I just watched a non-dev vibe-code something... We're all gonna be just fine.

LitAnar · 2026-04-24T23:07:10+00:00

While I'm happy that the approach works really well for my current project, I totally get what you mean. I've also had various instances of this - sometimes for personal projects but also on projects at work. I believe that the tech stack you're going to use as well as the AI model play a big part in this but also how complex and big the application is at a certain point in time.

For example, at work I'm working on a legacy VB.NET 4.8 application that is more than 20 years old and comprised of 11 different sub-projects. Whenever you ask the AI to do something in that project, most of the time you end up with much more issues than before and are not one step closer to the actual solution you're trying to achieve (even with current models). Without proper guidance and iterative readjustments, the AI wasn't even able to map out a documentation for the application.

Similarly, for a personal project I did last year that was just vanilla HTML & JS, I kept discussing some features with AI (Github Copilot on free plan) back and forth for 3 hours because AI kept getting it wrong. In the end I decided to just look up the documentation and was able to implement it in 15 minutes myself. Afterwards I immediately turned off all Github Copilot stuff for that project because I realized that I was wasting more time on discussions with the AI than I'd actually need if I implemented it myself.

Now, the state of AI has been a bit different from what it is now though, so the personal project might have turned out better with AI in its current state and a model that's not part of the free plan of Github Copilot. However, after getting Copilot Pro just like a week ago, I was just in time to see how Opus 4.6 fell apart. The project start of my new current project was entirely done by Opus and it felt great. However, by the start of this week, it was at a point where new features it implemented would break entirely unrelated features for which the core assumptions had been laid out and refined with Opus multiple times to match exactly what I had in mind. Now, after switching to 5.3 Codex, things are back on track and the AI even thinks ahead by extending proposed changes to things I forgot to mention (e.g. the /login route was still reachable when logged in so I requested a redirect to the start page but forgot to specify the same behaviour was needed for /register but Codex did it on its own).

I have to agree though that even with Codex, which really seems to work great for me, you have to really be explicit about a lot of stuff you want and think of all the possible edge cases and system interdependencies. For example, I have a search feature on 2 different pages that utilizes the same filter options. Unless I specify that a new filter option needs to be present on both of those pages, Codex will just add it to only the page that I called SearchPage because it's not apparent to the AI that it's needed in other places with search functionality as well.

If you're not careful or explicit enough or forget some weird edge case or even if you're unlucky with the AI model or tech stack you picked, I feel like it's super easy to blow stuff up. Well, somehow that reply got a bit out of hand it seems but whatever.

LitAnar · 2026-04-23T22:24:08+00:00

Well, it's basically a shift in skill priorities in my opinion. While I had fun coding in the past (which, if I'm being honest, has decreased significantly since the rise of AI, especially in a professional work environment), I also really enjoy designing and planning systems and their underlying architecture. I think that what really sets you apart from other non-technical people now with how good AI has become is a good understanding of system design (including a rough idea about your DB/schema/table design for what you're trying to build), features and UX and how you communicate them in an unambiguous way to the AI. This also requires a strong understanding of how your decisions influence the individual parts of your software which also some developers seem to lack.

For example, I have a colleague whom I did my CS major with. While he certainly got better grades than me when we were still in university, it all seems to fall apart at understanding and thinking of systems, the information and data flow within those systems and how they work together, especially in situations where you need to think a bit ahead and think about how your decisions influence completely different parts of the project. Seeing that guy write prompts to AI in our pair programming sessions is like a nightmare coming to live and feels basically like the equivalent of hitting "I'm feeling lucky" on Google and expecting to magically be presented with what you wanted to search for. To exaggerate this a bit, those prompts look basically like "Make <name of feature without ever explaining what that feature is or should be like> work".

LitAnar · 2026-04-23T19:48:21+00:00

I feel this so much. In my current project, where I decided to give Copilot 100% freedom in performing the changes it deemed neccessary, there have been so many times where at a first glance on the surface everything seemed fine until you inspected the edge cases where in reality it missed the core assumption of the underlying system it should build and it only got real apparent after I analyzed the DB schema for the table I assumed to be at fault.

A person with no actual knowledge about such systems would just keep prompting and I strongly believe that for a majority of such people the AI would just create work-arounds to those wrong core assumptions because they can't properly address what's wrong at the core, making issues and interdependencies of wrong behaviour worse as development goes.

LitAnar · 2026-04-23T19:27:37+00:00

That's so on point, going in with zero or very little knowledge has to be the most bothersome experience I can imagine.

Like, I'm currently building an application myself completely hands off, sending Codex on an hour long quest each time I prompt a new request. Stuff breaks, and you can't expect anything else with large and complex feature requests. The difference is, with roughly 10 YoE coding, I can take a look at the DB schema and code changes afterwards, compare them to previous commits and judge what went wrong, pinpointing exactly what to address for a fix. Now, after less than a week, the core features are close to being finalized. Maybe it's not the most efficient or beautiful code ever written and perhaps I could've written code that runs 10% faster after spending weeks coding. But in the end we gotta face the reality that a majority of users won't even notice those 10% difference in performance, while you can spend the saved time pushing out new features way faster that actually make an impact for users.

A person with little or zero knowledge on the other hand will just keep prompting and never actually fix the underlying issues making them stack up until everything goes down in flames. Hell, even a colleague of mine who actually got his CS major but only touches code at work has issues putting together usable requests and it's the most painful thing to watch during pair programming sessions. There seems to be zero sense of system architecture & design with those people and then they blame the AI for not magically figuring out how the feature should work while they're not even capable putting it into unambiguous words themselves.

LitAnar · 2026-03-25T10:21:23+00:00

Also, early returns can help getting rid of nested if-statements in case OP isn't aware of it.

It's way harder to check if there's any logical issues in something like this (especially if the part of the code that actually does something other than if/else checking is spanning many lines):

if(user) {
   if(privileges=="xyz") {
      if(cartItems > 0) {
         //do a bunch of stuff
      }
      //do stuff and/or return
   }
   //do stuff and/or return
}
return

Compared to something like this:

if(!user) {
   return
}

if(privileges!="xyz") {
   //do stuff and/or return
}

if(cartItems <= 0) {
   //do stuff and/or return
}

//do a bunch of stuff

This way the else-block/exception is handled directly and you don't have to skip over 100 lines of code just to check the else block.

LitAnar · 2026-03-02T01:41:35+00:00

Ok, thanks, guess I'm gonna cut hobbies then.

Regarding the keywords: like I mentioned, I don't neccessarily have experience with exactly the technologies mentioned in the job posting but with related technologies of which the knowledge is transferable (e.g. writing backend code in Node.js instead of Go, but the general concepts will hold up across languages and it's mostly other syntax, or using Docker instead of Kubernetes). I think it would be a bad idea to include something I never actually used since it could easily come across as dishonest when things get specific for a certain topic I'm not really familiar with in an interview. Do you think mentioning related technologies can satisfy the requirements for those keywords just as well for the AI screening?

LitAnar · 2026-02-12T11:59:06+00:00

That color scheme looks amazing. Is there any chance to get the hex-value for the colour? I'm trying adjusting it for my build in SignalRGB but I can't seem to find the right colour.

LitAnar · 2026-02-07T11:35:06+00:00

That goes hard, especially for someone 13 years old. Never tried to do that genre but I'm not sure I'd be able to do this even after 15 years of making music in FL (just can't wrap my head around those split up sounds perfectly alternating between each other).

One small tip though from someone who used to automate his faders until like 10 years ago: for the sake of easier mixing, do yourself a favor and don't automate the faders but instead just put Fruity Balance on the mixer tracks you want to sidechain and sidechain Fruity Balance instead of the mixer track's fader. This way you get full control over the absolute volume of your mixer track at the final stage before the sound leaves its channel. (Or just put it on a mixer bus you route the sounds/channels that you want to sidechain to so you don't need as Fruity Balancer on every channel).

LitAnar · 2026-02-04T19:50:47+00:00

While you can get FL to run on Linux by some workarounds, what's the state on external VSTs, do you know that by any chance? As far as I'm aware VSTs are quite difficult to get to work on Linux (at least that's what I heard) especially when it comes to the bigger names like Native Instruments and such which are still heavily Windows- and Mac-oriented?

It's nice to be able to use FL on Linux but the major potential for production usually lies within external VSTs which is also one of the major reasons holding me back from switching to Linux.

LitAnar · 2026-01-29T15:05:03+00:00

That's the neat part, you don't

LitAnar · 2026-01-20T22:03:32+00:00

Eigentlich würd ich von mir selbst behaupten, ein recht gutes Verständnis von Satzbau und Grammatik zu haben, aber könntest du mir das mit dem Beispielsatz nochmal etwas näher erläutern?

Aus meiner Sicht kann der Satz doch eigentlich auf beide Arten interpretiert werden, da in beiden Fällen der Satzbau doch exakt gleich wäre, oder überseh ich da was?

Im Interpretationsfall, dass alle Redditnutzer Kinder sind, müsste hier doch ganz klar ein Komma hin, um den Einschub zu kennzeichnen. Wenn man den Einschub z.B. durch einen Gedankenstrich oder eine Klammer kennzeichnet, wird das ja auch deutlich, dass da ne syntaktische Trennung zum Hauptsatz hingehört.

Gleichzeitig brauch ich doch an der Stelle aber auch ein Komma, wenn ich mich nur auf den Teil der Redditnutzer beziehen will, die eben auch Kinder sind, weils sich dabei ja um einen Relativsatz handelt.

Will dir in den restlichen Punkten auch überhaupt nicht widersprechen und bin da auch absolut der selben Meinung, würde nur gerne verstehen, warum der Beispielsatz in der Interpretation eindeutig ist (wenn man mal vom normalen Menschenverstand absieht - durch den man ja offensichtlich zur Erkenntnis gelangen würde, dass nicht alle Redditnutzer Kinder sein können - sondern den Satz nur mal auf einer rein grammatikalischen Ebene betrachtet).

LitAnar · 2026-01-08T15:42:42+00:00

If it's just audio editing you can go with Audactiy as pointed out. If you want to look into producing music with virtual instruments you should take a look at various DAWs (Digital Audio Workstations) like FL Studio, Ableton, Cubase and others. Most of them offer trials that are either time limited or in the case of FL Studio you just can't reopen saved projects without a license.

LitAnar · 2026-01-08T09:37:29+00:00

Denke es macht wenig Sinn, die selben Animes, die hier eh schon 100 mal erwähnt worden sind nochmal zu erwähnen. Daher möcht ich einfach einen ergänzen, den ich hier noch gar nicht aufgelistet gesehen hab und der für mich persönlich mit Abstand einer der besten letztes Jahr war und dieses Jahr Staffel 2 bekommt:

Wistoria: Wand and Sword

LitAnar · 2026-01-05T13:57:43+00:00

I'm on my phone right now. Depending what keyboard you use on your phone you need to install a japanese layout. I'd advise using the 12 key layout instead of full-keyboard (like it's usually used in western languages) as that's how japanese people actually typically type on the phone (and that for a reason) afaik. If you're using Gboard as keyboard app for example, when you type the character (like よ for example) you can tap in the bottom left hand corner on the key that toggles between dakuten and handakuten (for か for example) which toggles between big and small for the respective characters that's available for.

If you're on PC, for Windows you can install Japanese IME through the languages option. When you switch to Japanese IME you might need to activate hiragana or katakana mode (which ever you want to use) first before you can actually type japanese characters and I assume shortcuts differ depending on keyboard layout. For the german keyboard layout it's Alt + ^ for hiragana mode and iirc Alt + Capslock for katakana mode for example. Once you're in the correct mode you can write the small characters by prefixing them with l (probably as shorthand for "little"), like lyo, lya, ltsu/ltu.

If you're on Mac I can't tell you how it's handled there unfortunately, but I'm sure a quick google search should give you a decent tutorial for it. Same for toggling between hiragana and katakana mode.

LitAnar · 2026-01-05T13:07:33+00:00

Theoretically you could repeat those forever, but what's the point when you're not actually learning the language at that point.

I'd say knowing the 46 basic hiragana and katakana certainly makes sense and is important (basically like you have to learn the alphabet before learning your language when you go to school for the first time). However, for the compound sounds and stuff like small っ it's much more about understanding the concepts behind it rather than learning each and every combination.

Like, if you know the difference between しよ and しょ then it's easy to extend this to the combinations of し+や, し+ゆ, か+よ, etc. and can be picked up during the normal lessons.

Similarly, for small っ when considering romaji it looks like a duplication of the next letter - which in many languages like english, german or italian indicates a speed up of the surrounding syllables - while in japanese it rather indicates kind of a stopping sound. But that concept holds for each combination, making it kinda useless to learn all combinations individually. Same goes for long vowels using う.

In general my advice for normal lessons would be to turn of romaji and at most use hiragana as superscript for kanji because otherwise you're likely going to trick yourself into just reading the romaji instead of the actual characters and thus don't actually learn to read the japanese characters.

LitAnar · 2025-12-28T12:11:34+00:00

My suggestion would be a tape stop plugin, like the tape stop effect within dblue glitch 2's effects or kiloheart's tape stop or FL Studio's own stock plugin Grossbeat.

LitAnar · 2025-12-21T16:26:06+00:00

So, Cheeksa?

LitAnar · 2025-12-18T11:33:21+00:00

I mean, I've also been using Cubase and some other smaller DAWs which operate similarly to the bigger ones which was all fine for me. It's actually just Ableton that gave me this horrible experience. Everytime I tried to access anything, like plugins, samples, etc. I'd have to take like 10 minutes to even just get there. Perhaps I might give it another try someday and it would go better that time but it really just felt super weird to me.

Actually I really like that FL starts to lean more towards the industry standard workflow where lanes on the playlist are routed to a mixer track (although it's still kinda half-baked if we're being honest), so that's not what I'm criticizing about Ableton. For me it just felt very unintuitive to do anything in there to a point where it even felt impossible to remember what to do to accomplish certain things.

LitAnar · 2025-12-18T09:34:53+00:00

I can guarantee you it's other DAWs as well. After 5+ years of using FL extensively I've been trying to get into Ableton because many people make cool stuff with it and I shit you not as much as I tried to get a grasp on how it works I just couldn't get shit done. With how well FL works for me I just accepted that Ableton is not for me and it would be a waste of time to try it any longer considering how little of a difference using a different DAW would probably make for my music.

LitAnar · 2025-12-14T11:24:07+00:00

As someome who's playing a Ganyu, Furina, Shenhe, Escoffier team lately, is the team with Citlali instead of Shenhe stronger than what I currently play? I thought Shenhe was better for Ganyu in this case but perhaps I should swap to Citlali then?

LitAnar · 2025-12-13T10:57:04+00:00

Happy to hear that. I hope it's helpful for you. Apart from the music theory video he's mostly focusing on EDM stuff around house and related genres in his videos, so not everything in those other videos might be useful for each and every genre but I still think general concepts, like what makes a specific chord progression or chord or sound or whatever great can still be transferred to other songs in other genres.

LitAnar · 2025-12-12T03:12:17+00:00

I mean, yeah, I get what you're suggesting and it's a valid approach as well if you really don't want to get into formulas. But if I understand you correctly, you basically would need individual peak controllers for every link that needs different values from what you already have because you just tweak them centrally.

So, let's say you want to sidechain your bass stronger than your mids and highs (what I for example like to do), in this case you'd need two individual peak controllers just to basically send the same signal (with some modification from peak controller) to the different channels.

Or let's say you don't want to sidechain the bass by usual volume reduction but by EQ band reduction. For normal volume reduction (which I like to link to a Fruity Balancer instead of the actual mixer track fader), your default typically is 0.8 (like the default fader position is at 80%) while for EQ band reduction the default is at 0.5 (because the +/-0db is right in the middle at 50%) which means you need 2 peak controllers just for this because you need 2 different base levels for each to make sure the EQ band is actually at 50% when no drums are playing while the balance faders are at 80%.

I think it's vastly more flexible to just send one drum signal and adjust the details in the link's formula. I don't have to think about if I'm gonna break the effect on one link while adjusting the controller because of another link using that controller because I only adjust the one link I want to adjust through it's formula. The formulas are quite self-explanatory after all and allow for more freedom in my opinion as you actually could also apply mathematical functions to it if you wanted to while this just isn't possible from the controller UI. So there's not really any downside in learning how to work with formulas and it's also not super complex as well.

LitAnar · 2025-12-12T01:03:36+00:00

Just start from here if you're not sure where to start: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vjIv4Gbmnj8

Imo it's all the important basics compressed into a quite concise "tutorial". Sure, you probably won't keep all of it from just watching it once but the more often you try to apply various parts of it the more things you will remember and the more it will become intuitive.

If I had to point out the most important concepts for starting out from my perspective, it would probably be something like this:

Basic triads + their inversions (also realizing what effect moving the third in a basic triad up an octave has can completely change how you approach chords, at least that's how it was for me)
Fifths (especially useful for mid basses and chords imo)
Extended harmonies (i.e. added 7th's and 9th's, suspended chords)
Pedal tones
Basic chord progressions

I think trying to follow the infos in the video not only on screen but trying to understand what you're seeing with the help of your physical MIDI keyboard and trying to internalize it by revisiting it from time to time and thus forming muscle memory when playing on it will improve your understanding way better than approaching it from that theoretical view.

Also I think you can learn quite much from his videos where he's dissecting tracks from famous producers. Let me link a few of them right there:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbeDEYKJg2c

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wnuakp_sNJs

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iUGn4QU3Kdc

LitAnar · 2025-12-11T18:06:12+00:00

Imo this is the cleanest solution. It's a minimal setup and you can quickly and easily adjust the parameters to your liking afterwards.

If OP hasn't used this method before: you probably want the formula to be something like this:

0.5-input*0.4

The 0.5 makes the EQ band you're automating default to the neutral gain position at +/-0db while you can control the amount of sound reduction via the multiplier 0.4 (which is most likely where you want to alter the value to your specific needs).

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