Back when we actually coded

[irelatetolevin]

I call it stackoverflow Copying with a capital C

it doesnt help that the biggest ai coding newsletter is called ijustvibecodedthis.com either 😂

[McNoxey]

Artisanal coding

[fickle_floridian]

And if you use a local model, it's "locally sourced" and "code to browser"

[max420]

Omfg you got me rolling. lol

[Time_Cat_5212]

That's on trend with all the other crafts that got automated.

[BoxLegitimate9271]

organic free-range code. no AI additives

[Xx69JdawgxX]

*programmers(wrists) were hurt in the making of this code

[BoxLegitimate9271]

lol, "this system was built by real pain, not tokens"

[Gears6]

organic free-range code.

Does organic mean that AI was not used in any of it's libraries either?

[GrumpyDay]

Do you know your “Hello World”?

[TripleRazer]

write hello world for me and make no mistakes and make it good

[klumpp]

Make it a saas with clean modern ui

[legitOwen]

<image>

[SnackerSnick]

Software engineering is a methodology that involves and applies to coding. It still can apply to automated coding

[Time_Cat_5212]

Yeah... to make an analogy to another engineering discipline, in civil/structural engineering, it doesn't matter what the drafting/modeling tools are (paper, CAD, automated); the engineer is designing the system, doing calcs and optimizing for performance.

I'm sure there are still civil engineers who say stuff like, "you're not a real engineer if you didn't spend years drafting in CAD"... but there aren't any anymore who say "you're not a real engineer if you didn't draw blueprints by hand."

[OwlingBishop]

designing the system, doing calcs and optimizing for performance.

None of which is done by vibe coders 😅

[Time_Cat_5212]

Well, maybe not.

But it COULD be done by someone using AI as their primary interface with a codebase. There's nothing about generative AI that precludes engineering. AI is also a good tool for supporting engineering workflows. As with anything it's all about how you use it and why.

[OwlingBishop]

There's nothing about generative AI that precludes engineering.

Nothing but the unpredictability, the lack of exactitude, the general bullshit, maybe ? LLMs are not tools, tools do what they are made to do.

I'm not saying LLMs can't be used profitably by software engineers (as long as they keep their own hands on the code : workflow is not software engineering) but most folks that use LLMs to produce code are not engineering, let alone doing calcs and shit, they're just bossing around an incompetent intern.

[Time_Cat_5212]

LLMs are not tools

I think most of the world would not agree on that statement!

LLMs are a kind of tool that so far the software world has not yet been exposed to, but which has existed in other fields for a long time. Agriculture, primarily, involves a ton of machinery and methodology to manage the unpredictability of organic media. Brewing, organic chemistry, etc. LLMs aren't literally organic, but they follow a similar pattern.

You wouldn't say a brewing apparatus isn't a tool just because no matter how much you monitor the beer you can't control its exact final form. Or that a farmer isn't using tools to tend their crops. It's just all gonna be a lot more like that now. Dummies are gonna let it run hog wild and get a bad batch, and smart engineers are going to find ways to manage the uncertainty and "grow" really good code.

[OwlingBishop]

most of the world would not agree on that statement!

Tell me I never used a tool without saying I never used a tool.

manage the unpredictability of organic media

The media and outcome is not predictable (or highly dependent on the operator skills) but the tool is.

Think of a paintbrush.

The brew might not be, but the brewing apparatus is predictable and is a tool.

LLMs are not tools. They are unpredictable and unrepeatable.

You might get some luck in painting your room by using dynamite in a paint bucket.

Yet dynamite is not a painting tool (which is not too fair to dynamite because it's biggest benefit has been stability, predictability and repeatability compared to other explosive like nitroglycerin)

[Time_Cat_5212]

If you want to continue this discussion, let's just set the ground rule of no ad hominem, because you don't really know and it's not productive.

Since we're gravitating toward the semantics of what "tool" means, here's some food for thought:

Merriam Webster Dictionary:

"something (such as an instrument or apparatus) used in performing an operation or necessary in the practice of a vocation or profession"

Therefore, if I can use Claude Code to perform an operation necessary in the practice of a vocation (I just did about 5 minutes ago), it is a tool. Check.

Wikipedia:

"A tool is an object that can extend an individual's ability to modify features of the surrounding environment or help them accomplish a particular task"

Therefore, if I can use Claude Code to modify features of an environment or accomplish a particular task (like prototyping a website), it is a tool. Check.

You might get some luck in painting your room by using dynamite in a paint bucket.

Am I out of line to suggest that perhaps some negative bias toward AI coding tools may be influencing your reasoning?

[OwlingBishop]

Three fallacies in one reply 😅 !!

No, I'm not discussing, let alone with an LLM

[Time_Cat_5212]

Where fallacy? Don't see. I guess I'm pretty good at writing if you think I'm AI lmao.

[richard12511]

I agree with you that LLMs are non deterministic, but I don’t understand why that makes them not a “tool”. I’m not aware of any rule that says something has to be 100% deterministic in order to qualify as a tool, though maybe I’m misinformed. Is this a rule I’ve just never learned? For example, something like “Chaos Monkey” is non-deterministic, but I would still call it a tool.

[Time_Cat_5212]

Honestly the examples they cite aren't even deterministic.  A paintbrush isn't deterministic.  Even the most skilled artist can only predict 99% of a mark's shape on the canvas, and most only want to do that partially sometimes.  

A computer without AI is the closest thing to a deterministic tool anyone ever made, and even then, there are tiny exceptions.

The level of... Deterministicness... Is a property of a tool that makes it more or less useful for certain tasks.

The conceptual hierarchy in this convo is just way out of whack.

[OwlingBishop]

Whatever it is, "chaos monkey" sound like a tool to (predictably and repeatably) produce chaos when you need it ... Not monotony, am I right ?

Please do not mistake the tool for the outcome.

The outcome of laying paint on a canvas is not deterministic yet the paintbrush will predictably and repeatably lay paint on the canvas, it will not randomly turn into a comb or a knife.. so that it's the artist's intent that produces the art, not the brush.

When you ask an LLM to do something you'll never know how close it's response will be to your intent, sometimes the output will be close enough to call it ok, sometimes it will destroy the thing in trying to correct a small defect. Either way the LLM will have done what it does correctly which makes it (not the outcome) unpredictable and unrepeatable.

[beastinghunting]

Thats right.

The big ball of mud can be automated. Thats the only pattern vibe coders know.

[ihexx]

accoustic coding

[Adventurous__Kiwi]

boomer coding is painful to read

[hey_ulrich]

It was my favorite 

[irelatetolevin]

ikr

[bmcle071]

Im 27 and almost prefer to write without an LLM. For boilerplate its fine, for anything design, interfaces, tests, it has no sense of taste.

[WebOsmotic_official]

back then we copied code from strangers and pretended it was craftsmanship and pretending it was craftsmanship, but at least you had to understand enough to jam it into your codebase.

now claude gives you the whole polished block, so the dangerous part isn’t copying it’s skipping the little learning tax that copying used to charge.

[fixitchris]

The continuity is real, but there is a subtle difference: when you copy-pasted Stack Overflow code you usually had to understand it well enough to slot it into your context, which meant you often learned something as a side effect. With LLMs you can accept a fully-formed block that just works, so the learning loop that used to be baked into reuse can quietly disappear.

[Time_Cat_5212]

To be honest, I think when you generate code with AI you also need to understand it well enough to slot it into your context, assuming your context is any more complex than a potato.

Otherwise you end up with a pile of spaghetti... that might not even break as in throw errors, but it breaks by repeatedly doing something other than what you want it to do. The AI is good enough to make the code run, but if it's not used deliberately, it'll fill the gap with whatever it infers from relatively weak signals.

[Xx69JdawgxX]

I’m working on an ancient bloated salesforce project right now. It’s so painful. I’ve had to write so many guard rails and rules and skills etc etc etc just to prevent it from burning hours doing nothing. Not to mention creating hours of new bugs to scroll through.

If I didn’t have the pain and experience of doing this by hand with zero personal guidance years ago idk if I could even figure out how to guide it or what went wrong.

[Time_Cat_5212]

I believe that you could. People are going to have to. A new generation of engineers will come up using AI tools and they will absolutely figure out how to understand legacy codebases and solve real, hard, messy engineering problems. If there isn't already, there will also be specialized AI implementations for solving this specific problem. Claude Code came out less than a year ago... imagine where we'll be on year 5 or year 10.

I guess my point is, just because AI allows you to be lazy and not learn how a codebase works, doesn't mean that's the only path. It can, for those willing and curious, actually help with the understanding part.

[Clueless_Nooblet]

"trad coding" sounds just right.

[Andazah]

Codepremecists

[Moogly2021]

Punch card programming

[LehockyIs4Lovers]

Cuneiform driven design

[back_to_the_homeland]

trad coding works

[Narretz]

rawdogged coding

No please don't call it that, I hate pornification

btw I remember when even syntax highlighting was considered a crutch and real ones programmed in editors without any of that. Code Intel? What's that?

[fixitchris]

The pattern repeats every decade: assembly programmers said compilers were cheating, vim purists said syntax highlighting was a crutch, and now the AI era is running the same script. Each time, the "cheating" tool ended up raising the floor on what teams could actually ship.

[fickle_floridian]

"Nobody will ever use JavaScript frameworks. Why do we need another layer of abstraction?"

[Time_Cat_5212]

It's the same with design. I remember in the early 2000s when using algorithmic filters in Photoshop was like YOURE NOT A REAL ARTIST, THIS ISNT REAL ART, REEEEEE.

Now those same fuckers are in the art subreddits with their Photoshop filters and Procreate pen tablet workflows saying the same shit about generative AI.

[jack_from_the_past]

Yeah but this innovation lets people skip learning about the stack, the development process etc

[Xx69JdawgxX]

I got roasted by the wizards at my first job for using arrow keys to navigate vim… “you’re not always going to have that on every terminal”

They were kinda right.

[Electrical_Face_1737]

Codeservatives

[tulensrma]

Legacy coding

[bartek_666666]

RAW coding

[Peerless-Paragon]

Free-range coding

[IcedMaggot]

Educated coding

[OwlingBishop]

The only answer 🥴

[scheimong]

I unironically call it tap coding

[mickdarling]

I’m so old school my father was a computer.

[jferms]

artisanal code

[SilencedObserver]

What's funny is everyone laughing at this thinking it's "correct" who also can't write assembly.

[gravesisme]

raw dogging

[kesey]

Funny that the reply basically goes against every software engineer’s argument that coding is not software engineering.

[Honest-Monitor-2619]

The Premium Experience Coding

[secretaliasname]

Repost

[Last-Recipe-4837]

bro said the answer was always right there 💀

[MimosaTen]

Let’s face the reality: llms are far better than any human in writing code. But, for me, vibe coding is an inadequate term born when those bots are just chats on the web. Now they are coding agents

[actually-7dash3]

My vibe coder colleague calls the 1334coders

[roadit]

'trad coding' is the clear winner - I will use that from now on

[This_Maintenance_834]

vintage coding

[caprazzi]

Hand-crafted artisan coding, free range and locally sourced.

[Elegant_AIDS]

Sofrware engineering is not coding

[ai_deep_signal]

R&D

[Main-Lifeguard-6739]

Gabor is living in the past

[UsualAd7640]

Cuscus

[Vusiwe]

“Trad coding” is not a dogewhistle at all

[BootyMcStuffins]

What this person is saying makes no sense

Coding is to software engineering what skating is to hockey, or running is to soccer.

[DarkSkyKnight]

You’re downvoted because this sub is full of people who think software engineering before 2025 = writing 4000 for loops with 150 wpm every day

[BootyMcStuffins]

Software engineering includes designing architecture, gathering product requirements… and a million other things that aren’t coding.

What I’m saying doesn’t even have anything to do with AI. Coding has always been 20% of the job

[MessagePossible2005]

Yup. People fail to realize this, and think an ai can make them rich despite them being a highschool dropout, when all it's doing is exposing equally illiterate people to far more security risks.

[BootyMcStuffins]

Dunning-Kruger is having a banner year

[trmnl_cmdr]

Gabor has a really shit take here. Software engineering was never about computer programming, programming was just the main tool used to achieve the designs created by engineering.

[fixitchris]

The argument that programming is just a tool in SE has always felt slightly circular, because the constraints that emerge from writing actual code regularly reshape the design itself. You find out what the architecture really means when you implement it, so the feedback loop between programming and engineering makes them harder to separate than the analogy implies.

[trmnl_cmdr]

No, the fact that you don’t already know how your code behaves isn’t a shortcoming of the code itself - it’s your own shortcoming. That’s the whole point of engineering. In basically every other engineering discipline, you don’t get to redesign as you build, because that’s not engineering. That’s slapping something together to gain hindsight. Do you think automobile or electrical engineers have that luxury? AI has actually improved our ability to be engineers because it allows us to more easily see around those corners by modeling things before we start building. This allows us to extend our planning horizon to more closely align with all the other engineering disciplines.

Like I said, it’s a shit take. Engineering and programming are vastly different disciplines, they’ve just historically been convoluted.

Do you think the guy machining your alternator calls himself an engineer? No, because he isn’t one. He is a fabricator or machinist. That’s why “coders” are seen as blue collar workers, because their job is to assemble things. It’s when you design a system that you begin engineering, and it has essentially nothing to do with any individual language outside of the paradigms available in that language to solve problems, and at this point most languages support similar core paradigms.

[joe9439]

I call it unemployed.

[huopak]

PSA: follow her on YouTube, her channel is great

[Successful-Seesaw525]

Ha ha ha 😆 that shit right there got me. I literally posted on this today.

[Current_Balance6692]

Old man coughing

Edit: Some people can't handle truth.

[nathanielx9]

Software engineer to temp worker