Comment by llbbdd

You're not alone! I love hand-writing code, I love solving the puzzles that come along with it, but I'm having a blast learning how to apply all these new tools.

I have a backlog of project ideas going back two decades and one thing that's common to a lot of them is the startup cost. Many of them would have been multiple weekends worth of pure bootstrapping work just to get to the interesting parts, and I've tread that setup ground too many times to learn anything new from it, so they didn't happen.

Now, often I can pull one of those ideas off the backlog, have some back and forth with an agent, and get a project structure and a build script and a test target unique to my needs for free, and it doesn't have to involve turning my thinking over to the machine completely. I get to write clean code by hand and I get to think about the interesting problems. It just means that I don't need to learn the configuration file format for yet another damn environment until I absolutely need to dig into it, which may never happen. Yeah they tend to be bad at novel stuff, yeah they "regurgitate the training set" to whatever degree that that's true, but that's okay, I'm good at the novel stuff and I'm still present at the keyboard to do that. Cloning a template and following a setup README also "regurgitates the training set" but takes longer and is boring after the millionth time you do it. I've learned so much more now that I can skip the stuff that's always the same.

Sure vibe-coding tends to create code that's awful to read and maintain but so do I when I only care about getting the result. I had a need the other day to one-time export a bunch of data from a proprietary application with no built-in export and without the source available. I have absolutely no interest in learning how to use the Apple accessibility APIs, and even less interest in learning them well enough to create "good" code, so I let an agent make the script and I got the result I wanted in twenty minutes. And I got the result faster than a junior might because I knew exactly what to ask for and how to iterate on it. And then I got to spend my time on the interesting part.

I have no idea how new engineers going forward are going to develop the reflexes and intuition that I built up before all this new tech was available. Maybe we really are on the edge of a breakthrough that really truly obviates that need entirely, and then we're out of a job. In the meantime it does feel like we invented a bicycle for the mind, the energy of every manual step translating into ten effortless strides that can take you in the complete wrong direction if you let it, or faster than ever towards a concrete goal.

The caveat to all of this is that I am already very deeply tired of nearly every other use of AI. For example in the last day the front page of HN has been bombarded with vibe-coded apps, which I don't even automatically have a problem with, but now often the author comes in here and shits all over the replies with slobbering LLM-ism responses. Multi-paragraph gish-gallop answers that say absolutely nothing, and liability for truth deferred to the machine, shrugging shoulders of metal and silicon. It was pleasant when everyone on the internet had a real voice. Even very considered writing had a natural variance to tone and cadence and vocabulary. Now it feels like I'm alone, and being stalked around the internet by some singular cheerful demon producing ugly, tasteless, marketing-speak drivel.