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0 pointsscrollaway1d ago0 comments

> because vibe coding makes computer programming accessible to the masses

I've been coding for 24 years and vibe coding has made computer programming accessible to me.

I've burned out on my work several times, to the point that a few years ago I became unable to open my IDE without getting headaches and nausea. This has killed one of the startups where I was fractional CTO and it's debilitating as an engineer to feel this.

Vibe coding has changed this. I'm once again productive. Like, 1000x more productive than I could ever be.

AI is an amplifier. It amplifies shit engineering into shittier code, but I also deeply believe it amplifies people who care about polish and love of their craft into so, so much more.

I've been "as a side project" finishing a bookkeeping app I could never finish (https://financica.app/) and adding so many features that are pure polish, which I always wanted to add but the ROI was just not there.

Like, the other day I wrote (using AI) a PDF parser for a specific type of account statements from the Belgian government, turning those into perfect data for the books. This saves me a ton of time as a user, nobody in the world has this automation for those types of statements, and it would have taken me several months of full time work to write and automate all of this, learning PDF libraries, dealing with the output, figuring out geometry, writing a battery of tests, etc. I would never have done it. But now, in less than an hour the whole feature was built, shipped and announced.

It's awesome.

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endemic1d ago

I'm debating using LLMs for my side projects. Does using one remove the "soul" of my project? On the other hand, a friend is actually making progress with his side app _because_ he's able to lean on the LLM after a full day's worth of working the day job. I might be able to actually do some of the things I've dreamed of and never had the capacity for. First world problems, I guess.

freedomben1d ago

I've been doing exactly this now for a little while, and it breathed new life into my projects. It's been amazing, honestly. I was worried about the "soul" as well, especially for some projects where I got intimately deep in bit shifting and things, but realistically that project is now 100x more useful to me because it has a ton of features and even bug fixes that I never would have spent the time on before. I highly recommend it.

scrollawayOP1d ago

I think it depends on what you are doing the side project for.

Are you doing it to learn engineering? The learning potential of a back & forth with LLMs is wasted on people who don't have serious know-how.

Are you doing it to create a product, or learn how to do that? Then no, the LLM is helping you get over the hump of writing slow code.

I think we'll eventually drop the "vibe coding" and retronym coding to "slow coding" or something similar. There's advantages to slow coding in a world of AI coding, just like today there are advantages to dropping other types of abstraction layers (from writing direct code when using a WYSIWYG editor, to dropping into assembly code in a performance-critical branch of a game engine written in C++...).

But spending more time on writing code is not useful if you don't get something out of that additional time.

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