Comment by foota
14 hours ago
Imo programming is fairly different between vibes based not looking at it at all and using AI to complete tasks. I still feel engaged when I'm more actively "working with" the AI as opposed to a more hands off "do X for me".
I don't know that the same makes as much sense to evaluate in an essay context, because it's not really the same. I guess the equivalent would be having an existing essay (maybe written by yourself, maybe not) and using AI to make small edits to it like "instead of arguing X, argue Y then X" or something.
Interestingly I find myself doing a mix of both "vibing" and more careful work, like the other day I used it to update some code that I cared about and wanted to understand better that I was more engaged in, but also simultaneously to make a dashboard that I used to look at the output from the code that I didn't care about at all so long as it worked.
I suspect that the vibe coding would be more like drafting an essay from the mental engagement POV.
I find it very useful for code comprehension. For writing code it still struggles (at least codex) and sometimes I feel I could have written the code myself faster rather than correct it every time it does something wrong.
Jeremy Howard argues that we should use LLMs to help us learn, once you let it reason for you then things go bad and you start getting cognitive debt. I agree with this.
AI is not a great partner to code with. For me I just use it to do some boilerplates and fill in the tedious gaps. Even for translations its bad if you know both languages. The biggest issues is that AI constantly tries to steer you wrong, its very subtle in programming that you only realize it a week later when you get stuck in a vibe coding quagmire.
shrug YMMV. I was definitely a bit of of a luddite for a while, and I still definitely don't consider myself an "AI person", but I've found them useful. I can have them do legitimately useful things, with varying degrees of supervision.
I wouldn't ask Cursor to go off and write software from scratch that I need to take ownership of, but I'm reasonably comfortable at this point having it make small changes under direction and with guidance.
The project I mentioned above was adding otel tracing to something, and it wrote a tracae viewing UI that has all the features I need and works well, without me having to spend hours getting it up set up.