best way I can describe how I feel about it.
When the software output is the _goal_, it's a lot less rewarding. When it's not, it's fine I guess. I'd still feel better if I had it done it myself but it's fine.
Writing code is fun for me in a mechanical way - it is very satisfying to edit my lisp expressions in Vim (gasp not emacs)
I'm sure some people thought that it was the same for type writers. Indeed even today some writers prefer a type writer or even pen and paper (quill perhaps?)
But for many cases the quality of life that successive innovation brought outweigh the mechanical joy involved in the creative process. And when the endeavour is a commercial one the argument gets a little harder to justify...
I'm sure people can see how producing text without delete or copy and paste or easy versioning/duplicating makes life harder...
It depends on the goal. Right now, one thing I definitely wouldn't want to do is write js bullshit by hand - absolutely not.
But if we are talking about personal projects where the aim is to learn complex interesting things, then of course writing code by hand is the only way to actually learn.
I miss hitting states of flow that lasted all day where I would just drop into a mental black hole and emerge on the other side with work I usually felt a large amount of personal pride from, where I was primarily the creator rather than a babysitter.
People talk about how LLMs take away the tedium of writing boilerplate code and it just makes me wonder how/why they were writing enough boilerplate code into the mid-2020s for that to be a significant help.
I do use LLMs because they are undeniably productivity-enhancing for producing most code and I'm ultimately a laborer selling my time for money, but I feel like a lot of the fun and accomplishment has been stripped from the job I've been doing for decades.
If I were comfortably financially independent I'd probably just code for fun without LLMs and be much happier, but It Is What It Is.
I think this is cope. I'm sorry to be so harsh, and the author is entitled to their opinions on what is fun, but I think a lot of the "LLMs are not fun" discourse is motivated reasoning.
We can no longer deny that LLMs are useful for coding, so we now move on to the only remaining and defensible goalpost: I don't use LLMs because I don't want to. To be clear, this is a perfectly fine position and I hold no ill will against anybody holding it, but I don't think one gets to this conclusion naturally. It comes first from a lifetime of writing software, like I and many others have experienced.
And for what it's worth, I always had more fun planning what I was going to build rather than handling the brass tax of implementation. The specifics of problem and solution are always what interested me more than writing each character, and LLMs allow for me to do just this, and nothing else. Not a bad deal!
Again, my apologies for being such an insufferable asshole that I came here and told you what you ought to like. This is my opinion, based solely on my experience, and I might be wrong.
I don't think "cope" is the right word for it. I totally agree with the author that it's not as much fun now. But that isn't an argument against using AI tools to write code. I'm a professional. It's certainly nice if my professional work is fun, but it just ... might not be.
I have definitely been finding more joy in other parts of the job though, which is also good. But I definitely used to have a lot more fun writing and editing a lot of lines of code than what I do now, which is mostly reading and reviewing them.
Laughed loud at the “you are absolutely right!” While diving in!
But in my opinion it depends, if you are just generally vibe coding you will get that, but if you know what you are doing and precisely direct it to what you want, you get amazing results. I feel a lot of developers hate it because it requires leadership skills and shuffling multiple task at the same time with a strong long term vision, which none of that is needed when you are doing the code manually, simply because time is in your favor, say in 2 years you reached the point that you would get in 2 weeks by LLM, you have had enough time to revise your goals (hence the whole agile approach was a thing back then), with LLM tho, you need all that thoughts compacted and very well planned before you even write a single code (it’s why agile is dead, and waterfall with specs planning is back again), having the specs and blueprint and all the little details even the library to be used is also documented and planned, then you fire up the LLM, that’s what I do and it works perfectly.
vibe coding for personal projects is a power tool. If I'm creating a 4x game for fun, id like to write core logic myself, but figuring out why drop-down lists stopped opening after a unity upgrade or why the animation is glitching sometimes is something ai can do.
For work projects, if fun was the goal you wouldn't be paid to do it :)
I predict we are less than 12 months away from the pendulum swinging back to hand coding but dragging ai pair programming into the workflow. This is why I don’t worry too much about this.
I can predict this because I’m building such a thing for myself as are many others. It seems to be where the tao of slop is going.
At work I've spent the last few weeks building a big feature that involves streaming the output of a 3D engine to a web client and wiring in HID from the client back to the engine. Basically, it's a simplified version of Google Stadia.
I'm not trying to be rude. Is this new to you? I've had all of this plugged in myself for all of 2026 (at least). The LLMs use of APIs shouldn't be surprising once you see decent ones in action in general. I'm not sure how this would impact my thoughts on whether the pendulum will swing one way or not.
This is new to me (last 6 months or so). What I’m observing is people growing lazy. I think it will take a while for it to swing back because momentum is still in the wrong direction.
Yeah, reality is this fall/winter is when we start seeing the shift from "engineer guides claude on their laptop" to "PMs write tickets and everything else is hands off until pressing the merge button".
I actually agree with what you said! the subscriptions we are paying today is only a tiny fraction of what it actually cost AI companies like Claude and Codex. either it will shift into running those agents in your own setup or pay an absurred number. anyways as you said the pendulum will swing back for sure!
The ship has sailed. For personal use, maybe, but supply and demand are going to dictate that there is going to be a massive ramp in memory and compute production, and when the prices inevitably normalize due to the increase of availability, there will be a push to use local inference. It goes back and forth, and unless there is a strong roadblock put in place, the current generation of models are already powerful enough that incremental improvements in the run up to increased hardware availability will mean that these tools are here to stay. Even if draconian laws were put into place, the prevalence and availability of open models and the tools to train them means you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Definitely not. Look at what Deepseek costs. AI companies spend a fraction on inference, it is not expensive for them to run these models like it is to train them. Coding by hand is not coming back.
Large enterprises are paying unsubsidized metered rates. I work at a firm with around 700 employees. The p90 engineer is spending $2k/wk.
Our business-side employees have only begun using agents, and their spending accelerating. They're claiming their ROI is massively positive and have an enormous willing to spend.
Prices will probably go down because of the emerging price war between Anthropic and OpenAI, but there are many firms willing to spend.
I really love my horse and carriage over that really fast car that gets someone from point A to point B with 100x speed, said the Amish with a heart full of honesty, and he was subjectively right.
“Most likely better” is carrying a lot here. Risk matters to my customers and having a 1% chance of erasing a production DB or inserting a typo squatting malicious dependency that exfiltrates and enables ransomware is not acceptable for those customers. They don’t care how you built it, but they do care that you know how it’s really built which is antithetical to vibe coding. Vibe coders can be very smart, but they are in “trust, don’t verify” mode.
this is completely unrelated to the article, which is about not _enjoying_ vibecoding. even if I agreed with you, I would still think commenting this on this article is a real dick move
It would probably have been safer for the author to explicitly point out that this is true for them specifically, rather than a general rule, because this way they run the risk of never hearing the end of it.
It's not fun to always have to couch your language just in case someone doesn't naturally grasp that you're talking about your individual experience on a blog.
Anyone that assumes an author is speaking for everyone will find something else to gripe about, IMO.
> It's not fun to always have to couch your language
It depends, some think it's fun :)
But why should writing be universally tailored to them, subjectivists?
Oh, and the irony
So clickbaity title selection is fun?
It's not fun to always have to couch your language just in case someone doesn't naturally grasp that you're talking about your individual experience on a blog.
Always a hazard when you use objective language to describe the subjective.
Why does anyone ever have to say “this is, like, just my opinion, man.” Are readers so ignorant to think articles are statements of definitive fact applying to all of humanity unless told otherwise?
yes.
Did you not see how downvotes are used here? To show an example from today:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49977612
It is clearly their opinion, but it was downvoted heavily. Doesn’t help that he is pro AI.
It seems like there's a difference between an "opinion" about the facts of the world (like the article you are referring to) and an opinion about subjective experience (like whether something is "fun" or not).
It can make sense to disagree and argue with the former, but for the latter, having different subjective opinion doesn't invalidate or contradict the original.
(In my opinion.)
What else are downvotes for other than to express disagreement?
Well, I suppose the original idea was that they are for low-quality stories and comments, not for expressing disagreement.
Just to continue this, if someone posts a comment lying about something, is that "low quality" or..?
Low-quality, off topic, don't make sense, violate site rules, rude, abusive, being a jerk, shill, propagandist. Disagree is actually the least negative reason to downvote someone.
the least negative reason is not very clear. do you mean "it's the least negative sentiment against the comment" or the least negative kind of comment? or do you mean "it is the least bad/wrong reason" or the best reason as in: it's better to use downvotes for disagreement than for other reasons (others should then be flagged?)?
i read it as the former, and hence upvoted your comment because i agree, but the downvotes of your comment suggest that others are reading the latter which feels wrong to me. that is of course if they actually agree with me.
Seems pretty clear what they meant. Of all the absurd, pedantic nonsense in this thread, I chose to downvote yours. Purely out of spite, and for giving me the bitter realization that I've wasted too much time on HN today.
well that just made my day. best downvote ever. for two reasons, one is the explanation itself, the other the fact that you explained it. downvotes are frustrating when you have to guess why. here, have an upvote. (if that upvote made you feel guilty for downvoting me, then that's an unfortunate side effect, not intentional ;-)
They are absolutely not to express disagreement? You want to hide opinions that you disagree with so other people don't see them? Christ, infantile.
don't be harsh on him, he's a vibe coder
Why would you think that the author was speaking for anyone but themselves?
When I say "juggling is fun", I'm talking about my own experience. I'm not saying that everyone else should drop their hobbies and take up juggling.
Why should the author have to couch the headline of their article with this kind of defensive language that you suggest? The very first word of the article is "I", it is clear that the author is talking about their own experience.
For whatever reason, I've found that people who use AI to code tend to be quite defensive about it.
It's because of the fear.
Never hearing the end of it from people who don't understand that other people write from their own perspective by default?
Exactly!
> It would probably have been safer for the author to explicitly point out that this is true for them specifically
It's ironic but you should have started with "In my opinion", "I think" or something to that effect. Now you never hear the end of it!
I like to think that "probably" covers this well enough, but, yes, you're right.
Yeah. The only way to be wrong in this discussion is to assume a position of deciding how others feel about something.
he's right though
That is just your opinion, not a general rule. In my opinion.
This. Like cooking is more fun than take-away... if you can cook.
In particular, writing code by hand is fun for people who are good at writing code by hand. It's not at all fun for people who aren't. For those people, vibecoding means that they can produce something without the pain, something that compiles without all the time fighting the compiler, something that works (or at least mostly works) without all the debugging time.
this is a personal blog and it uses the first person
unless you want to water down the title with an "i think"
Who gives a shit? HN holds itself in too high a regard; some peanut gallery on an AI-pilled tech forum will have no effect on the author's life one way or the other.
i mean, fun is a pretty subjective concept, seems obvious that it's personal preference right?
Boy look at all these six month old accounts that have been programming for decades and just love vibe coding!
My account is seventeen years old, and I've been coding more than forty years; is that enough to meet your standards?
I do love the weird new world we're in. I feel as though I've been a player in an orchestra all my life, doing a little one-man-band act on the side, and suddenly I've been handed the baton and now I get to conduct the whole show.
I also have been coding for over 40 years now, and I am going to take your example and expand it a bit: wiggling a baton and hearing nice music come out is fun in its own way, all the years of training allowed you to develop the "ear" so you know what sounds good, and to a certain extent to recognize errors the player you are directing is doing, and isn't it nice to be able to just wave your hands and music comes out without having to work on scales, or embochure, or finger dexterity and so on.
The downside is that of course the further you stay away from actually playing your instrument, the rustier you will get; this might or might not be an issue, but it is a significant downside, also being away from the technique side means that as the years go by, you might not be able anymore to have an intuitive understanding of "this sounds wrong" and why it does.
I don't want to stretch the metaphor too far, but it does feel that agentic coding is a bit like building skill tech debt, the more you do it, the more you'll have to work later to bring back the skills you lost. The meta could be that models will get so good so that only a small percentage of developers will ever need to sully their eyes again with looking at code (same as while when we started most people had at least a passing familiarity with assembly, nowadays nearly nobody does), jury's out on that.
Either way, what before needed a full orchestra of developers, now could be doable by a good conductor and maybe a couple of soloists: how many orchestras will be needed? and what will the section musicians not good enough to be soloists and that don't have an interest in becoming a conductor will do? and how are new conductors going to develop their technical chops if there are no more orchestral jobs?
> how many orchestras will be needed?
Many more. There isn't a fixed amount of software needed in the world: the amount will expand to fit the capacity. There's a reason it's been consistently difficult to find good programmers: there's more work than the existing population can handle. By expanding to use AI, I expect that the amount of programming work will grow, not shrink. However, the amount of programmers may decline.
Yes, and I will also add that there is so much software out there completely unaffected by LLMs. Those apps tend to be the vast majority of internal corporate/financial/government/etc. IT services.
If I were to guess, those devs are at least half of the readers of HN, if not the commenters as well. That's why there's so much push back and arguing against LLMs.
Software like that is almost entirely maintenance work. The requirements trickle in slowly and the changes are small but precise. They require deep knowledge of the broader topic, not just programming.
The deadlines are generous now, but what happens longer term? In the future nobody knows how to code without LLMs, most of the topical knowledge is long gone, and the deadlines are always urgent.
I think there actually is a fixed amount of software needed in the world. FAANG has had de facto unlimited programming manpower for years and years and they've mostly squandered it on enshittifying once-decent software. Honestly, I can't think of anything in my life right now that demands more software. If anything, I'd like the software I already use to be drastically polished and simplified.
But hey, maybe the slopocalypse will incentivize us to disconnect and engage with the physical world a bit more.
Most software is purchased or built by businesses for their internal needs. Are you a business?
The greenfield projects where LLMs make sense will ramp back up when the economics make sense again. It's only been a few years since the "soft landing" BS in 2022-2023.
All of the drama and discomfort since then is 100% caused by that residual economic impact. LLM hype and more aggressive enshittification are just the symptoms, not the root cause. It's not "the new normal", or rather it's totally normal but not the default case for the majority of fiscal years. These dips happen almost every decade.
When that ramp up happens (it kind of already is), the media will do a 180 like the first half of the 2020s never even happened. You will be slightly annoyed, but not complaining because hey we all have more money again.
This is my sense as well; I've been coding since the 90s and on HN since 2010.
I don't want to be a typist, I want to make things.
If Claude/Codex does 90% of the work of figuring out how to build an app while all you did was give it a high level picture of what you wanted, did you build it or did you merely commission it?
So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
Not if the architect said "make a cool design for a house" to some team and went out for the day.
and the market takes care of such things. if your app is able to absolutely kill it because your prompt was "make a cool app" then you got extraordinarily lucky, and have zero moat and will inevitably die unless you build a moat in a different area of the business. Taste/skill will always win, the end, full stop.
In my case, I come back that evening, give a few dozen feedback items, and come back in the morning to a new design incorporating them.
It's not much different from assigning a task to a more junior dev. I'm the architect, it's my goals we're working towards, but I don't need to be the one to go wire it together.
I don't think you're necessarily wrong today, but AI assisted coding has gone from autocomplete to functioning as a junior dev very quickly. The labs are obviously not happy to leave it at that. Fewer and fewer senior devs will be needed when the model can also create the architecture, derive the tradeoffs, and interpret product requirements directly. I'm really worried about the future of our field at the current pace of things.
What is "building" about this? In your example you're merely delegating. And no, I don't consider managers or product managers as builders.
An architect does far more work than your typical vibeprompter.
Maybe, but I've got no interest in being a vibeprompter, either.
Are you really trying to equate a vibe coder with an architect of a skyscraper?
Is programming tantamount to stacking bricks to you...?
>So an architect can't take pride in a house where they didn't put one brick on top of the other? Norman Foster "merely commissioned" the iconic HSBC building in Hong Kong?
I never said anything about pride. I was talking about whether terms like "build" apply when the act of building is outsourced to an AI agent.
Also, I would seriously scrutinize the claim that a person vibe coding an application is really getting into the nitty gritty details. These days it seems like people are merely describing what they want and a few high level guidelines, and then letting the AI agents to do the rest of the planning + architecture.
I don't really care, personally. What I care about is that something now exists which didn't exist before. A Ouija board would be equally as good.
There are (at least) two types of programmers. One type does it because they enjoy problem solving and programming is the best/most effficient way to solve those problems.
The joy comes from the problem no longer existing, being solved, not from the physical act of typing.
I'd wager the former is no programmer at all, just a regular problem solver. At least not a programmer in the way that someone printing a clay teapot is not an artisan.
Anyway, let's burn the data centers and become Luddites. Wait, first become Luddites, the we can burn things.
I'm not a huge fan of tying your identity to something as essentially meaningless as "programming".
I am not a "programmer", I do "programming".
>I'm not a huge fan of tying your identity to something as essentially meaningless as "programming
Good for you!
But for most people, their identity is often strongly influenced by how their community sees them
If you get paid to be a programmer, then society treats you as such, which often causes you to perceive yourself in kind.
> If Claude/Codex does 90% of the work of figuring out how to build an app…
Good news: It doesn't.
I just don't have to do the typing, pre-acceptance testing, fuzzing, etc.
>Good news: It doesn't.
People are famously terrible at analyzing their own behavior. I would bet that people who "no longer write code" are actually way more hands off about their work than they believe they are.
Random internet commenters are also famously terrible at analyzing others' behavior. My clients are happy, my coworkers are happy, my boss is happy, and I'm happy.
>Random internet commenters are also famously terrible at analyzing others' behavior. My clients are happy, my coworkers are happy, my boss is happy, and I'm happy.
Good for you!
Regardless of the answer (which I don't claim to actually know, but I'll bite), I've heard a related question as well: "Well, all you did was vibe-code it, anyone can do that!"
To which the obvious answer is often: then why didn't you think of it? And if you thought of it, why didn't you iterate on it and polish it to achieve a proper product that actually matched your vision?
For some people, they seem to believe that an idea isn't worth anything, and only the building is. And, even then, they don't really understand that building a proper product (even with vibecoding) takes a lot of effort to get right, because as you build you find more about the domain, about how the product should work, etc. Sure, loads of people vibecode crap, but many don't. They build things with real care over the course of many many many hours.
It's not that I love agile, but this is one of the reasons it exists. I wonder if the people who so openly bash solving a problem through vibecoding (with multiple iterations) also fail to see this value of agile?
To answer your question (acknowledging I don't really know): If all you had to do was get Claude/Codex to work and it came out perfectly very fast, then I believe you did commission it (and I have no problem with that), but, more often that that, you will have built it by iterating on product decisions.
When I "build" products for clients, I am not doing commission development work. In fact, I'm not building it for them -- we are building it together, learning requirements, failing, iterating. Otherwise, I would have just been a code monkey, and that I have sincerely despised for years.
Lastly: at least for now, the impact of knowing how to guide the AI is still very relevant. Good problem solvers who embrace AI completely blow "regular guys" out of the water. Maybe, as models get better, this will not be as prevalent, but you can clearly tell when someone "knows" what they're doing with the AI, even if they NEVER look at the code. The knowledge from the coding days is definitely partly transferable.
I agree with you 100%. I’ve never enjoyed programming for the sake of writing code. I’ve always loved creating products and coding was just a necessary evil to do that. And thanks to AI I can now focus more on the product, its UX, design, etc instead of spending most of the time in the codebase.
But most software engineers I’ve worked with are not like that. In fact, they want to be as far away from the customer/user as possible and they love the coding for coding’s sake. I’m afraid those are the first to be replaced by AI as their skills don’t extend beyond writing code, which is probably why they are screaming so much now.
Not even commissioned. You paid to ask Claude/Codex for an app.
Vibe coding isn't making things. It's outsourcing the creation to someone else.
If you say so. I want to paint, not spend all my time grinding pigments. I've already got some carpal tunnel!
Your example makes no sense. You aren't painting, you are merely asking a painter for a piece.
Look, you like AI, that's fine. But stop lying to yourself for fuck sakes.
Outsourcing coding to someone else is nothing new, especially not for senior developers. Most software is developed in teams anyway.
Been working for a little over 10 years, but coding for double that time.
Building things with LLMs is the closest I can get (perhaps even surpass?) the feeling I had as a kid, learning to code.
I feel rather sad that most (though luckily not all) of my friends despise AI, as I feel a (small, but relevant) part of the connective tissue we had is sort of gone. I'm in love with what I can do, I've re-gained the superpowers I had back in college (and even before that) and I can't really share that with them (and they can't really share their concerns and frustrations with me). In two weeks of vacation (actually: in 1 week of those) I finally got around to tackling 5 different projects I had in the back of my mind, mostly for fun (but one of them is genuinely generating some income as well) -- this is amazing, but I have actively avoided talking about this with them, bar sharing a link to some of the things (and even that I'm feeling some regret over)
It's so fun to tinker around with everything! Modding a game, revitalizing abandonware with custom patches, building a harness to know how it works or just...you know...building what is in my mind, whenever, wherever, without it taking foreeeveeeeeeer.
I used to think what I loved was coding, but I have really come to realize I liked both building and coding. The latter I haven't really done much of in more than a year and....it doesn't annoy me at all? I know for a fact I loved doing it, but I can't really say I _miss_ doing it? Maybe after 20 years it just wasn't the same? Maybe the rush from watching my mind materialize into real things so fast is camouflaging it? Who knows...
Not to mention that most everyone else in my surroundings outside of the tech bubble is doing amazing things with AI. Cool websites, music that moves me to tears, random fun games and just, in general, clearly managing to focus more on what they want, on their goals, on their imagination and less on their work. There are exceptions, but the trend is that AI has enabled them to do more of what they want and less of what they have to, and I love that.
I completely accept that, for some people, the fun is/was in coding by hand. And that it's terrible that they'll likely not be able to earn a living just doing that relatively soon. What I have difficulty accepting is the outright bashing and hating on everything AI-related (and, yes, I hate hype too, but have you LOOKED AROUND AND SEEN THIS NEW WORLD?!). I can sort of accept it based on ethical grounds, but very rarely is it actually that. I guess people are just venting and firing in all directions due to how much this has shaken their lives and livelihood (and that, indeed, I can understand).
Anyway, this world is AMAZING! I am 100% with you. Especially because I don't even type (to the agents) anymore. I just voice-to-text, with barely any filter. I've often described it as the closest I've ever felt to truly controlling the computer with my mind, because I don't have to slow down my thoughts to write them. Sort of incredibly liberating.
I'm still getting used to LLMs as tools. Even searching feels jarring, because they're very confident, yet provide no solid sources unless the harness searches for them. They're very useful, but make hard-to-catch mistakes that makes me distrust them. What scares me most is how they allow people who don't fully know what they're doing to deploy software, especially corporate software.
Unfortunately, LLMs have been shoved everywhere in a years-long desperate scramble to capture the market, so we might as well get used to them while the bubble pops and the winners cash their bets.
I agree a lot with this part
> What scares me most is how they allow people who don't fully know what they're doing to deploy software, especially corporate software.
Which is why I also think some people get such disparate experiences. If your organization is allowing clueless people to confidently throw stuff built by LLMs at mission-critical problems, that does seem more like an organizational problem than an LLM problem. (A related problem: the amount of people who keep shoving claude shit in front of us, thinking they've "edited" it enough to not sound like it came from it. I can spot it from a mile away and usually make myself loud about it if I have the power to stop it. AI is not an excuse for mediocrity.)
There's so much to hate about LLMs, and there's so much to love. And since we've sort of ended up in this world of constant false dichotomies, this kind of nuance gets lost in the trenches.
Of course LLMs in the wrong of clueless people are bad. Of course the way in which these models were trained is shameful and it's criminal that people are having their work stolen. Of course we need to find ways of dealing with slop. Of course it's bad for the environment at the moment (and so on). The list goes on and on, I know that.
But on either side of this debate (which SHOULD NOT HAVE TWO SIDES -- that's THE problem), people just tend to lump everything together. Your example is one some acquaintances repeatedly throw my way, and I'm left wondering if they have even thought that they're just showing me how broken their org is, not how bad the tech is? But, nope, they turn to me and go "AI bad bad"...
We're talking of a medium-size business, most of those are broken because budgets and manpower are limited. Even worse when their line of business is not subject to mandatory regulations.
We can't seriously expect medium-size businesses to become (and stay) unbroken without significant, continuous investment and effort. They will always be broken, and AI is the sprinkle of crack they didn't know they wanted.
This sounds less like someone who has rediscovered a passion for "building", and more like an addict who has discovered a magical button that serves their brain dopamine when pressed.
There's much more to “building” than just writing code.
>There's much more to “building” than just writing code.
Absolutely!
But is there much more to "building with AI" than chasing dopamine? I would say for many, the answer is no.
To each their own, I guess.
(I will say, though, the people around me I mentioned getting immense benefits from AI outside of tech are most definitely not addicted to it)
It's heavily biased by the circles I hang out in, but I'm seeing a loose correlation between how much people enjoy working with coding agents and their depth of experience. I've even seen people come out of retirement because this stuff is so much fun for them.
AI tools amplify existing coding experience, and reward management experience too. Engineers with a decade+ of experience are more likely to have been engineering leads or spent time in engineering management.
Related observation: Anthropic are developing a reputation for hiring former CTO/CEO/founders and putting them back to work as individual contributors.
I think it all comes down to whether or not they enjoyed coding in the first place.
For me it's mixed. There's aspects of coding I do enjoy but also there's tedium that I don't. What I don't like about vibe coding is it has turned me into just a code reviewer in a lot of cases.
I dare say review is often way more important than the act of laying down code.
I agree, it's just not particularly fun.
For me fun left the room around 2016, but I can relate.
Now it's just work. There's not a ton of pride in it.
This is how I feel. I do enjoy "vibe coding" significantly more at home on my own projects as there just aren't the same consequences I face at work if something goes left. I'm now working a place where there are only three or four of us in the code base and it still makes for some long days where it's mostly review. That part sucks. I can't imagine trying to keep my arms around a codebase at a larger shop in the current environment.
Yeah, that's the other part that's really hard. It seems really easy for the shape and layout of a codebase to change under your feet. It also ends up being hard to know exactly what is where and what it does. It makes it easy for the AI to recreate something that doesn't fit with the rest of the codebase. For example, I've seen LLMs generate code that completely ignored the built in tools for an existing code base and reinvented everything.
I have been coding professionally for 15 years, and while I like coding I was always more passionate about the product design side and the end result, be it business apps or video games, I like what it does, not specifically how it's done. Either at my small agency or for hobby projects not writing code by hand anymore is not a loss a for me, code is just a mean to an end. I get some people are more passionate about the tooling and the code itself, but it's not because someone doesn't share that it's not a real perspective.
I've been coding since the 1990s and I love vibe coding with sensible guardrails and code/design reviews.
(I am currently 18 so you have actually been coding since more than two times my whole lifetime so y'know there's that.)
I wish to ask you for some feedback and clarity and further concrete resources because I feel a little confused/lost regarding the whole vibe-coding situation, I wish to say thanks in general though as nonetheless your comment finally made me concretely express all the nuances brewing in my stomach about vibe-coding and how I often nowadays feel as if I may be falling behind if I don't know how to do it "accurately", I would love and really appreciate to get a more in-depth response if possible.
I have said the same thing as you have said as well sometimes if not mostly that AI is a tool which should be used sensibly (as I think that this is what you are intending to say as well)
Within the contexts of vibe-coding though, I would really appreciate it if you could explain to me in more depth about the whole process and workflow that you follow if possible and how much drastic change has that been in. I would love some concrete examples or repositories or just some pointers that I can help to improve myself further.
Here are some other thoughts that I have on the matter:
When you mean design review, are you just architecturing suggesting it the main architecture itself, for example. I mostly do "create me a golang web application which uses htmx/templ/modernc sqlite about XYZ" and then create a more detailed prompt from it which I then pass onto the agent to complete and give me a single binary at.
Most often than not though after this point, I haven't felt the need to change the architecture after the first initial setup and afterwards I point the changes that I wish to be done like "I want X1 Y1 Z1 changes" and if it breaks something then just showcasing what breaks, and taking feedback then "it just works"
The architecture sounds solid to me, I love golang as a language and I run multiple such apps on same 500mb/1gb ram servers and use cf tunnels in the middle.
For styling, I mostly prefer monospace-web theme because that's what I personally really like a lot but recently I found that giving first prototype to chatgpt and asking it to generate image then it can create a decent UI as well.
An example website that fits the pattern: https://mirror.forum
So what are the things which I should do though now? Should I attempt at reading the code and trying to understand it completely (I think that golang's mostly standardized method of doing things helps in reading AI code) or should I treat myself as thinking more about (seams?) or other technical terms that I found described within obra/superpowers or matt-pocock and other skill driven development oriented stuff.
Can I learn these stuff through AI itself as well and I wish to generate my own projects as well because I still believe that there's some joy in that as well as I find vibe-coding to be sometimes a bit hollow[1] [not sure though as the atmosphere has changed, earlier people used to be extremely critic of it whereas now more accepting]
I can be wrong, I usually am but what I am finding the most shocking is that although we are constantly seeing new tools and I try to be more well aware of them and always curious about it, yet I don't know at the same time where to actually proceed because the projects are just being built enough yet I don't know if I am doing standardized practices enough or how to really meaningfully improve such practice if vibe-coding is really such valuable then I would prefer to learn the more technical way of doing so and how experts within the field actually do vibe-coding.
Thanks and have a nice day and I would love to hear your/the community's response.
[0]: https://github.com/owickstrom/the-monospace-web
[1]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47264945
Greybeard coder here. There are two separate problems you get to solve. 1) If AI writes your code, you didn't learn anything about the code. 2) If you don't use AI, you won't learn how to use AI. You need to learn how stuff works and how to code well. And, you can't do that passively. If you didn't type it with your own fingers, you didn't learn it. And, that includes learning "How to use AI?"
You want to learn web dev? Start typing HTML and JS. You want to learn how to use AI? Start typing specs and prompts. You'll need to learn both. But, you can't learn web dev by typing specs and prompts.
You can learn using AI as a research assistant, a tutor, a reviewer, a critic. You can use it to bang out quick tools, prototypes, deal with the hassles that are not your focus at the moment. But, whatever you are trying to learn, you need to do the actual implementation manually. There is no such thing as passive learning.
Thank you for the response, I have a few questions that I would like to ask now as well which jumped on top of my head which I would like to ask though to get more clarity at the same time.
What is the exact learning of the topic that I have to do in it, for example. I can (and I will) learn webdev about valuable if vibecoding becomes the norm (as it is becoming nowadays)
Now I will learn the basics, then intermediate, then expert. Where exactly do you think that the value lies in?
ie. are the advantages put within getting from beginner -> intermediate or to complete beginner -> intermediate -> expert
Another thing is the level of fields that you have to be in or the whole question could perhaps be framed as being the jack of all trades or the master of one? Is this going to be like typing speed [90 wpm vs 130 wpm is somewhat negligible effect] or like chess [ 2100 vs 2400 isn't negligible and becomes exponentially harder when you become expert yet the difference will have genuine real impact maybe?]
Also within the process of vibe-coding, what is the actual value that I am adding given that I have learnt the skill, what I think might be is that I can actually verify if its good or not instead of asking a chatbot [which might be sycophantic or might miss the devil in the details], and say its okay.
Also, how do people naturally move away from the natural tendency to just... not read what AI is saying (when I tried obra/superpowers etc.), this video[0] tries to showcase what I am suggesting perhaps but I feel as if its still quite a slippery slope.
I hope that this question can be taken in good faith (because I like learning about CS for the sake of learning itself) but aside from that, why learn HTML/CSS is still a question that I can perhaps ask, similar to why learn assembly[1], and to what level, and will it help me in getting a job and if that helps in what I will actually do in job, and if so, then how? if the job done via vibe-coding as well. [I think this might tie to the previous questions that I have asked]
I do agree with the overall premise and learning can't be passive granted. Learning requires some form of active involvement which includes the phase of struggle (I think), yet that struggle is done for something meaningfully better and has a purpose. What AI does to many is question that purpose, why learn?
The issue I find which is why I am coming to this again and again is this, I am unable to find how the improvement within this corresponds to actual work/job or in actual terms how so.
Also, what happens if suppose the difference between an expert person with extreme knowledge and a normal~ish person is that it might take normal person is some more time/prompt/tokens to debug the issue with the models itself. Like it might take 2-3 more prompts to fix the issue.
I am finding people with varying opinions on how even the most expert people on some topic are agreeing that most AI can do it good enough already with vibe-coding, whereas some generalists who might not know the other language are porting their projects in it with vibe-coding.
In general, when approaching learning as well, I am not sure which to approach first: the thing which might be approachable (so for example: after HTML/CSS/Js Python, Django [thanks @simonw], golang's complicated full stack application)
and what if I might not like JS so much and python only enough but golang the most ideologically but my skill level still matches mostly python and its what I am most proficient in writing by hand?
I am personally going to go the learning path (the hard way?), I don't know if its the hard way or not but I wish to learn programming quite deeply even if just for the sake of itself and making my brain think about problems better
but my mind does still wonder if people on the other side could be right as well, does everyone need to learn deep ends of programming if programming becomes simpler or operates via just words, similar to how in previous times we used to have a lift operator and now we have all become a lift operator with the press of a button.
My opinion on vibe-coding has been this for quite sometime now: I do vibe-coding not for learning but for if/when the end results/prototypes matter more than the process but I absolutely DO NOT want to do vibe-coding if learning is the goal. before college, I didn't even have time to properly pursue the learning phase but I will now have the time and I will chose the learning path.
Also, when someone suggests that vibe-coding is all good if done right and alright when you do it this particular way or that particular way which causes my mind goes to this chain of thought and I feel a little confused.
As such, many of these thoughts float into my head when someone mentions this and it makes me wonder what should I do to achieve that and the other goal as you mentioned which was learning itself, it makes me question both sometimes if I am feeling p(doom). Learning as in, for all the reasons that I explained above and vibe-coding as in feeling shallow and hollow.
I am extremely sorry if I am being unable to succintly convey what I am trying to say and for the longer post. I really don't know how to express this particular thought because its all over the place. I hope that it's okay though and I might not have wasted the time and thanks for commenting and have a nice day.
[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZumXpZzDsgo
[1]: (although there are still good reasons to learn assembly imo, I recently vibe-coded/[vibe-forked?] a scratchpad application in assembly as a way of messing around with AI.): https://github.com/serJaimeLannister/rhunpad
It sounds like you're maybe in a bit of analysis paralysis, trying to find the optimal way to move forward. If you stay in that frame of mind, you'll spin your wheels for hours trying to find the best way to approach it, and then never actually approach anything.
My advice would be, as hard as it might seem, let yourself go slow and just do things. Spend a few weeks on webdev, or learning aseembly, or playing with AI. As long as you are engaged with whatever you're doing, that is enough. You will, via repeated exposure to smart people doing hard things, learn how to navigate and overcome all kinds of problems.
I actually disagree a little with the previous commenter about learning how to use AI. While that is useful, AI becomes second nature once you have been exposed to all these other things.
I write a lot of C++. A long time ago, I learned the basics of writing assembly. Even though I haven't written much assembly, it still helped me a lot over the years. I understand how it works. I can read the assembly output of my compiler and judge how well my C++ translates to machine actions. I can debug individual assembly instructions when stuff isn't going as planned or the C++ is not available.
I write a lot of high-performance code. To do that, I had to learn the details of how devices (drives/NICs/GPUs) work, how buses (PCI) works, how RAM, CPU caches, instruction pipelining work. Now I know how to structure data flow to work well with the machine instead of against it.
I write a lot of APIs. In doing that, I had to learn the hard way about how different API trade-offs drive client decisions. How to foresee problems in the future stemming from interfaces I'm writing now. How to argue with clients to get them what they need in the long term and not just want they want for the next milestone.
At all of these levels, I had to learn how each level works by doing it. By trying it lots of different ways. And, by optimizing it all the way down from "More productive client discussions" to "More performant assembly instructions" :P
Now whenever I do vibe-code, it's because I know exactly what I want and I can get AI to type it faster and with less RSI (carpal tunnel). Or, I know I want to prototype a few options rapidly before committing to implementing one design for realz. In neither of these cases am I telling the AI "Make it performant and easy to use." Because I know how I want to structure the code to make it performant. And, I know how to set up the API to make it easy to use. So, I'm telling the AI how to structure the data flow and how to set up the API. Because, if I didn't, I'd just be generating a big ball of noisy mud that's neat to gawk at, but has no long-term value.
So, what should you learn? You need to learn how the stuff you are interested in actually works under the hood by experimenting with it manually. Not just "Hey chat, make it work somehow..." You need to focus on architecture and systems thinking because otherwise you won't know how to prevent AI from holding your hand deep into a maze neither of you can escape from. And, you should be spending the majority of your tokens on step-by-step refactoring, never one-shotting. One-shotting is for AI tech demos. Not for learning or production.
Should dig up my slashdot 5 digit uid to placate your concerns, or just decide your opinion in regards to me is irrelevant? (Because it is.)
My uid was < 32768.
I've been programming for decades, and I do love vibe coding side-projects. I have a little pixel art / animation tool, a music composition tool, and a little video game builder that agents made for my kids. I haven't looked at a line of code. Instead, I've just focused on getting the UX and features that I want. I did guide it along the tech stack and general philosophy I wanted it to follow, though. I'm sure it's hot garbage, but for projects like this, it doesn't really matter, and it's been a lot of fun.
Would I want to build a business around products that are built this way? Not yet. I'm definitely not comfortable supporting a vibe coded heap of code in a production setting.
This is my approach now. I'm done with programming professionally, but all those ridiculous ideas for my own use I've had over the years? I've built most of them in the past year. I have no time or patience for doing it by hand any more. I used to love programming but I have other things I want to do now and I'm pretty burnt out on putting effort into my code after doing it for my job for nearly two decades.
That's a valid assessment, and a reminder why I keep using 4chan despite how awful it is.
I've been programming since I got a Commodore VIC-20 when I was seven years old.
I love AI coding because I can use it to automate all the parts that are not fun or that would take far, far too much time to implement by hand. It puts things within reach that would formerly be unthinkable without millions of dollars and a gigantic software development team.
I still also enjoy coding things by hand... interesting, original things.
The technology itself is also absolutely fascinating. I've followed AI research for a long time and played around with it a lot, but the incredible breakthroughs of the last 5-10 years have blown me away. I've been working through the math on attention layers and feel like I've almost got it, and it's genius. Very cool stuff.
(The companies behind marketing and scaling it are, to varying degrees, not cool, but the tech and science and math is.)
I've been coding since the 90s and I stopped coding by hand pretty much as soon as I could get away with it.
I guess the real question then is why were you programming since the 90s instead of getting yourself into a managerial position. After all, that's basically what you have to do with vibe coding; you tell the agents what they should do and specify requirements etc.
Managing humans is hard work. Team dynamics are complicated. Communication is uncertain. Relationships which have power imbalances can be fraught. People's lives get messy, and that leaks into their work. Performance is sometimes uneven, and you have to deal with it.
Robots are much easier.
I hard disagree. When you have a great team of humans to manage, you're basically unstoppable and the quality is top notch.
Your statement is all about you and the places you've worked, and has nothing to do with LLMs or humans.
Or in other words, people actually have agency. They have real opinions, emotions, unique perspectives, and what not, and a robot programmer is an intellectual sex doll, ready to confirm all your previously held beliefs were always /absolutely right/.
Hiring a team of humans to do my bidding would cost slightly more than the $100 claude subscription.
Also they have feelings and off time and stuff.
Yeah except agents don't get their feelings hurt when you tell them it's not right and to do it all over again. And the iteration loop is light years faster.
I grew up in the 1980s. My HackerNews account is 7 years old.
My first program was in BASIC on a Sinclair ZX Spectrum with 48K. I used to sit for hours typing "listings" from gaming magazines and save them on cassette tapes, like this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AuVBX5Iu18I
I love coding manually, and I love AI! This is the first time I've felt the same excitement about computing since the 1980s, when there were new computers and new platforms and new operating systems and new programming languages coming out almost every month.
I use AI where it makes sense, where a quick output matters more than the fact that I manually coded it, like map editors and other internal tools, or quick proof-of-concepts.
I used Codex to convert some of my old Visual Basic 6 apps and games and it was a joy to see them running again after so many decades. There was no way I was going to convert them manually since Microsoft abandoned VB.
> Boy look at all these six month old accounts
Bro with <500 karma in 10 years thinking he knows something
You're the middle of the bell curve meme :)
I generally have better things to do than argue with techbros. Not always, though.
Boy this thread is full of people with more experience, older bodies and older accounts than you telling you
???
bro ran out of tokens halfway through the comment
OK that was funny
My current take: at the moment, vibecoding is much fun as being IT manager.
YMMV, not so fun for me being human/robot proxy constantly, there is "review dilemma" with AI tools:
review everything AI does - getting burned out quickly
skip review what AI does - getting wake up call in a weekends' nights and getting burned out quickly as well
i found being an IT manager quite a bit more fun. at least i was working with people
the few years i was an IT manager i came to like the repeat offenders and those with chronic learned helplessness. they seemed like "regulars" and were all big personalities. often i wondered if they intentionally disabled bluetooth just to hang out for a few minutes
> vibecoding is much fun as being IT manager
I think part of the popularity is that it appeals to people who want to be managers but lack people skills.
Or even if we do have those skills, I still do t like when some moron comes by my cubicle to discuss some nonsense, job related or not. I’d rather be vibe coding at home.
I don't know if "fun" is the right word for me, but since AI coding has taken over nearly all of my individual hand coding (or augmented IDE suggestion coding), I find it much less satisfying to solve difficult problems with creative solutions. That always tickled a part of my programming brain, and I didn't realize how much I enjoyed that until I didn't do it anymore. Now, sure, I've broadened out to more systems-level thinking, but now the hard problems that I have generally aren't engineering problems, they're personnel problems, integration problems, planning/priority problems, and solving those usually means taking a deep breath and having a "conversation" with a senior manager, making an annoying business case, whatever else. There's much less satisfaction in that for me.
I've been programming for fun for decades, at work and at home. I have no desire to have someone or something else write my code for me. However, I've managed to convince ChatGPT that I like to be mentored in a way that allows me to build intuition instead of just having the answer given to me (or worse) the code to build it. I'm building something like AlphaZero in C in my own way without any third party libraries, going my own way, building it as I go along and discussing how it all works with the AI. I find this even more fun than just trying it on my own.
Agentic engineering feels like DevOps to me rather than coding.
I dislike DevOps because the feedback loop is quite long with DevOps and it's very declarative rather than imperative. Proper agentic engineering is like that; you don't actually build the thing with the agent, you build the things around the agent that's building the thing.
The skills, the MCP connections, the auth flows and handling, the CI, the deployment strategy, the code review, etc.
I think that's why it doesn't feel as "fun" if you are used to actual coding: long feedback loop from you creating/modifying the scaffolding to actually seeing it connect to an output. I liken it to waiting for CloudFormation to deploy your infra -- like watching paint dry.
Not really, I think this is an ADHD-adjacent thing. Say you have a hobby that could benefit from a 3D printer, and suddenly 3D printing becomes your hobby. Or you want to do some home improvement, and suddenly you’re focused on your workbench and tool rack instead of the home improvements.
When Amazon released Q, I too started building things around it, first rules, then MCP servers, then skills, then Claude Code workflows. Eventually, I was able to break this feedback loop: I have very few extras on top of Claude Code/Codex because there’s no point in competing with them on features.
The slowest part of my current feedback loop is CI.
Fantastic analogy. Bullseye.
Incorrect!
As a domain expert, I spent all my time learning my scientific niche, and only a small bit on practical coding. Now I can manifest the ideas I formerly needed to hire developers for. WAY more fun.
Yep. Now you get to focus on actually solving the problems at hand rather than messing around typing thousands of loc of irrelevant boilerplate to get something to work.
It sounds like you never enjoyed coding.
If the discussion was "Sitting in a submarine is not as fun as scuba-diving", I would recognize the conversation is not about me, and not jump in and tell all of the recreational scuba-divers they're wrong.
it's 2026. people can't understand when things aren't for them. they will see a french onion soup recipe and comment "any dairy and onion free version?"
A recipe option is nowhere near the same thing as what happened in the parent tree.
also, the submarine is a little scary to pressure test, created using the dive fast and break things model. :)
>It sounds like you never enjoyed coding.
Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding? People enjoy trying new things and building new products, and coding isn't the goal, it's just the tool you use use to get to your goal. If now you can build things without you doing the coding part, then why is that bad?
I think this berating of people who don't enjoy coding is cope and bile by coders who feel being left behind by an industry who only values the end product and doesn't care about their idealist craft for the code, but this always had been the case. People bought Half-Life because the game was good, not because the code was written with enjoyment by the devs(Valve source code is full of swear words).
There's plenty of products with shit code that sell well, and plenty of products with good code that don't sell and bankrupt the company. The end-product is king, not the code. Did Steve Jobs just care about the end product UX or about how nice the code inside was?
> Yes. Who says people must enjoy coding?
Nobody. But if you never enjoyed coding then the post about enjoying coding clearly isn't for you?
>Nobody.
GGP was being judgemental on people not enjoy coding, which means for him the default status quo is that one has to enjoy coding, therefore my assessment was correct.
> Who says people must enjoy coding?
Nobody. But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind. I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code. The sense of accomplishment is gone.
Nobody can ever stop you from creating "works of art" in code. But they might stop paying you for it.
But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right? I'm planning to leave the industry once my role at this company is up. The fun is gone now and I don't want to do the new form of the job.
Yes, you don't need anyone's permission to be sad.
I enjoy the act of coding, but my ambition to create almost always exceeded my ability and the number of hours in the day. So the transition from coder (and sometimes manager) to agent orchestrator has been fairly positive.
It's not necessarily easy or pleasant to evolve, but that's life.
>It's not necessarily easy or pleasant to evolve, but that's life.
Nothing about this is "natural". It's all because a handful of people made the decisions in order to make money, and we're all collateral.
>But we can still be sad that we can't get paid to do something we enjoy anymore, right?
How does being sad help anyone?
What?
There is a huge skill gap arising in using LLMs. You have some people (like me) who are able to direct LLMs and get them to produce (nearly) perfect code, while there's others who can't even get them to make a CRUD website without exploding.
>There is a huge skill gap arising in using LLMs.
Yeah, i've seen this when others shown. We're no longer in the days when you just copy and paste code snippets in the browser window, nor just dump and entire codebase in the harness and letting it rip, there's an entire new skill tree on how to use each model and harness correctly for maximum gains and bypassing various context hiccups.
>You have some people (like me) who are able to direct LLMs and get them to produce (nearly) perfect code, while there's others who can't even get them to make a CRUD website without exploding.
Well it seems unfair to compare anyone to your brilliance.
>Nobody.
Didn't you just accuse someone above of not enjoying coding as if that's somehow a must?
>But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
Nobody here is saying that. People are saying whether you enjoy coding or not, doesn't matter for the end product if it does the job just as well. When people buy an iPhone, a pair of Nikes, or some other China made nicknack off Amazon, they don't care if the factory workers who assembled it enjoyed their time on the assembly line making stuff for you, or if they're sweatshop workers assembling your stuff in absolute pain and misery, they care if the end product in their hand satisfies them.
>I really like understanding what I'm building and creating works of art in code.
Is passionate code something customers are willing to pay a premium for versus the AI written one, or do customers only care about the end product and nobody gives a shit if it was vibecoded or whether you poured your soul in the code?
>> >But everyone is saying that I must stop coding by hand or get left behind.
> Nobody here is saying that.
To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
>To be fair, I've definitely seen that said multiple times on HN, even if not in this particular thread.
To be fair, after talking to AI devs on the frontline at a local meetup, I learned that models, agents and harnesses have so many edge cases, traps and footguns, that aren't really well documented anywhere, especially visible on large codebases, that you really need to stay up to date to keep up and squeeze the best out of each model for your intended use case.
people actually are saying if you keep coding by hand you will be left behind
my CEO said it publicly to all engineers
he still pays me for my handwritten code tho. luckily it's easy to pretend you like AI and know by lying since it has basically no skill curve.
and then just carry on doing a good job the old way.
>people actually are saying if you keep coding by hand you will be left behind
"People" say a lot of things, I can only reply to comments said here, not to vague words by anonymous people from the ether.
>my CEO said it publicly to all engineers
Good think your CEO speaks for everyone in the industry.
I think what he means is that he's afraid for his company being beaten by competitors who will overtake you if they use AI but you don't.
Fun is a weird thing to measure, it's often tied to things we don't instrument properly and/or account for poorly.
For me, personally, I have learned that fun is often more correlated with social connection and sharing than it is with subjective perception or gratification of the task at hand if removing the social element.
The most fun I had in life was when I had great teams, great people, and great challenges to share both the growth and struggles with. The rest, like what tooling we used, was optional and easy to misjudge as important at the time. Looking back I rarely recall the experience of using certain tooling over another, and often remember the people and the stories.
For me, a big part of it is there is something about the formal structure of a programming language that is very satisfying to me. Same thing with math. There is something about the precision, and the constraints. Writing natural language prompts just isn't the same.
I think there’s a difference in vibe coding and what I call accelerated software construction.
Vibe coding is like a last second weekend trip to Paris.
Accelerated software construction is like planning a four week backpacking trip through Western Europe.
I’m a grey beard so I’m on the far side of “writing code is fun” but I get it. I used to love those ah-ha moments when solving coding problems.
But now I love delivering solutions to the business or creating software that works as I envisioned it and those two things are fun in very different ways.
I've programmed for decades. Vibe coding is more fun than writing boilerplate just to kick off a small project these days.
The days of:
10 PRINT "Hello World!"; 20 GOTO 10
Are long gone.
I've seen boilerplate be brought up as an argument very frequently and I keep wondering, what sort of boilerplate do you deal with that it is a considerable time sink? I feel like most languages and frontend frameworks have a pretty established template project which gets you going as far as boilerplate goes. When it comes to backend it's more of the same. When it comes to gamedev, you have established game engines which cut down on the boilerplate process. If you are writing your own engine in something like Vulkan which require a lot of pre-game ritual, there are still plenty of template projects to get you started, but they are more surface level than the frontend/backend examples due to the nature of the project. If you are working on popular hardware, like arduinos, esp32s, there are established template projects for most languages. And if you are working on a niche language or framework for which this doesn't apply, then roughly by the second project in them you'll find yourself just copying over the boilerplate from the first.
So I'm genuinely curious, what sort of things do people who complain about boilerplate ceremonies do?
Exactly. When people bring up the boilerplate argument, my first question is "Why hadn't you abstracted that away already?"
as somebody who does now do 95% of my coding without typing, I wonder the same thing. I've also seen that thrown around and I keep wondering who these people are who are spending so much time and/or effort on boilerplate to the point where they see that as the biggest benefit (??)
It depends on what you consider boilerplate. Unity, Godot, or Unreal cut down on "boilerplate" for alot of things, but they also leave a lot to the developer unless you are aiming for an asset flip.
For me, boilerplate isn't scaffolding out getters and setters, or deferring to templated code generation; using refactoring tools that have been baked into IDEs or third party tools have been available for about 20 years deal with all of those nicely.
On the other hand, the "boilerplate" to stand up a secure web service with appropriate monitoring and scaling capabilities is a fair bit of work when you know that the immediate first users are enterprise businesses.
Building a service that meets or exceeds industry compliance requirements (internal or otherwise) is a lot of work! My harness, skills, and SOPs are set up such that if I spin up a new web-dev project, it gets all of the accessibility, internationalization, observability, authentication and authorization capabilities I would expect, appropriate to the tier. There is a lot of work done to build and implement those at the front end of a project, which I could skip over for experimentation, but for actual, deliverable work, it is a huge accellerator. In addition, by having that scaffolding and boilerplate in place, and a few skills and SOPs to support future feature growth, the agentic coding tools build with them in mind, and wire everything up as they go.
It doesn't replace the need to do the testing and validation, but it sure does break me out of the cycle of "fuck it ship" that takes over when I have my developer hat on, and the "holy shit, burn it all down and start over" that takes over when I put my security engineer hat back on.
shrug YMMV.
99% of most projects is boilerplate. For instance let's say I'm making a video game and I want to add multiplayer. Well, most of the networking code is going to deal with deciding what protocol I will be using (UDP likely) what the packets are going to look like (basically just pushing simple data frames over the wire) and then messing around with writing a UDP reactor (probably epoll backed) to actually get my game to run. This _essentially_ is pointless boilerplate, because you need to mess around with looking up kernel intricacies, how you're supposed to wrangle UDP packets, what the kernel expects what some pointless spec written 50 years ago says (oh no if a UDP packet arrives while the other end has closed connection according to RFC whatever you MUST(!!!!) stop reading otherwise UB occurs). If you want to ignore all this now you need to find some library, hoping it work (it won't) and trying to wrestle it to work in your engine. I do _not_ care about any of this. What I do care about is how my multiplayer game is going to run, how players are going to interact with each other etc. LLMs allow you to focus on that.
I think that's half true because there is a lot of great technology that exists today where you can get anything done without any of the boilerplate. A very brief example is the .NET ecosystem where I get a lot of work done in asp.net and winforms in a pleasant way.
Bad example. Even the prompt for that would be longer than the code itself.
That is terribly reductionist.
giving that code as a prompt to Claude yields:
Worked for 5s · done 8:30 AM
Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World Hello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello WorldHello World ^C Break in 10 Ready.Still looping. Anything you'd like me to do for real?
After that, I gave it a second instruction: create a GW-basic interpreter in python
It's 5 characters longer, and gives me the interpreter I need to run the basic code (actually not - I had to change the Basic code to have a second line for the loop in GW-Basic; I should have used a more recent basic, but I actually wrote a GW-Basic interpreter many years ago).
"Hello World BASIC" ?
"H. W. BASIC" seems to work too if you want to golf it ;)
Tried it in a incognito tab with ChatGPT and "H. W. BASIC" did not work while "BASIC" had it explain the history and show an example of Hello World
Yeah of course the result is a bit random by nature, probably we should define a threshold of success rate when we make prompt golfing an official sport. It worked on first try with claude.ai
Double edged sword. I started programming in the 90s as a teenager, it was always fun for me to code. Several toy projects on GitHub, later studied CS and became a professional dev of course.
I started a small one-man SaaS in 2022 that I coded by hand, and have gradually adopted AI usage. I don't write a single line of code anymore today, and my speed/performance has supercharged in the last 6-12months. The fun of coding is completely gone, but replaced with me being able to deliver what I need to grow the product (from dev, to design and marketing work).
Not even close. But I can say that for grunt work, it's a dream come true. I was just telling my wife the "high" or "flow state" I used to get in is more or less MIA with letting the AI loose. I've started to just do the stuff I enjoy by hand—front-end design, challenging/interesting back-end stuff—and let the AI do the other stuff that I'm either too lazy or too disinterested in doing.
Honestly, it's quite nice. I wish more people would take a less-binary approach to this stuff. It doesn't have to be all or nothing. It's just a tool. Like any tool, you can apply it selectively. It sounds like a lot of companies have hand-waved this away as being an anachronism, but I'd argue that's the most foolish way to deploy AI. Trying to augment juniors into seniors with it, too, is just showing how many people haven't the slightest clue what they're doing with it.
It feels to me like what I imagine it world be to transition from developer to a development manager. I like getting the product but the enjoyment of solving the challenges is missing
It's being able to produce the output that formerly took a team of people, without needing to deal with the drama and politics of mananging a team of people.
Personal Context: For our personal ClockStack[0] project, I have decided that I will NOT read code at all. Though at high level, I do decide the architecture, dependency libraries etc. Sometimes even telling database schema. That's it. No code reading. Even ask AI how you implemented is enough. And going for prod/live just by chatting with AI is totally fun. Background: I wanted to do this ~5 years back and read almost 500 pages of H.264/RTMP spec/documentation. Even got valid non-compressing video encoding working in Golang. Then priorities changed. Now with the power of AI: Live within a week. I will absolutely call it vibe coding. It is totally fun.
[0] https://www.youtube.com/@TheClockStack/streams
To me, coding is very similar to modern agriculture. Some people enjoy growing their own fruits and vegetables even though it takes significantly more time than buying stuff from the store. Personally I care more about the end result than the process so I do a lot of vibe coding.
Tell me about the end result you enjoy instead of growing your own food because I somehow suspect it’s premade slop from TJ’s microwaved and eating out. I would not be bragging about that!
Top 5 side projects that I enjoyed doing without having the requisite knowledge:
At work, I don't vibe code and I need to understand any proposed changes. Where I do like the vibe coding are small annoyances that I don't want to make time to learn everything APIs that I'm unlikely to use again. If they stop working tomorrow, no big deal.The industrial revolution comes for everyone eventually.
Tell me, do you wear handmade shoes?
I had fun writing code when I felt I'm growing from it or that it facilitates my knowledge and unique experience. The parts that I felt could as well be written by a robot were so hard I would miss deadlines unable to force myself to do them. For a brief period in 2025 we were in the happy spot when robots were good enough to do the robot thing and I could focus on the interesting parts. But now they are good enough for everything and it's depressing. I can still contribute meaningfully to the overall system and product design, but it seems we are couple of major modle releases away from that being no longer possible either.
For me it really depends whether I'm happy with the result. The code base I work on is such a complex mess, AI often gets lost and I am not able to sufficiently scope the problem and foresee all the subtleties I don't actively remember. That often leads to agents loosing the plot and writing horrendous code. Trying to debug that and steering the agent back is not fun. But if I can avoid that, keep things small and isolated, so it just allows me to get things done more quickly, it can be a lot more fun. I miss the flow state though, with ai i'm way more distracted and feel a lot less productive after a days work.
I was vibe coding algorithms for research for months, enjoying it. Had to move it into production, doing normal cs work. Disliked it. Began to understand the point of this article. Reviewing, testing, arguing with other dev's is painful.
Oops, that’s the only way to make software that’s reliable and usable by others.
I don't know. AI is certainly the cause of a lot of anxiety for me about the profession as well as society and the world at large. I also enjoyed my job quite a bit when I had to/could write all the code by hand. I'd been doing it for a few decades, and don't appreciate that the future of this path is now in question. For these reasons, if I had a lever to make it so LLMs never happened, I'd probably pull it.
That being said, similar to OP, I've used AI to create some things I've been thinking about for a long time, and realistically might never have gotten to otherwise. One of them is an app to wean off of Blue Apron for meal prep: it has a (high-quality) scraped database of a few thousand recipes, it works and looks just the way I wanted it to, and it has a lot of functionality I haven't seen anywhere else, that I came up with over time. This morning, I had a feature idea, and before heading out for some errands I outlined its system design to the AI. It wrote a spec, got it reviewed, and built a v1 before I came back home. That's a lot of fun, for me, too: to be able to mostly focus on the higher-level design of a system, and still get where you want to go.
It's not a strict binary. I can write the parts of the code that I find interesting and shove the parts I don't want to write onto the model.
True and only when you own the entire project, you can do whatever you want. Most codebases are shared and it sucks to be forced to look at slop.
Excellent write-up. This reminds me of a quote from "Dialektik der Aufklärung." (My English translation below)
"Die Menschen bezahlen die Vermehrung ihrer macht, mit der Entfremdung von dem, worüber sie die Macht ausüben."
"People pay for the multiplying of their power with the alienation from that which they exercise their power over."
Paradoxically, AI enables workers to feel more connected to the fruits of their labor by reducing their need to specialize; they are now able to field adjacent tasks.
It's fun when you find an actual new boundary and capability that you wanted to build, and the abstraction is clean, and then you materialize it into existence.
It's awful when the boundary breaks down. It might just be inherit to the loop (no mind readers) but I will walk away from an AI task for 30 minutes and all too frequently there will be insane code smells.
I've been doing a thing where I will have "integration" projects between many different subsystems to demonstrate some capability, test it, then destroy the integration folder, folding back what we learned into the subsystems themselves. So far this has been OK for learning and it incentivizes the AI to not throw garbage everywhere. Of course, this assumes you get subsystems right but it prevents direct reaching into them and modifying excessively - try to do the most you can with fixed interfaces, etc.
riding horses is many ways way more fun than driving a car (earliest form of self driving!!!); but I'd never consider riding as a real form of transportation
it's fine to keep riding though as long as you're having fun!! but it will definitely get worse and worse as a form of transportation
(this is true for hand coding too)
I completely agree. I am still writing code by hand because I find it enjoyable and almost therapeutic.
Writing code by hand, for your employer, isn’t what most people consider “fun”, anyways
The entire process of the ups and downs is such a human experience for all sorts of work. The ups and downs are kinda removed when a ton of that friction is removed.
Can think of almost any task, and there is that likelihood for some small issue to arise, and the person has to adjust to it. Ai for coding, now you just kinda say "i hit this issue", and its usually resolved, this removes the friction that feeds the feeling of accomplishment once you complete something.
But i do think, there is of course a separation of work and play, many modern video games are amazing at the dopamine style rollercoaster it seems like this article is hinting at missing. So i totally get it for personal projects, if its no longer fun because the dopamine roller coaster is dead, it kinda kills it for a lot of people. For work I don't know if it NEEDS to be there at all, ideally less friction makes for more work getting done, even if its less pleasant for the human involved.
I couldn't see myself continuing playing a game if all the happy dopamine was front loaded into the first 10 minutes.
Can't relate. The whole point is to build products and drive value for the customer. It was never to enjoy writing the code. Writing the code was actually the easy part.
There's one thing I struggle to understand when I read posts like this: who is forcing these people to vibe code their side projects? If you want to hand-code because you enjoy it, what is stopping you?
I understand that the work we get paid to do exists in an entirely different context. Capitalism will always push for doing more with less. When you're on the clock, the rules are different.
But if you love coding. By all means, code. What's stopping you?
Also, I think we need to update our terminology. "Vibe coding" served its purpose and still defines a subset of how people are creating software. But I feel that working with coding agents, carefully orchestrated by skilled developers, deserves a term less dismissive than "vibe coding".
To me, vibe coding is pulling the arm of the slot machine until something good comes out. Yeah, that can honestly be a lot of fun. But working with these tools to create code that is as good as, if not better than what you'd write yourself, that's something else entirely. I think we flatten the nuance of this whole crazy situation we find ourselves in when we conflate the two.
Agentic coding is the term I’ve been using.
Vibe coding means you have no idea how the code looks or works or the architecture. Agentic coding is the same as regular coding, just you had an agent do most of the typing.
I personally really really don’t like working on a code base where I have no idea what the code is actually doing or looks like and I find even the best models eventually start tripping up on messy bloated code bases, though that takes months now vs days like a year ago. I think we’re still early days in the vibe coding experiment and as vibe coded products push into 50k LOC, you start to see the parasitic drag caused by a messy code base on the agents.
I absolutely love the speed that agents give me!
So what I’ve been doing is working myself in a main branch where I’m just tending to the code and writing high level types and architecture, then spinning up agents into work trees and having them work on specific, focused tasks. Then I get and agent to do a merge into the main branch, fix up conflicts, help me go over design decisions etc.
So it’s trying to get the best of both worlds, I’m getting the speed and also my head is in the code and working on the most challenging / important aspects of the code base so my actual technical skills are always improving.
It isn't as fun for those projects that can be written by hand ;)
There are tons of projects that were economically infeasible to write, and now become feasible. Something that needed lots of human time but almost no one wanted to sacrifice anything, including money, to get them. But now we have LLM subscription in which per token cost is almost free.
They are fun to create and use.
can you name such a project that requires LLM only?
also would you fly on a plane with vibecoded software?
I'm really enjoying dusting off old projects that I lost interest in and handing them over to Claude to modernize their code and resurrect the ideas. But I'm also starting to miss the grind and feeling of accomplishment when you build stuff yourself, or finally sort out that nagging bug. I think there is a balance to be found, for me anyway, and I'm not sure I've found it yet.
Personally I also liked writing assembly code for hot loops. It just doesn’t make sense anymore except in some rare 1% case.
I think you should split the difference and use vibe coding for the parts you don't care about.
Example, the UI for his two vibe coded example apps. Why not let AI do a single pass on that? 30s for a huge improvement. Other than the personal pride of saying you did it all, I don't see why not.
Making food in the microwave isn’t as fun as cooking by hand.
The comparison misses the utilitarian aspect.
that's strange, for me it is the coolest thing in the world. but I always had a love-hate relationship with with programming which always felt dirty compared to math. AI just feels so incredibly empowering (and removed the slow drag). You still get the joy of designing systems, trying out new ideas and potentially conquering the world.
Vibecoding is intellectual Viagra for the feeble-minded.
I don't get it.
I've been a developer for 40 years now. Over that time period - I've had a lot of ideas that were great but were simply too difficult for me to execute on my own.
Today I am executing all of them and it feels amazing to see all these beautiful things come to life.
I understand that some people really really really liked coding by hand. More power to them. I just don't understand why they're so angry at me because I prefer the final product.
EDIT: And I get an anonymous downvote within 30 seconds. I don't get it.
It isn’t about valuing the final product. If you really cared about it, the code would not have stopped you doing it by hand.
In my experience, people like programming with agents because they are lazy or bad programmers (or both).
> In my experience, people like programming with agents because they are lazy or bad programmers (or both).
When you get a little older, you might find that you too have more commitments and desires than you have time to complete.
(see, I can be mean too!)
It's not even about having a real life. Agents objectively code insanely fast and produce more and better code than I could have if I devoted all of my time to it. (When used correctly.)
I get that people really hate AI - but they're being incredibly irrational about it. Baby with the bathwater stuff. It's creepy.
> Agents objectively code insanely fast and produce more and better code than I could have if I devoted all of my time to it.
Then you aren't a very good programmer, because LLMs produce worse code than the typical programmer does. They can produce more, certainly. But generating bad code faster isn't actually useful.
> But generating bad code faster isn't actually useful.
Tell that to every successful business.
Code that exists is very frequently better than code that doesn't.
Well - more importantly - with the absurd speed you can iterate insanely fast. It's amazing what you can do when you throw 1000 average programmers at a problem.
People who don't use coding agents really should stop making fools of themselves. It's painful to watch.
> because LLMs produce worse code than the typical
I'm not so sure that's true anymore.
But regardless - no one uses just one coding agent. It's a series of agents - a group to plan the work - coders to implement it - and then agents to review the work. Overall it comes out better than human code.
Here - let's test it - give me your GitHub and we can compare your code to theirs.
> Then you aren't a very good programmer
Ohh.... my sweet summer child...
"If you really cared about it, the code would not have stopped you doing it by hand." This is insane to me. So you have unlimited time?
You seem to be of the belief that all AI output is slop.
May I humbly suggest you might be mistaken?
It's trained on massive amounts of public code, so its output is (at best) average-- like the code it was trained on. My issue isn't really the output itself, but the mindset that accepts average output as good enough. People who make that choice will keep producing below-average software, and that's what the rest of us will have to live with.
You're being silly. With an appropriate dev pipeline it comes out quite nice. A team of agents to design and plan the implementation - a team of coders - and a team of reviewers after the fact.
Here, let's test it. Give me some of your code (GitHub is fine) and we can compare.
Wrong. What you call "vibecoding" is in fact metaprogramming, or essentially the art of writing programs that write programs. Yes, the medium of exchange is common text (or ideas in their purest forms) which may seem different from traditional programming but is no different from typing in Rust or C++ syntax. The reason a large chunk of HN purists _detest_ it is due to them not being able to gatekeep development anymore behind obscure syntax rules or forcing developers to memorize irrelevant programming constructs. And before I get called out, I've effectively memorized the entire C++ standard going back however many revisions, and yes, I can confirm that it's a complete waste of time. LLMs (today, in their current forms) can understand and emit code far better than _any_ human developer. Amortized for time? It's not even close. With half of the tools I've built I've stopped counting my code generation in locs and switched over to KB of code per day. Far more informative at this point.
Watching someone play videogames is not as fun as playing the said game yourself.
Then why do esports, speedrunning, and Twitch exist?
There are two camps in this industry and I have the chance to meet both.
- There are those for whom coding is a hobby, an art project, an identity. These are the people who debate tabs vs spaces or use Vim.
- There are those for whom coding is a way to build things. Their dopamine comes from the end product and seeing people use it. They couldn't care less about tabs vs spaces.
I'm in the second camp. Vibe coding has removed all the shitty parts of coding. Like I hate figuring out how to do this esoteric thing in this library. Wading through docs and hitting the CI constantly - its a pain. Not fun.
Agree ! Writing code by hand becoming a thing of the past unfortunately !
Vibe coding is fun when you catch a good vibe and the AI seems to magically one shot things you’re thinking about almost perfectly.
Unfortunately it also means that whatever you’re asking for has likely already been thoroughly done and explored before and is nothing novel.
> "Whatever you’re asking for has likely already been thoroughly done and explored before and is nothing novel."
This.
idk man it really looks like an opinion i disagree with. had more fun vibecoding 10 projects last month than writing html tables manually 3 years ago on the same projects
You want to have fun at work? What is that?
It feels like pulling and building someone else's code. It just happens to be *exactly* what you're looking for.
This is the best way I can describe how I feel about it.
When the software output is the _goal_, it's a lot less rewarding. When it's not, it's fine I guess. I'd still feel better if I had it done it myself but it's fine.
Writing code is fun for me in a mechanical way - it is very satisfying to edit my lisp expressions in Vim (gasp not emacs)
I'm sure some people thought that it was the same for type writers. Indeed even today some writers prefer a type writer or even pen and paper (quill perhaps?)
But for many cases the quality of life that successive innovation brought outweigh the mechanical joy involved in the creative process. And when the endeavour is a commercial one the argument gets a little harder to justify...
I'm sure people can see how producing text without delete or copy and paste or easy versioning/duplicating makes life harder...
Well, irrespective, this is the work now. Your choices are:
1. find the fun in it
2. tolerate the boredom
3. find something else to do with your life
It depends on the goal. Right now, one thing I definitely wouldn't want to do is write js bullshit by hand - absolutely not.
But if we are talking about personal projects where the aim is to learn complex interesting things, then of course writing code by hand is the only way to actually learn.
I guess antirez agrees with this as well[0].
[0]: https://x.com/antirez/status/2105569301944238403
> Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand
I agree.
I miss hitting states of flow that lasted all day where I would just drop into a mental black hole and emerge on the other side with work I usually felt a large amount of personal pride from, where I was primarily the creator rather than a babysitter.
People talk about how LLMs take away the tedium of writing boilerplate code and it just makes me wonder how/why they were writing enough boilerplate code into the mid-2020s for that to be a significant help.
I do use LLMs because they are undeniably productivity-enhancing for producing most code and I'm ultimately a laborer selling my time for money, but I feel like a lot of the fun and accomplishment has been stripped from the job I've been doing for decades.
If I were comfortably financially independent I'd probably just code for fun without LLMs and be much happier, but It Is What It Is.
If you can’t code it is
Creators vs. Coders.
Counterpoint: Writing code by hand isn't as fun as vibecoding
I think this is cope. I'm sorry to be so harsh, and the author is entitled to their opinions on what is fun, but I think a lot of the "LLMs are not fun" discourse is motivated reasoning.
We can no longer deny that LLMs are useful for coding, so we now move on to the only remaining and defensible goalpost: I don't use LLMs because I don't want to. To be clear, this is a perfectly fine position and I hold no ill will against anybody holding it, but I don't think one gets to this conclusion naturally. It comes first from a lifetime of writing software, like I and many others have experienced.
And for what it's worth, I always had more fun planning what I was going to build rather than handling the brass tax of implementation. The specifics of problem and solution are always what interested me more than writing each character, and LLMs allow for me to do just this, and nothing else. Not a bad deal!
Again, my apologies for being such an insufferable asshole that I came here and told you what you ought to like. This is my opinion, based solely on my experience, and I might be wrong.
Don't think this is an offensive position and don't think you're telling people what they ought to like; like author you're expressing your opinion
I don't think "cope" is the right word for it. I totally agree with the author that it's not as much fun now. But that isn't an argument against using AI tools to write code. I'm a professional. It's certainly nice if my professional work is fun, but it just ... might not be.
I have definitely been finding more joy in other parts of the job though, which is also good. But I definitely used to have a lot more fun writing and editing a lot of lines of code than what I do now, which is mostly reading and reviewing them.
I mean, if you're just going to come in and say that the person is lying (or, charitably, deluded), there's really no point in having a conversation.
I think we should be able to disagree without going there.
I don't think that this person is lying, and your interpreting of my comment that way is taking the worst version of the argument.
Not just not as fun, it isn't as effective either. The AI proponents who claim LLMs can write code better than a human are only kidding themselves.
Laughed loud at the “you are absolutely right!” While diving in!
But in my opinion it depends, if you are just generally vibe coding you will get that, but if you know what you are doing and precisely direct it to what you want, you get amazing results. I feel a lot of developers hate it because it requires leadership skills and shuffling multiple task at the same time with a strong long term vision, which none of that is needed when you are doing the code manually, simply because time is in your favor, say in 2 years you reached the point that you would get in 2 weeks by LLM, you have had enough time to revise your goals (hence the whole agile approach was a thing back then), with LLM tho, you need all that thoughts compacted and very well planned before you even write a single code (it’s why agile is dead, and waterfall with specs planning is back again), having the specs and blueprint and all the little details even the library to be used is also documented and planned, then you fire up the LLM, that’s what I do and it works perfectly.
One of my projects is creating a direct manipulation user interface. It's been a blast.
For most other (maintenance work) projects, not so much.
Meh. I'd much rather AI write the boring boilerplate bits so that I can focus on the fun stuff
Edit: Or the bits I don't want to learn about because I'll literally use it once and never again
vibe coding for personal projects is a power tool. If I'm creating a 4x game for fun, id like to write core logic myself, but figuring out why drop-down lists stopped opening after a unity upgrade or why the animation is glitching sometimes is something ai can do.
For work projects, if fun was the goal you wouldn't be paid to do it :)
I predict we are less than 12 months away from the pendulum swinging back to hand coding but dragging ai pair programming into the workflow. This is why I don’t worry too much about this.
I can predict this because I’m building such a thing for myself as are many others. It seems to be where the tao of slop is going.
Not a chance.
For your personal projects or as a hobby, absolutely. But in a professional setting, coding by hand gone forever.
At work I've spent the last few weeks building a big feature that involves streaming the output of a 3D engine to a web client and wiring in HID from the client back to the engine. Basically, it's a simplified version of Google Stadia.
I've written >90% this code by hand.
Please tell me about the companies that are seeing productivity gains from LLM usage, seriously, who’s software is getting better?
I’m doubtful. I’ve seen increasing hands-off work where bots are now replying on PRs, tickets, and even DMs!
I'm not trying to be rude. Is this new to you? I've had all of this plugged in myself for all of 2026 (at least). The LLMs use of APIs shouldn't be surprising once you see decent ones in action in general. I'm not sure how this would impact my thoughts on whether the pendulum will swing one way or not.
This is new to me (last 6 months or so). What I’m observing is people growing lazy. I think it will take a while for it to swing back because momentum is still in the wrong direction.
Yeah, reality is this fall/winter is when we start seeing the shift from "engineer guides claude on their laptop" to "PMs write tickets and everything else is hands off until pressing the merge button".
I actually agree with what you said! the subscriptions we are paying today is only a tiny fraction of what it actually cost AI companies like Claude and Codex. either it will shift into running those agents in your own setup or pay an absurred number. anyways as you said the pendulum will swing back for sure!
The ship has sailed. For personal use, maybe, but supply and demand are going to dictate that there is going to be a massive ramp in memory and compute production, and when the prices inevitably normalize due to the increase of availability, there will be a push to use local inference. It goes back and forth, and unless there is a strong roadblock put in place, the current generation of models are already powerful enough that incremental improvements in the run up to increased hardware availability will mean that these tools are here to stay. Even if draconian laws were put into place, the prevalence and availability of open models and the tools to train them means you can't put the genie back in the bottle.
Definitely not. Look at what Deepseek costs. AI companies spend a fraction on inference, it is not expensive for them to run these models like it is to train them. Coding by hand is not coming back.
Large enterprises are paying unsubsidized metered rates. I work at a firm with around 700 employees. The p90 engineer is spending $2k/wk.
Our business-side employees have only begun using agents, and their spending accelerating. They're claiming their ROI is massively positive and have an enormous willing to spend.
Prices will probably go down because of the emerging price war between Anthropic and OpenAI, but there are many firms willing to spend.
I’ll take that bet up to all the money in the known universe.
Yeah I could see this...folding claude code cli into the copilot-style experience could be good.
I really love my horse and carriage over that really fast car that gets someone from point A to point B with 100x speed, said the Amish with a heart full of honesty, and he was subjectively right.
Your analogy and sarcasm reminded me of Ezekiel in Sex Drive
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AKKGpZyWj3M
Nobody is going to pay you to write code by hand when an agent can do the job faster and most likely better.
“Most likely better” is carrying a lot here. Risk matters to my customers and having a 1% chance of erasing a production DB or inserting a typo squatting malicious dependency that exfiltrates and enables ransomware is not acceptable for those customers. They don’t care how you built it, but they do care that you know how it’s really built which is antithetical to vibe coding. Vibe coders can be very smart, but they are in “trust, don’t verify” mode.
this is completely unrelated to the article, which is about not _enjoying_ vibecoding. even if I agreed with you, I would still think commenting this on this article is a real dick move