Programming, Evolved: Lessons and Observations

> There is so much fun, beauty and pleasure in writing code by hand. You can still handcraft code. Just don’t expect this to be your job. This is your passion.

Can people keep a good mental model of the repo without writing code? I always feel like I lose my thoughts if I let an LLM do it for me. I totally get that LLMs can do stuff faster and (Given the right context) sometimes keep better track of this than humans can.

Even musicians had to go digital, but that doesn't mean people stopped playing raw instruments. Will company culture shift towards one senior that has the context + 7 LLMs that work for him? is that where we're heading towards?

Traditional engineering involves more than talking to people, teams, and trade offs.

Where I live the engineering society here does license software engineers now and enforces the term, "Software Engineer," as a protected term. You can't just call yourself a software engineer. You have to have educational credentials, pass exams, and be licensed. You have to keep up with your educational requirements. You have to be insured.

It boils down to the same thing, people and teams, but the difference is liability.

Personally I think we're better off pair programming with actual people than GenAI chat bots. We get to teach each other and learn together which improves our skills. We actually need to socialize and be around people to remain healthy. You miss out on all of these benefits with chat bots.

And there's growing evidence that you don't learn as much when using them [0].

Consider when using them is appropriate and maybe don't rely on them for everything.

[0] https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.08872

One thing that I do not see mentioned enough is how fast editing code is now. I want to create a new function to replace a functionality that appears in multiple places? I can just write the name of the function and the IDE understands what I want to do. It will then promptly copy the existing code into this new function and suggest to replace the occurrences in the code with it. Tab, tab, tab, editing is complete in a few clicks.

Still not convinced.

Advocates claim this helps, but imply that programmers should now be constantly evaluating a dozen or more assistants in various ways and honing prompting strategies. Does that not take time and effort? Wouldn't it make more sense to let the technology develop more?

And then there is this claim that it makes things easier and faster, but what is actually being coded? Has anything remarkable ever come out of vibe coding? Seems like nothing but a lot of unremarkable applications that push no boundaries.

Really coming up with new ideas often means coming up with variations and then honing the results. When iterating like that the speed of coding is already a minor input because what really matters is the judgement calls of knowing what kinds of things to try and when to abandon approaches that are not working out.

And what about all the negative implications that we are still trying to figure out. Just because no vibe code has yet triggered intellectual property lawsuits doesn't mean that won't happen because there is already a lot of that kind of thing going on in the LLM space. And what about the damage that data centers are doing to the environment, to the grid, to markets for processors and memory? When I code things by hand the amount of liability and wreckage I generate is minimal.