In order to be effective at software engineering, you must be familiar with the problem space, and this requires thinking and wrestling with the problem. You can’t truly know the pain of using an API by just reading its documentation or implementation. You have to use it to experience it. The act of writing code, despite being slower, was a way for me to wrestle with the problem space, a way for me to find out that my initial ideas didn’t work, a way for thinking. Vibe coding interfered with that.
If you’re thinking without writing, you only think you’re thinking.
– Leslie Lamport
Yep. This what I don’t get about people who are using these spaghetti-bots. How do they figure out the right solution to a problem without actually walking around the whole perimeter of the problem?
My guess is they are not, and they’re just waiting until someone complains and they’ll get a job somewhere else and leave the mess for someone else(‘s chatbot) to clean up.
Between that and the death of open source, our industry is about to become a disaster area.
Except that code is generally made of… other code. And generally gets transformed from some kind of source form to some kind of deployment form. And then executed by some kind of runtime, made of code. On some kind of OS, made of code.
The level of abstraction at which you make paper by hand is pretty much constant. The level of abstraction at which you make even a “hello world” program by hand is extremely flexible.
Depending on your operating environment, even an incredibly complex and impressive task may just be a matter of passing the right flag to a CLI tool that you already use.
Being attentive to the manual experience of how a codebase “feels” is pretty important for making sure a system has a coherent (read: not over-engineered) approach to bridging the high and low levels of the tasks it performs.
Not paying attention to that, because you can delegate it to a chatbot, is kind of like forgoing having light switches in a room because you can just keep a crane parked outside and have it slam a lighting fixture through the ceiling when you need it and then dump a mound of dirt to cover the hole when you don’t need it.
Like, that functions and accomplishes the task in a pinch, but you do not want to try occupying that room in person at any point to do any kind of detail work.