Comment by sashank_1509
10 hours ago
> At some point in my career, I just got tired of having to read tons of documentation for fragmented libraries and frameworks
Well that’s your problem right there, also a wider problem in programming culture. You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own. That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway. That said most programming jobs even in yesteryear was framework management so I’m not surprised people are happy to give that off to AI.
> You might have had a lot more fun if you minimized dependencies and just built everything else you needed on your own.
From my anecdotal experience it absolutely is more fun (I yearn for the early days when this happened more), but it's also extremely inefficient and slow when you need to ship a product, and increasingly difficult when your code has to run on high-level platforms (like the web, mobile, etc). Building frameworks and re-inventing wheels is one of my favorite things to do, but it rarely makes business sense to do that unless you're in a very niche space.
> That’s fun, more fun than Vibecodin anyway.
Been working on my own ORM / Framework for 15 years at this point. Had a laundry list of things I wanted to finish that would have taken me another 3-5 years and it was done in about a month. Still controlled every function name, every preference, every comment, even went in and manually rewrote function names and adjust how it did things. At one point I had to manually intervene in an algorithm because the AI fucked it up badly. Most of it's first try was garbage. It's true. But still in the end I didn't really have to type it out. Sometimes you've been living and breathing a code base for so long that you can just skim the function names and their contents and be content. So that's what happened. It only took a few sessions and I was done.
So it's over. Not only is it "done" exactly to my preferences with exactly all the right method names and configurations I have always dreamed of. It also has 100% unit test coverage AND on top of that I have a suite of benchmarks profiling it against similar libraries in order to provide an honest assessment.
This would simply not be possible before AI. It's a little bittersweet that my ongoing project is "done" but now I'm building things with it. So it's not all bad.
I encourage you to stop calling it "vibecoding" when you are, I presume a long time software engineer, and shove your hand into the guts of the code and force it into the submission sometimes.
> just built everything else you needed on your own
Exactly what I'm doing. Made my own task manager. Have my own harness. Have my own fork of $browser. Whatever.
I'm okay with this.
> Exactly what I'm doing. Made my own task manager. Have my own harness. Have my own fork of $browser. Whatever.
Dude you didn’t build anything. If you hired some programmers last year, to code up your task manager would you go around claiming that you “built” your task manager? I don’t understand where this “I built this” comes from.
Your joy is that something that was uneconomical before is cheap enough for you to buy now, which is fine, but don’t go getting it mixed up with actually building something.
You're a fucking idiot. That's all I've got to say to you.
Yeah, but therein lies the difference between coding as a hobby and software engineering as a profession. The latter tends to promote DRY overuse of dependencies, whether the dependencies were invented in-house or not!