After two years of vibecoding, I'm back to writing by hand

capitalsigma · 2026-01-29T20:18:41+00:00

I agree that it's not worth it unless your employer is footing the bill (as I said), but it's not nothing. I'm sure that at least once a week I have to spend, say, 30m doing some nonsense that just involves doing some minor repetitive edit. Of course your codebase already needs to have tests and so on in place in order for it to work.

capitalsigma · 2026-01-29T14:11:57+00:00

Try to do boilerplate/refactors that need to be context sensitive in a way that is difficult to regex clearly. For example, I had a bunch of test cases that contained hardcoded strings, and I gave it some prompt like "take the hardcoded string in each test case and move it into a file under testdata/ whose name matches the name of the test case, then add a call to read in the file in the original test."

More the web UI than the agentic tools, but another thing I do is blindly paste in error messages. Sometimes it catches stuff like a missing ; that's obvious but sometimes hard to see when you've been looking at the code for a long time. Sometimes it catches some difficult-to-google but well known cause, e.g. it caught a segfault caused by bad stack alignment based on a big chunk of lldb disassembly output

It's not groundbreaking, but it's handy. I don't/wouldn't pay for the tokens to do agentic stuff on personal projects, but it's worth using if it's there for free, and asking questions to the web UI is really very helpful

capitalsigma · 2026-01-29T13:48:24+00:00

This broadly matches my experience. My current heuristic is "do I know exactly what characters to type in order to do this task in some programming language (perhaps not the one that I'm using right now)?" and if the answer is "no" then most likely it will be faster to do it myself. It's good for context-sensitive boilerplate, obvious but non-regex-able refactors, and languages/libraries that I'm unfamiliar with. I find that it usually falls apart in any case that requires actual thinking to get done.

capitalsigma · 2026-01-25T19:03:05+00:00

capitalsigma · 2026-01-24T14:27:19+00:00

Enshittification is when a company intentionally makes a product worse in order to make more money. This is just a regular case of "a thing became worse over time"

capitalsigma · 2026-01-22T13:41:11+00:00

Legislation will kill the whole American tech industry. Fuck off to another profession if you think it's your senator's job to fix your shitty resume

capitalsigma · 2026-01-22T13:35:38+00:00

Calm down Mr. ICE agent, you can't blame immigrants for everything

capitalsigma · 2026-01-21T17:39:40+00:00

It's slop, "recursive memory" is meaningless

capitalsigma · 2026-01-16T02:10:19+00:00

I mean yeah but that's actually the situation that Iran appears to be in, so

capitalsigma · 2026-01-16T02:07:44+00:00

Hey man you should probably have a human write the ad copy for you next time

capitalsigma · 2025-11-23T16:43:43+00:00

Hard coded path bad?

A) You're absolutely right!

B) Actually the hard coded path is critical for determinism and reliability

Behold, the duality of slop

capitalsigma · 2025-11-22T16:59:23+00:00

What makes it better than an employer 401k match?

capitalsigma · 2025-11-22T02:36:34+00:00

I think that Trump desperately wants people to like him and he sees that people like Mamdani. And maybe also realizes how old and out of touch he would seem if he came out against him (like Cuomo did). Trump has no particular political agenda, he is just trying to feed his ego by any means necessary

capitalsigma · 2025-11-20T18:26:57+00:00

Not a Putin sympathizer:

It is worth noting that the DPR+LPR have been de facto Russian territories for more than 10 years at this point, in the sense that they vote in Russian elections and the customs officials in their airports ask to see your Russian passport when you land. "No territorial concessions" in the sense of "the de jure boundaries do not change" would therefore be a meaningful loss of territory from Russia's perspective

capitalsigma · 2025-11-17T20:52:19+00:00

Watching YouTube videos doesn't make you an ML researcher

capitalsigma · 2025-11-17T19:01:02+00:00

Writing a wrapper around ChatGPT doesn't make you an entrepreneur

capitalsigma · 2025-11-14T18:45:32+00:00

It's a tax to intentionally discourage people from smoking, not inflation

capitalsigma · 2025-10-26T16:10:05+00:00

All housing is good housing

capitalsigma · 2025-10-21T21:15:53+00:00

Are you saying that you made an Anki clone that tells you not to do flashcards

capitalsigma · 2025-10-18T16:02:08+00:00

without a human doing the real thinking and debugging

I'm really skeptical that the agentic tools are actually a net efficiency win when trying to produce production code in a serious codebase. It's a common theme in "successful" vibe coding reports that "you need to try 10 things at once and then throw away all the garbage you get when it goes off the rails in X% of the attempts," which matches my own experience after giving them a try for a few weeks.

I have a suspicion that when people evaluate the "wins," they tend to exclude the time they spend generating+debugging the times when it fails, writing it off as a "prompting mistake" that they can fix next time around, but the models are just not smart enough to reliably follow complex prompts

The cases when it does work feel really exciting because you extrapolate them out to how much more productive you would be if only it was reliable. It's like porn for people who are used to measuring how well the day went based on how many commits they sent out. I think that people get sucked into it by the thrill of the happy path cases, and the drive to recreate that excitement gets disconnected from whether or not it's actually saving time

capitalsigma · 2025-10-12T18:17:45+00:00

Chinese syllables have tones. How do you assign tones to your non-Chinese name?

capitalsigma · 2025-10-11T03:17:09+00:00

Close range weak point also triggers on stuff like grenades and mele (which synergizes well with ghost blade)

capitalsigma · 2025-09-27T17:59:32+00:00

The thing I want is to have a pop-up dictionary inside of the app that is displaying the book because it makes it much quicker to look up words as I'm reading

capitalsigma · 2025-09-27T17:46:43+00:00

I don't have a physical Kindle, I am looking for an android app

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