These days, I'm not sure anymore. I learned through self-study, reading documents. I don't have a degree, and I don't have the exceptional talent to be involved in language standardization.

Everyone around me codes with AI, and most of them produce better results than I do. That's natural. I'm good at some things, but I'm bad at many others. I still hand-code occasionally, but now the main is AI coding, and hand-coding is the sub.

This document probably held true until about 3 or 4 years ago. But since last year, I'm not sure. I have nothing to say other than 'Just do it.'

People say vibe coding has security issues, but honestly, I have security issues in my own code too, from TTL and all that. In the end, with vibe coding, knowing the right security keywords and understanding the problems seems to come from experience anyway.

Reading 'So You Want to be a Programmer,' I feel like conversations with other programmers and the whole process of being a programmer feel distant to me now. Since AI came out, I barely talk about programming with other programmers.

It's not just me—most Korean programmers around me are the same. The reason is simple: those kinds of programming discussions make us realize how limited our knowledge is, since our understanding is often filtered through English sources and then translated into Korean. So we just end up not talking to each other about it.

When I saw this document about 4 or 5 years ago, it felt like it was absolutely true. The environment has changed drastically, and reading this again now. Back then I treated it like a Bible, but not anymore. I realize that if you don't have a degree or aren't a native English speaker, there was always a limit to how much you could participate. These days, everything is changing so fast. As AI breaks down the English barrier, the quality of materials I can read has gone up, and I'm starting to think that even programming mindsets might change depending on language background.

But if I were to advise someone starting programming from scratch today, I'd probably just tell them to learn through vibe coding and get familiar with programming keywords and black-box coding.

Vibe coding has become the baseline these days. The domains individuals need to handle have become so broad that it's gotten more complex.

In the past, being good at just one domain was enough to make a living. But these days, everyone wants to become a full-stack developer—something that used to be rare. Even then, full-stack developers had a clear front-end or back-end bias, with some areas being shallow and others deep. Now, people are expected to be good at everything.

If you want to become a true expert, I'd say keep hand-coding and focus on a single domain. But if not, I'd say just go all in on vibe coding. Use it a lot, and build your own worldview through it

The feeling of hand-coding and vibe coding is so different that I can't help but tell people to practice both. They complement each other, but they don't really feel like they're connected or intertwined. They rely on different kinds of intuition.

Still, I think I'll keep hand-coding. Not because it's more productive, but purely because I enjoy it as a hobby. AI writes better code than I do, but hand-coding is still enjoyable enough as a hobby