Vibecoding isn't as fun as writing code by hand

tom_

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.

sunir

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.

topham

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.

thenatureboy

Nobody is going to pay you to write code by hand when an agent can do the job faster and most likely better.

hingler36

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.

djtango

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...

pavlov

Personally I also liked writing assembly code for hot loops. It just doesn’t make sense anymore except in some rare 1% case.

gizajob

If you can’t code it is

thirtygeo

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.

diydsp

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.

nearlyepic

Boy look at all these six month old accounts that have been programming for decades and just love vibe coding!

augment_me

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.

sigbottle

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.

hofo

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

thayne

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.

littlecranky67

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).

julianeon

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.

ChicagoDave

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.

WesleyJohnson

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.

ChrisRR

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