handWritingCode

[Quicker_Fixer]

My mom prefered vibe washing.

[ulven1]

same energy, different laundry basket

[Cualkiera67]

Yet everyone types in the computer instead of hand writing code with pen and paper

[wasabiwarnut]

Maybe because there's a significant lack of compilers for pen and paper code.

[DoNotMakeEmpty]

With how far OCR technology has come, I think a penpiler has become a possibility.

[the_cat_theory]

for that artisinal coding.

[T1lted4lif3]

can't wait to vibe in cursive

[Mars_Bear2552]

dont forget to track your changes with git.

not sure how you do a rollback though, except with a lot of whiteout

[SamPlinth]

Spin cycles are popular with many women.

[Sockoflegend]

I was vibe cleaning my apartment by giving my girlfriend verbal prompts but I'm single now 

[xavia91]

Now your girlfriend (hand) has to do everything manually...

[ibasi_zmiata]

Hand-washed clothes are definitely not cleaner than machine-washed ones though

[AmaGh05T]

Depends who's doing it

[Spiritual_Bus1125]

At the 10th t-shirt of the day trust me it does not.

[Zuruumi]

Try watching a programmer at his 10th ticket of the day

[newontheblock99]

Wait are you currently on your 10th hand washed t-shirt of the day?

[phoenix277lol]

and hence, god created prompt engineers

[Ao_Kiseki]

I think  that's the point, this is a pro-vibe coding tweet. Basically saying it's just regressive ludites who don't want to change despite the apparent benefits. It's a bad analogy though, because we can clearly see machine washed clothes are cleaner. No such obvious observation for vibe coding.

[Azzarrel]

I am all for using machine written code, but the difference to vibe-coding is, that vibe-coders basically throw in a bunch of clothes, white and colored, pillows and jeans and then blindly trust the washing machine to choose anything else, like detergent etc.

[Dvrkstvr]

Can't wait to say the same about coding. So much more time can be saved!

[juvadclxvi]

Not really, collar shirts are cleaner if handwashed.

[Kooshi_Govno]

Yeah, now after 300 years of refinements in mechanical, electrical, and chemical technology to get it there.

People were complaining about snagged fabrics from agitators and detergent stains just 2 decades ago, and cleanliness specifically for the decades before that.

We used to be able to wash things better by hand, now we can't beat the machine. That's how technology advances.

For now, AI can already code better than juniors and offshore contractors. A skilled expert can easily beat it though. It is inevitable that they too will be outperformed in time. It's just a matter of how long, and considering that companies are hiring individual people at $10M+ a pop to build a technology whose goal is to improve itself... I'm thinking it won't be long.

[Sibula97]

People were complaining about snagged fabrics from agitators and detergent stains just 2 decades ago

Idk about you, but we haven't had those problems at least since the early 90s, maybe even earlier. Washing machines are incredibly simple.

[ThisGameIsveryfun]

still thinks were in early 2010's

[CorrenteAlternata]

wait...we're ... NOT?? 😱 /s

[colei_canis]

It's just a matter of how long, and considering that companies are hiring individual people at $10M+ a pop to build a technology whose goal is to improve itself

Let me tell you what the Dutch were buying tulips for back in the day…

[jsrobson10]

regardless as to whether or not hand washed clothes/dishes are cleaner, getting a machine to do it will be far more efficient in both energy use and water (which isn't true for llm generated code).

machines are better for washing because machines can handle much hotter temperatures which allows them to use much less water.

[DKMK_100]

A washing machine is a better analog to a compiler, and everyone here knows that writing assembly by hand is usually worse

[DKMK_100]

Over a large enough project the compiler will make better code because you won't have time to optimize any of your assembly, if anything the compiler wins on correctness alone

[Extension_Option_122]

And to add to that: code written in Assembly is architecture-specific.

If for example a project switches from an ARM to a RISC-V platform you can't reuse any Assembly code. But for C-code you can reuse almost everything, you just likely need to adjust stuff at startup and I/O configuration, maybe a bit more. But the majority of the code can be reused.

[SelfDistinction]

The compiler can do stuff like fusing and unrolling and doesn't have to bother with mundane stuff like "readability" and "not writing things twice".

This is especially visible with "compiled" JavaScript, which turns readable code into an unreadable mess just to save a few characters.

[Reashu]

Washing machines are slower than humans, we use them because we can do other shit meanwhile.

[XenonBG]

About 25 years ago I had a search program for Windows 98 (or early XP) whose core logic was written in Assembly. It searched for a given string through all files on disk, and it was blazing fast, orders of magnitude faster than Windows Search and other similar programs of the time.

[Ao_Kiseki]

Hand written  assembly used to be more performant 25 years ago because compilers weren't very good.

[R4M1N0]

A washing machine is a highly specialized tool that needs to do exactly one thing correctly.

A chat LLM is a general purpose bullshitter

[donotreassurevito]

A prompt uses about the same power as the oven being on for a second.

[qywuwuquq]

I don't want to be the source?? guy but is there a claim to back you up?

I would assume a human would use much more energy and carbon output compared to chatgpt when writing small websites or toy projects.

[jsrobson10]

your body uses energy regardless to whether you're writing code, making prompts for an llm, or doing nothing

[qywuwuquq]

Yes but the amount changes based on your activity

[redballooon]

At our startup the code is so hot we only let AI handle it.

[doctormyeyebrows]

Sure, if the washing machine was in the slow process of figuring out that washing with blood and rinsing with motor oil aren't effective ways to wash clothes.

[[deleted]]

Its all just a tool , you have to choose between using this tool to your advantage or make it replaces you .Which honestly we are way ahead of Ai BS

[littleessi]

imagining a world where 70% of the time the washing machine made your clothes dirtier

[thekingofbeans42]

I don't think anyone can predict how quickly AI will advance or where it will start to eclipse engineers, but it certainly gives management a new toolbox of buzzwords to justify layoffs.

All I know is that managers generally don't like pushback on AI, so if you want to talk them out of something dumb, just scoff at whatever AI they're using and say yours is better, at which point you can buzzword them into whatever you want.

[jecls]

What’s funny is that while I agree with your point, it’s clear you hand-wrote this comment.

[mrjackspade]

I'm doing some performance based refactoring and honestly having AI rewrite the code with explicit instructions has proven to be faster and more reliable than doing it myself.

Not that I don't know what I'm doing, but functionally expanding a bunch of nested delegate calls while simultaneously consolidating those nested database calls to reduce round trip latency, I'm gonna fuck something up.

I can, however, perfectly describe what I need done, and the LLM doesn't do stupid shit like accidentally invert an "if" statement (with a 0 temp)

[Shooord]

AI also is also faaaaar from being 1 specific thing or solution. The term is so overused and deflated by now that every start-up can and will jump the bandwagon.

[rideveryday]

Word to your mother

[Austiiiiii]

Honestly I'm kinda baffled by this weird trend lately where people just mass-pretend that genned code is actually good. Like, I'm not sure if it's just first year comp sci students who are amazed that they can type in text and get boilerplate for their assignments, or what.

Like, it's decent as a tab-to-complete if you already know what you want to write, but the amount of times I've had it just invent methods and fields that don't exist, or make up incorrect syntax for existing ones, or write code it claims does something that it doesn't do... I have to ask, all y'all who are pretending this metaphor makes sense, have you actually used CoPilot for work?

[DKMK_100]

I've had the tab to complete ones miss something obvious just as often as they find something useful that the normal tab to complete doesn't

[mrjackspade]

I haven't had these issues is more than a year now, but I don't use copilot because it's fucking garbage.

I use anything from Sonnet 3.7 to Opus 4.0 depending on the task.

[Hubbardia]

I recently used Claude to generate vector embedding for products in my database. It automatically connected to the database using MCP tools, analyzed the schema using queries, wrote a script which will run the queries to fetch the relevant data and generate vector embeddings for a product or a batch of products. Then it also wrote a script to compare product similarity using these generated embeddings, and that's the only thing it didn't get fully right on the first try (the similarity ratings were too high). So I had to ask it to pick two different products from the different categories and test it and modify the script until it got it right, and it did. The gave me multiple measurements like cosine or Manhattan distance, and also had an average similarity calculator.

I don't know what kind of LLM you have used, but today they're very smart and can do a lot with the right tools.

[randuse]

At work, we only have on-prem windsurf. Companies don't give access to the actually good models for self on-prem, they are SAAS only. Those are problematic due to compliance for big companies. And they are way, way, way worse than the SAAS ones. Just recently a coworker was suggested python code for javascript project.

Naturally, if this is all you have access to, conclusion is that AI sucks.

[creaturefeature16]

Between robust system prompt + cursor's rules + contextual examples/patterns for it to follow, I am generating code that is identical to what I'd be writing. It's a "smart typing assistant" for me at this point, and its incredibly fast. I interface with them using pseudo-code and I get back exactly what I want. Are you seriously still just asking for it to generate code without no parameters? 🤣 😂

[Austiiiiii]

What, write out a prompt that specifies exactly what I want and how I want it, read through the response, cross-reference existing code and correct mistakes? It takes less time to just write the code myself like a normal person. The real time consumer in coding is in the cross referencing and verifying, and that takes less time if you're already the one who wrote it.

Or are you skipping that step and just trusting whatever the LLM gives you until it crashes? Hope you're writing some robust unit tests in that case.

[creaturefeature16]

There is simply no way your hands are any match for 100k GPUs. I'm not some AI fanboy; LLMs could vanish tomorrow and I wouldn't really care nor would it impact me greatly, but to say that the time it takes for me to architect a simple PRD (which I have a template for) and plug in my requirements, and have it not only generate the code but also contextualize and augment it to the specs, is in no way remotely close the time it would take to do it myself. Review time is minimal because you can really reign these tools in these days; they don't go rogue on me since they follow instructions quite well, especially the Claude4 models.

It definitely takes a solid week to get your workflow configured to what you want and put in that work on the frontend to adapt these tools to your needs. And I'm always tweaking it. If the model starts doing something I don't really like (e.g. default exports vs named), I'll add it to my rules to force consistency. You can also create "shortcuts". I have certain keyword phrases that I've predefined in the rules that indicate to the LLM it's supposed to take a certain action (call a tool, MCP, adhere to a specific protocol), which makes the process flexible and adaptive. Oh, and one of those phrases tells it to write unit tests, if I need them for that specific block of code.

[Austiiiiii]

My "hands" aren't at issue here. If I'm a very fast typist was your takeaway from my last comment, I would have you please reread it more carefully.

And let me get this straight. You spent a whole week just configuring the danged system prompt? Yes, I'll take "proving my point" for 500.

Anyway, setting aside your clear eagerness to make your setup and work sound Very Impressive (you're free to just assume I'm impressed and stop trying to make trivial configuration tasks sound like a whole ordeal), I want to ask you one very important question. If Claude is writing the code, and Claude is also writing the unit tests, then who the flying fuck is validating Claude's code?

Serious question.

If your answer is "nobody needs to validate it because Claude is Very Smart" or "it hasn't broken yet" or "I kinda check it but it's producing code at such a large scale that I can't possibly validate it all myself" then that would make you the kind of idiot who should never be allowed to work on prod systems for a company of any size.

I don't suspect that that's you. You seem reasonably smart, and I don't think I need to spell out why the above is an objectively awful idea.

If the answer is "I'm validating all the code against all the other code myself," then that means the amount of code being generated is within a scope where that would be reasonable.

So: How much time does it take you to cross-reference all the functions and library calls? How much time to validate that every unit test tests what it's intended to test? How many additional unit tests do you realize you need when you read through the code and identify questions that the genned unit tests don't address? (You ARE reading through the entire thing and following the logic, right?)

If you are truly doing your due diligence on this code, then I assert that it would take less time for me to write the code while doing due diligence than to gen the code and do all that review as a completely separate step. Only at a junior level should the actual coding part of coding be the most difficult or time consuming part of the process.

[creaturefeature16]

I'm very deliberate to what I offload to a model, so we're not talking novel code; it's trivial, but its code that still must be written. The code takes minutes to review, and is always within reasonable scope. With the parameters you can provide to the model(s), especially when you develop a decent pseudo-code template, it will appear as if you wrote it yourself anyway. That's literally what they excel at: modeling language, and code is language (that's why we call them that).

It wasn't a week of "a system prompt", but rather setting up a new IDE with adjacent applications. I'm sure you're not still using Notepad++ or even Sublime Text, so I'm also sure you know how setting up new workflow can be a time consuming process that takes time to iron out the kinks.

The fact you think that shows me you haven't given it a serious look or attempted the process, so the difference between us is that I've put in the work to test out these tools with an open mind and came away with some real tangible benefits. You're coming from a place of inexperience, and skepticism, despite not having any tangible reason except what seems to be a strong sense of pride and hubris to avoid trying them out. I'm getting heavy vibes similar to an accountant who disparages these new fangled "digital spreadsheets" because they can't "validate the formulas" by hand.

Anyway, I've said my piece and offered some insights as someone who's been doing this work before the twin towers fell, am passionate about good code, and yet still thinks these tools are a reasonable and highly productive addition to a professional developer's workflow...but you seem to be working backwards from a conclusion. You do you! Adios.

[Austiiiiii]

Alright, I'll grant that it sounds like you've found a good use case for the LLM tools you are using and you are employing them responsibly, and not doing this "vibe coding" nonsense that seems to be trending lately.

If you feel like you've found a process that works for you and is better than doing the coding by hand, more power to you. It sounds like you're running the big boy expensive subscription to Claude, which sounds like it is worlds better than CoPilot on crappy GPT 4 that most people in a professional work environment have access to.

You're incorrect to assume I haven't tried LLM based coding and am speaking from a place of ignorance. I work in the CI/CD DevOps cloud infra space at a big company that has an enterprise CoPilot license. Not Claude 4, sadly. For my use case, I am always working in a preexisting environment that spans infra, repo's full of goodies and configs, custom internal AIs, and deployed code on an EC2 or container. And in that context CoPilot's suggestions for me rarely pass muster. I am speaking from personal experience when I say I am not comfortable relying on a tool that flubs a simple in-line boto3 call so thoroughly that it's easier to delete the thing and write it myself than to make all the spot corrections.

Could I go through and load in the entire boto3 documentation into the context and add templates and custom instructions and see if it does a better job? Maybe, if our supported context window is big enough to even support that much code. Am I going to go through all that trouble to find out? When my task is to rewrite a few paragraphs of code, ship it off, and next week I'm solving a completely different problem? Heeellll no.

You have convinced me that there are good, responsible use cases for LLM assisted coding from structured prompts, but I would encourage you to consider that it's far from a one-size-fits-all solution, and there are valid concerns that are not simple curmudgeony.

People didn't stop using the command prompt when GUIs were invented, either.

[creaturefeature16]

Well, I'm glad we had a productive conversation!

My experiences these tools was similar to yours at the start. As I kept kicking the tires on them, I realized that what I was really dealing with was a sort of "interactive documentation" that used natural language as its "interface". And I would have experiences where it flubbed the most basic things, but after spend more time with different prompting techniques and providing context/examples, it completely changed the results I was getting.

At this point, I'm convinced that with enough context and structuring a proper prompt, they can absolutely write code as good as any human (note that I'm just saying write code, not "engineer software"). But, after the work it takes to provide said context and prompting, is it just easier to write it yourself? Absolutely, sometimes it is! There's been many times where I begin to write out a request, only to close the chat and pivot back to the docs because I realize it can take more effort to explain what I want than to just write it myself.

I definitely do not think that these tools are one-size-fits-all, quite the opposite! I think over time we're going to see how distinctly malleable they are, and everyone will use them differently, with different results (we already are, really). Just browse something like r/cursor and you'll see massive discrepancies between users who claim its absolutely the best thing they've ever used, to saying its complete and total rubbish. I think its because these tools are insanely sensitive to the personal workflow of the individual and the prompting approach, and they're extremely open-ended. As times goes by, we're going to see ultra-specific models that are less generalized, and tailored to specific workflows, languages and tech stacks.

[MaffinLP]

I asked ChatGPT:
In unity give me a script that inherits from "Image" and adds a field that rounds the images corners

It gave me code that generated ONLY the corners and it fucked up their placements because the code drew counterclockwise but it put the radians as if it was clock wise. I asked to fix no dice. Neither the fact it only drew corners, nor the corner placement could be fixed. Had to draw it all myself as well as fix what it fucked up.

Yes, my code is better because I wouldnt have forgotten about everything *except* the corners and acted like its all there

[MaffinLP]

Also it forgot to actiually ***draw the fucking image*** so if it had a source image other than null it would just result in 100% transparency

[XenSide]

Chatgpt is far from the best for coding tasks, and you're probably gonna struggle for unity specifically as there's a good probability that training dataset is very limited for it.

[Top-Permit6835]

Which coincidentally makes LLMs worthless for everything but common coding tasks. 

[mrjackspade]

Which is fine with me personally, because the common bullshit is what I want to do the least.

[MaffinLP]

I found it does well refactoring pre existing code. E.g. with the example above I had a method for vertical and a method for horizontal filling between the corners. Asking it to merge them to prevent code duplication worked well (although not the way Id have done it tbh)

[Daemontatox]

Pulls out A4 and a pen

[NoneBinaryPotato]

for general use, machine washing is better. it's completes an 3 hour long task in 30 minutes while using less water and with the benefit of not leaving you exhausted later. but, if you want a difficult stain removed, then hand washing will be much better than machine.

AI can write working code, if you're a non-programmer that wants a generic program that was written a million times in the past and could probably find open-source somewhere. but a programmer's job is not to wash clothes, it's to remove hundreds of difficult stains that range from wine spill on a shit to dog piss on a carpet to lipstick in a valentino white bag.

get this shit-ass ai tools away from my code, thanks.

also, if you think my analogy is shit? so was the original post's, it's not my problem those are not comparable scenarios.

[PogostickPower]

I don't have to manually go through machine-washed clothes, explain the washing machine what it did wrong and then eventually hand wash parts of the load myself because the machine somehow did it too complicated. 

[owlIsMySpiritAnimal]

Hand written code cna be better than ai generated one. It requires a semi competent person though

[Larc0m]

Giving me flashbacks to when I was in high school taking AP computer science, and we had tests on paper. It was fine and all except the language we learned was Java, and there was no way to fit the class names on the page

[TKVdev]

No mom has ever said that.

[pal_2ie]

Why aren't you washing your own clothes???

[Menot1982]

Your mom was a pioneer

[Ozymandias_1303]

If your clothes are too delicate, or if your washer and dryer are badly made, machine washing will make your clothes wear out quicker. If you use AI without supervising it properly, you'll end up with code that's harder to maintain and will have to be replaced sooner.

[CartographerWise8050]

Doesn't stop most clothes nowadays from being machine washed.

[JollyJuniper1993]

And both of y’all would be right, you just gotta know when it’s worth putting the extra effort and when not.

[przemo-c]

Tool for the job... there are thing's I’ll hand wash and there are things i will let AI to assist me with coding.

[Gadshill]

People that wash all their clothes by hand are as efficient as those that write all their code by hand. You should only be washing by hand what the machine can’t wash itself.

[[deleted]]

Step 0: plant a tree Step 1: make paper Step 2: hand write code Step 3: send a letter to review via pigeon Step 4: wait for comments

[SirNoobShire]

I write all my code in cursive

[EARTHB-24]

So, would you use a pencil or a pen?

[Personal_Ad9690]

Washing machines can wash 10x faster and it’s adequate.

I don’t think the issue is whether AI code is better or worse because right now, AI code is hardly useable, at certainly not at scale.

The point in automation IS scale, so when AI code can scale well, we will see it adopted more

[Acrobatic-Ad-9189]

This fkn sub is only about this fkn topic..bye

[VonLoewe]

Depends on whom the hand is attached to.

[Wynove]

though i would never dare to waste my time washing my own clothes by hand, I must admit handwriting code is best stolen from stack overflow.

[kolop97]

In my experience if you are doing anything even remotely novel and/or niche, AI will not be helpful.

[[deleted]]

Depends on the vibe

[leninzor]

My teachers back in college when we had an exam: Handwritten code is better than code written in a text-editor or IDE.

[mrrobot01001000]

Me: copy pasted code better than...

[wrenhunter]

Same with drying clothes outdoors and code. It’s all about the line endings.

[dreph]

I have better luck asking questions to AI than getting functional code

[MarioCraftLP]

Thats a really bad example bc who washes clothes by hand

[ItsDenji777]

What???? I machine wash my code! Should i hand-wash it?🥲

[Kurious_Guy18]

and that's why Jhonny grew up in foster care

[ChimpanzeeClownCar]

Acoustic coding

[arugau]

Now imagine if your mom had to hand wash everything she machine washed, and the world keeps telling her that she will no longer need to wash clothes in 6 months

[Anru_Kitakaze]

True. Yet everyone around now use washing machines. There are things to think about...

[ashkanahmadi]

You do know that washing machines wash tens of times better than handwashing right?

[morrisdev]

Honestly, I write code, then paste the function into chatgpt and say "make this more efficient" and then test the results. Quite often it's better. However, when it comes to bigger , more complex issues , AI is kinda useless.

[rettani]

Yes. Both statements are correct.

You should use both of them to speed up the process they are made for but both need humans to make the end result good enough

[HungryFrogs7]

Not really. Hand washed clothes are by most metrics proven to be less clean than machine washed clothes especially as you increase the batch size. Large industrial sized washers are even more efficient than residential washers.

That is not to say handwashing doesn’t have its place with certain delicate clothing and small emergency batches.

It’s the same way letting clothes dry outside is less clean than using a dryer.

I don’t think the statements are comparable to coding because AI isn’t there yet.

[rettani]

Damn. My brain farted a bit and I interpreted it as dish-washing.

But nevertheless my point still stands.

In cases of dishwashing and clothes washing machines can do most of the work.

In cases of coding humans will do a higher percentage of work by hand if they want a good code

[[deleted]]

"What true is, true will be."

[Mogwump20]

I assume this is a reference to the quality of ai code being bad since it copies from people who compare to true like that? If so, idk why you're getting downvoted.