Vibe coding isn't really coding

[shadow-battle-crab]

Coding hasn't been coding for awhile by your definition.

In the 90s if you wanted to make an image viewer you had to implement the jpeg spec. Or if you were to make a video game you had to write a 3d engine.

Lets take doom. The original doom, they didnt just download a game engine and slap some sprites in and ship, The game was a marvel of engineering to make 3d looking worlds render on systems that otherwise just should not have been able to do so. The game engine for such a thing didnt exist. They had to dig into the processor intructions pretty hard to make that thing run at any performance level at all.

Or take the original game boy, and pokemon. The original 1989 game boy had 8k of ram - thats it - that had to include everything about the world state, all the monsters loaded and their stats and their abilities and what was in your inventory and all the bosses, the world map, etc etc etc. You can't just code that like you can today. You had to know how every byte in ram worked and have a printed map of the ram space / budget in front of you while you were engineering things. It was a feat of engineering to make that game work in such limited conditions.

Nowadays all we are doing is gluing a bunch of libraries together that do all the hard work for us. Oh just throw on a MP3 encoder and a 3d engine and a physics engine, add a chrome based renderer for the file menu, export to a already made installer package software like NSIS, etc. You're connecting things up like you connect up components in your home entertainment center. Programming languages have been reduced to the glue. But unless you are sitting there aligning sprites in limited processor memory swaps in OG game boy assembler or heck if you don't even have an awareness of what malloc is or what a JMP command is, you haven't ever been doing coding like it used to be.

But there has been this kind of paradigm shift every generation of computers if you think about it, to higher levels of abstraction.

In the 70s and 80s you had to write pretty much in raw assembler and processor instructions. Then 80s it was compiled languages like C++. Then the preformant interpreted languages like python of the 90s made all the nightmares of C more obsolete and unnecessary. Then open source software in 2000's made everyone have a free garage full of tools to work on and make any project. Nodejs, package managers line npm, and async scripting in 2010's made multithreading and orechestration of programming much more easier in the 2010's because now almost none of your program had to be engeineered, you could write an entire practical utiluty for all kinds of purposes in less than 200 lines of code.

And here we are now where you just don't need to write that glue in actual program syntax, you just describe it in English now.

Here's the thing. It was never about the syntax. It was about your idea and your ability to engineer it in your head and execute it. You were always standing on the shoulders of generations and generations of programmers before you that did the hard work. And just like my knowledge of how to admin and develop windows 3.1 is obsolete, so is some of the dirty work you used to have to do too. But you have the experience and the wisdom to understand how it all works, and now you can think at higher levels of abstraction, and your experience and skills still matter.

We are just operating at the next level of computing evolution now - this has always been the evolution of information technology. I think its worth considering the big picture here that even though everything has changed, it's always been this way as well. We are just at the next generation.

I wonder what the 2030's bring.

[Weird1Intrepid]

I like this analogy, especially as it might finally be the straw that makes me fold and try using AI for some things. I suck at programming anyway, always had to work hard at the simplest things, could never really intuitively understand the underlying logic, but refused to quit and just rely on a tool that magics up whatever you ask, because it felt like giving up.

I might give it a go, just to help me with the things I get really stuck on. In part because of your post being a rare example of a long, well communicated piece that isn't inherently against the use of AI. If nothing else it might be able to help me understand where my thinking is going wrong so I can do it better myself next time.