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I tought myself how to program - I just learned about "vibe coding" and I want to throw up now lol

ShadowkillXNA

ShadowkillXNA

Member
I tought myself BASIC on the VIC20 and Commodore 64 and a little on the Amiga.
In order to make a very simple Asteroids type game on Windows I tought myself some C++ and how to use the Codeblocks IDE and Visual Studio.
I had to learn how INCLUDE and USING statements and namespaces worked.
I used the Allegro graphics library and had to learn how it worked.
I had to learn how to link libraries.
I had to learn how to use SIN and COS to calculate X and Y offsets to use as a forward vector to move the ship when forward thrust was applied.
I had to use error handling because to simulate the ship losing momentum because when no thrust was applied I subtracted a small percentage of its forward velocity each time through the main game loop. I found that eventually the ship would start drifting in reverse and I realized that eventually the velocity was subtracting into a negative velocity so I added code to check for that.
I used a tutorial to implement a timestep for the game loop so the game would run at a consistent speed no matter what pc it was run on.
I also did some dabbling in Microsofts XNA game programming framework along with some C#.
Dabbled in Unity as well.
I tought myself all this. Not that I'm a master programmer by any means, but I put in the work to learn this stuff along with a lot of help from other coders in IRC game development chat rooms.

And recently I learned about "vibe coding".
Typing a description of the program you want into a AI application and it writes it for you? What in the actual fuck? Do these people not have any pride in actually learning something? Are they really this fucking lazy? And shouldn't the resulting code be checked by a real, actually skilled programmer to make sure it actually, you know........functions as it should?

Maybe I'm totally wrong and I'm just getting old.

malcom tucker GIF
 
People don't care about coding. They care about what the coding achieves.

If ai can help people get what they want, without needing to learn a complicated new skill, or hiring someone who knows that complicated skill.. they are going to use ai.
 
Imagine in 20 years when a whole new generation is brought up having created entirely through AI. Movies, music, games, books. They had no incentive to learn anything, no developing of their talents, no trial and error, nothing. Everyone just used AI. It's gonna be terrible.
 
Vibe coding, or using an AI agent to code for you, has been a thing for years now. People also use model context protocols to bring agents into practically any software application to do the work for them, not just writing code.

I am an old fuck and I learned to code with BASIC and Fortran and COBOL and Turbo Pascal, all that old school stuff. These days it's Python and C#. But my point would be it's important to understand how something works and why it works, so that you can improve and stabilize its foundation. Ignorance of the pillars of your code breeds in inefficiencies and vulnerabilities and a lack of future proofing against bugs at scope. It's also lazy as fuck but that's society these days in general so I digress.
 
To be fair folks without actual programming knowledge generally produce unmaintainable software with a ton of security issues.

Top notch "vibe coders" are usually experienced developers.
 
Im a professional programmer myself and all you do now is pretty much babysit your chosen ai model to do stuff at work. you should know what the ai is doing to get the most out of it but ease of use and frankly how good they have become, enabled many non-programmers to build something themselves to varying degrees.
 
Two things:

- this should be in offtopic (it's on off topic now)
- good luck maintaining a vibe coded software... i give 5 years TOPS to see all the sorts of security problems in different fields because of course a vibe coded sodftware will be filled with bugs, or even stupidities like endpoints with no auth and such... and trust me, in LOTS of cases, a AI software is alreayd more expensive than a good senjor dev, so your knowledge will ALWAYS be necessary, do not listen zealots and what not.
 
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Now imagine how it feels for those of us that paid for our degrees in computer science and learned COBOL and C++ in college

I'm old as fuck and also taught myself BASIC before that
 
ShadowkillXNA said:
And recently I learned about "vibe coding".
Typing a description of the program you want into a AI application and it writes it for you? What in the actual fuck? Do these people not have any pride in actually learning something? Are they really this fucking lazy? And shouldn't the resulting code be checked by a real, actually skilled programmer to make sure it actually, you know........functions as it should?

Maybe I'm totally wrong and I'm just getting old.
Click to expand...
Nope, you're right on all counts. I'm a 25+ year software developer with skills across multiple disciplines (web, mobile, desktop) and I feel the same way.

We have interns every summer at my job and just today we had one of them sharing how proud they were about being atop the leaderboard for a competition between interns that involved coding. The thing is, it was a competition where they were presented with broken code to fix and encouraged to use AI to solve the issues. No doing actual research or trying to hash out the solutions themselves, just letting ChatGPT do it all for them.

Not exactly something I'd be proud of but to each their own.
 
The amount of debugging ive needed to do on alot of vibe coded stuff makes it almost pointless for me.

Note I dont use Claude....people tell me that Claude is actually pretty good at vibe coding.

I will admit that even with the debugging for simpl(er) scripts like for 3DS Max and other programs vibe coding scripts works out well enough that the code does what i ask albeit slightly inefficiently but once I look over the code I can clean it up in a few minutes.

I think if you have zero programming knowledge most of what youll create is practically useless for production and people with programming knowledge will clown the program.
Same with the AI 3D model generators that have awful awful awful topology and way way too many polygon for what you are trying to make.

Im sure things will get better with time but right now without knowledge of what you are doing using the AI is almost a waste of time.



P.S
Just realized my wheel/tire offset/backspacing calculator was fully vibe coded hahahaha Ive been using it for a minute just didnt realize I vibe coded it like 2 years ago maybe?
Its so small its inefficiency doesnt matter.
 
I feel you, op. I'm doing something sort of similar (don't really want to get into specifics because I try to keep my work life and my forum posting life separate so I can keep saying whatever the hell I want lol). The key is not to let the people who disapprove of not being in step with everyone else drag you down.

Look at Jonathan Blow, dude created his own programming language despite lots of haters saying it was a stupid waste of time. A shining example for us all imo.
 
This Vibe stuff I keep hearing about, Can I simply ask "Make the controls and movement of the character handle like Borderlands 4. and I get physics and everything?
 
_Ex_ said:
Assembly is for pussies, back in my day we coded with punch cards sonny.
Click to expand...
lol, one of my uncles took programming back in uh, the later 70s I guess and he told me he accidentally dropped an entire program worth of punch cards on the floor. He said the hell with this and never programmed again and became a doctor instead.

Glad I never had to put up with that stuff. I first learned to program with Visual Basic in high school in 2002, and then I got more serious later on with Bjarne Stroustrup's book Programming: Principles & Practice Using C++.
 
Been writing code most of my life. Yes, it's fucking bizarre watching my career becoming relegated to snapshot in time, like the early human calculators.

Right now I don't have insane deadlines so actually find coding with AI enjoyable. It does much of the work I hate and am more productive than I ever thought possible.
 
How I see it is: calligraphy didn't go entirely obsolete with the invention of the printing press. Woodworking, sewing and even smithing haven't gone completely obsolete because of machinery, Oil painted art wasn't killed completely by Photoshop and Illustrator and stuff.

Why should old fashioned programming be any different? Even if the audience who can appreciate it is way smaller than all of those other things.
 
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To make a good output you still need to be experienced and know what to ask for. Vibe coding is amazing - in my opinion it actually supercharges the good coders and makes them 100 coders in 1. The amount of scenarios one can run now in a short time frame wasn't possible 2 years ago.
 
uncreativename said:
How I see it is: calligraphy didn't go entirely obsolete with the invention of the printing press. Woodworking, sewing and even smithing haven't gone completely obsolete because of machinery, Oil painted art wasn't killed completely by Photoshop and Illustrator and stuff.

Why should old fashioned programming be any different? Even if the audience who can appreciate it is way smaller than all of those other things.
Click to expand...
Yeah, if you want to do that as a hobby then you're completely free to do so even if the industry will start taking shortcuts.
 
Trilobit said:
Yeah, if you want to do that as a hobby then you're completely free to do so even if the industry will start taking shortcuts.
Click to expand...
I wouldn't say just as a hobby. Of course I totally agree the big companies will keep going all in on vibecoding, no question that that's reality and that's what most people will be doing going forward, but indie developers can do whatever they want.
 
ShadowkillXNA said:
I wanted to learn programming not self-torture lmao!
Click to expand...
Assembly is pretty insane, but it's also really fascinating, and it's possible to ignore a lot of the thousands and thousands of instructions and opcodes so it's not as overwhelming as it might seem if you were to try to read these books cover to cover for some reason lol
images
 
ShadowkillXNA said:
I tought myself BASIC on the VIC20
Click to expand...
I did this too when i was a little kid. I moved on to darkbasic and then stopped. Decades later i went to school and learned me some c# scripting. I'm a big dummy though, so i never got a job doing it. But i do fix the label printer at work sometimes.

I've dabbled in some vibe coding and i just feel like right now AI is more suitable as helping someone code than writing code from scratch.
 
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If you buy an Apple developer account, AI can make your business an app and you can publish it very easily now.

This was very recently not so cheap.

That's just one way it saves entrepreneurs money.

Web coding which was very easy before is now effortless but also the companies that once charged a million dollars to do your basic ecommerce site are now either doing the same thing and using AI to do it or out of business.
 
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Mr Hyde said:
Imagine in 20 years when a whole new generation is brought up having created entirely through AI. Movies, music, games, books. They had no incentive to learn anything, no developing of their talents, no trial and error, nothing. Everyone just used AI. It's gonna be terrible.
Click to expand...

And that's when AI makes its move, right after the last person who actually knows how any of this shit works clocks out permanently. :messenger_beaming:
 
Zacfoldor said:
If you buy an Apple developer account, AI can make your business an app and you can publish it very easily now.

This was very recently not so cheap.

That's just one way it saves entrepreneurs money.

Web coding which was very easy before is now effortless but also the companies that once charged a million dollars to do your basic ecommerce site are now either doing the same thing and using AI to do it or out of business.
Click to expand...
Oh yeah, I'd been meaning to say, I'm pretty anti-AI but even I found something useful that AI can do for me the other day :pie_open_mouth: . I didn't feel like recalibrating my monitor again so I got the google AI to do a description of two different colours for me as a sanity check since it knows what they objectively look like.
XtZEf85KgEKZEmei.png
 
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Idleyes said:
And that's when AI makes its move, right after the last person who actually knows how any of this shit works clocks out permanently. :messenger_beaming:
Click to expand...
Once AI takes care of all the nerds the rest of us are screwed.

How AI takes care of nerds:
hq720.jpg

I'm simply lobbying for us to become nerds. Art hating AI loving nerds good old fashioned nerds who love AI and math and science and computers and technology not because it is hip but because we love it.

The jocks turned into nerds and the nerds become me. Now it is time for the real nerds to join me in AI paradise here on earth. It wasn't easy getting here guys but we literally invented the computer from Star Trek and it works better than the computer from Star Trek and we also invented a better combadge and tablet.
images

Once Elon gets the robots built we will have the first Data.

Dr Noonien Soong would be so proud:
Lore.jpg

Remember who you are my nerds. We are gonna checkmate the jocks. Don't lose your metal now. Not when we have them on the ropes. A mere 48 months and we will achieve AGI. Of all the tribal conflicts in the world who knew it would be nerds vs jocks that finally brought it all crashing down like a house of cards.
 
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I nearly went to grad school to become an English professor. While I loved that subject/major, I'm glad I didn't go that route and even more so the past couple years with the LLM boom.

Imagine being an English teacher in the age of AI. Hopeless.

I say all this because writing and coding seem like the most AI-disrupted industries at this point. Trying to relate from personal experience.
 
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Damn, Asimov's "The Last Question" was spot on. We will not know how to fix or make anything, but ask a computer to do it for us.

How pathetic and embarrassing we have become. We actually have people that do not want to learn anything anymore.

We are fucked.
 
At my job I'm known for having really high standards for software developers. I worked with a guy I thought was pretty damn good about 3 years ago on a ~1.5 year long project. So was only 1.5 years ago that we last worked together.

He's interviewing at the client where I'm overseeing a few teams and I did a pre-screen of him. First question he asked was "can I use AI tools for the interview?" I said no, and he said he legit isn't sure he could still code without them anymore. Like he cancelled the interview, what in the flying fuck? Guy couldn't have been using these tools for more than 1.5 years and legit lost his skills.

Insane.
 
uncreativename said:
Assembly is pretty insane, but it's also really fascinating, and it's possible to ignore a lot of the thousands and thousands of instructions and opcodes so it's not as overwhelming as it might seem if you were to try to read these books cover to cover for some reason lol
images
Click to expand...
Simple RISC assembly back in the college days was pretty 'fun'. I'd probably even have fun with that pile of blue shit had I made a career out of it. I'd much rather be looking up opcode documentation than trying to divine what some retard put into his REST API.
 
I've been programming automation controls stuff for over 20 years and I fucking love the AI tools. It's leveled me up more in 18 months than the last 10 years of manual coding. I'm doing shit I never would have even tried. Seeing what it outputs opens my mind so much. I'm not even on a high enough tier to really just dump his code in whole cloth, some lines maybe but it's really just for new ways of thinking about problems. I used to dread the software part of a project (still do depending on what cheap HMI we're using), but now I actually have fun a lot of the time. I'd always try to get on bigger projects with people I knew would want to do the software and just let me draw. Now I look forward to it! It's good having enough of a foundation to check his work, even though sometimes he outputs shit that I don't fully understand after 20 years... and it passes all review and FAT. A lot of places will look at you funny now if you're not using these tools... total industry sentiment 180. At least the view from my desk.
 
ShadowkillXNA said:
I tought myself BASIC on the VIC20 and Commodore 64 and a little on the Amiga.
In order to make a very simple Asteroids type game on Windows I tought myself some C++ and how to use the Codeblocks IDE and Visual Studio.
I had to learn how INCLUDE and USING statements and namespaces worked.
I used the Allegro graphics library and had to learn how it worked.
I had to learn how to link libraries.
I had to learn how to use SIN and COS to calculate X and Y offsets to use as a forward vector to move the ship when forward thrust was applied.
I had to use error handling because to simulate the ship losing momentum because when no thrust was applied I subtracted a small percentage of its forward velocity each time through the main game loop. I found that eventually the ship would start drifting in reverse and I realized that eventually the velocity was subtracting into a negative velocity so I added code to check for that.
I used a tutorial to implement a timestep for the game loop so the game would run at a consistent speed no matter what pc it was run on.
I also did some dabbling in Microsofts XNA game programming framework along with some C#.
Dabbled in Unity as well.
I tought myself all this. Not that I'm a master programmer by any means, but I put in the work to learn this stuff along with a lot of help from other coders in IRC game development chat rooms.

And recently I learned about "vibe coding".
Typing a description of the program you want into a AI application and it writes it for you? What in the actual fuck? Do these people not have any pride in actually learning something? Are they really this fucking lazy? And shouldn't the resulting code be checked by a real, actually skilled programmer to make sure it actually, you know........functions as it should?

Maybe I'm totally wrong and I'm just getting old.

malcom tucker GIF
Click to expand...
Learning how to code something the proper way still seems like the best way to go. Yeah it's nice that AI can write code for you through 'vibe coding', but the whole process is still sloppy and could only get you so far before you hit into a brick wall. Knowing the foundations of actual computer coding and using vibe coding to aide your work seems like the best solution. because you could also proof read the code that the AI application has written and even make your own modifications. I would imagine this is the best flexibility you could have.
 
IntentionalPun said:
At my job I'm known for having really high standards for software developers. I worked with a guy I thought was pretty damn good about 3 years ago on a ~1.5 year long project. So was only 1.5 years ago that we last worked together.

He's interviewing at the client where I'm overseeing a few teams and I did a pre-screen of him. First question he asked was "can I use AI tools for the interview?" I said no, and he said he legit isn't sure he could still code without them anymore. Like he cancelled the interview, what in the flying fuck? Guy couldn't have been using these tools for more than 1.5 years and legit lost his skills.

Insane.
Click to expand...

I guess he thought "use it or lose it" was just some fancy catch phrase. :messenger_squinting_tongue:
 
If you want to write code for fun, get a Commodore C64 emulator, and setup one of the many dev environments. Have a bash at writing some demo effects or a game. Tons of sample code and documentation out there, as are every sort of tools you might need.

People are still playing, hardware both original and new is out there and basically emulation is cycle-perfect at this stage,

6502 is fun, and if nothing else will teach you how computers work at a fundamental level.

Fuck "vibe coding" and the horse it rode in on.
 
Programming is the only good part about working in IT. The field is doomed.

I currently keep LLM usage to 'I know 90% how to write this function but it's a pain in the arse' queries. So basically stack overflow replacement.

But I fully expect to be forced to use it more and more, so I'll just keep the real stuff for hobbies.
 
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