alt Hacker NewsThere's something exhilarating about pushing through to some "everything works like I think it should" point, and you can often get there without doing the conscientious, diligent, methodical "right" way of doing things, and it's only getting easier. At the point where everything works, if it's not just a toy or experiment, you definitely have to go back and understand everything. There will be a ton to fix, and it might take longer to do it like that than just by doing it right the first time.
I'm not a professional SWE, I just know enough to understand what the right processes look like, and vibe coding is awesome but chaotic and messy.
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If you're hanging your features off a well trodden framework or engine this seems fine.
If frameworks don't make sense for what you're doing though and you're now relying on your LLM to write the core design of your codebase... it will fall apart long before you reach "its basically working".
The more nuanced interactions in your code the worse it'll do.
> I'm not a professional SWE
It was already obvious from your first paragraph - in that context even the sentence "everything works like I think it should" makes absolute sense, because it fits perfectly to limited understanding of a non-engineer - from your POV, it indeed all works perfectly, API secrets in the frontend and 5 levels of JSON transformation on the backend side be damned, right ;) Yay, vibe-coding for everyone - even if it takes longer than the programming the conventional way, who cares, right?
I've noticed that as well. I don't memorize every single syntax error, but when I use agents to help code I learn why they fail and how to correct them. The same way I would imagine a teacher learns the best way to teach their students.
AI is allowing a lot of "non SWEs" to speedrun the failed project lifecycle.
The exuberance of rapid early-stage development is mirrored by the despair of late-stage realizations that you've painted yourself into a corner, you don't understand enough about the code or the problem domain to move forward at all, and your AI coding assistant can't help either because the program is too large for it to reason about fully.
AI lets you make all the classic engineering project mistakes faster.
"It was a non-trivial project, and I had to be paying attention to what the agent was doing"
There is a big difference between vibe coding and llm assisted coding and the poster above seems to be aware of it.