Some people will try to vibe out everything with LLMs, but other people will use them to help engage with their coding more directly and better understand what's happening, not do worse.
I've been programming for 15+ years, and I think I've forgotten the overwhelming majority of the things I've googled. Hell, I can barely remember the things I've googled yesterday.
Instead of manual coding training your time is better invested in learning to channel coding agents, how to test code to our satisfaction, how to know if what AI did was any good. That is what we need to train to do. Testing without manual review, because manual review is just vibes, while tests are hard. If we treat AI-generated code like human code that requires a line-by-line peer review, we are just walking the motorcycle.
How do we automate our human in the loop vibe reactions?
For the people who just want to solve some problem unrelated to computers but require a computer for some part of the task, yes AI would be more “fun”.
Most of all I find what computers allow humanity to achieve extremely interesting and motivating. I call them the worlds most complicated robot.
I don’t find coding overly fun in itself. What I find fun is the results I get when I program something that has the result I desire. Maybe that’s creating a service for friends to use, maybe it’s a personal IT project, maybe it’s having commercial quality WiFi at home everyone is amazed at when they visit, etc. Sometimes - even often - it’s the understanding that leads to pride in craftsmanship.
But programming itself is just a chore for me to get done in service of whatever final outcome I’m attempting to achieve. Could be delivering bits on the internet for work, or automating OS installs to look at the 50 racks of servers humming away with cable porn level work done in the cabinets.
I never enjoyed messing around with HTML at that much in the 90s. But I was motivated to learn it just enough to achieve the cool ideas I could come up with as a teenager and share them with my friends.
I can appreciate clean maintainable code, which is the only real reason LLMs don’t scratch the itch as much as you’d expect for someone like me.
I don’t enjoy boilerplate. I don’t necessarily enjoy all of the error checking and polishing and minutia in turning algorithms into shippable products.
I find AI can be immensely helpful in making real things for people to use, but I still enjoy doing what I find fun by hand.
Different strokes I guess
I'm a stereotypical nerd, into learning for its own sake.
I can explain computers from the quantum mechanics of band gaps in semiconductors up to fudging objects into C and the basics of operating systems with pre-emptive multitasking, virtual memory, and copy-on-write as they were c. 2004.
Further up the stack it gets fuzzy (not that even these foundations are not; "basics" of OSes, I couldn't write one); e.g. SwiftUI is basically a magic box, and I find it a pain to work with as a result.
LLM output is easier to understand than SwiftUI, even if the LLM itself has much weirder things going on inside.
