A Single Reason To Not Vibe Code
17 points by asindu
17 points by asindu
There are many ways to keep your brain engaged that are not writing code at your day job, you could for example play Sudoku, Factorio or hell even code yourself a hobby project without any side help.
Speaking of day jobs, I don't think "thinking"is going anyway, sure you might get rusty in writing code but that's not going to be so relevant in the future anymore (sadly). You will probably get to do a lot of brain-intensive work such as technical writing, defining and solving problems, discussing with peers, etc.
So yes, your ability to write code is going to become hampered, but that doesn't imply your brain will atrophy completely, there are many other activities you can do.
As for the London cab driver thing... well perhaps my city cab driver is happy that he doesn't have to study all the streets once he arrives home, and he can rest instead.
Tl dr temporal reasoning might atrophy. At this point this is enough of a commonplace that I’m flagging it as spam.
I wouldn't flag it so quick. It sounds like a solved case, yet US is still killing its country over vibeslop, so uuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuh yeah people still don't know about temporal searsoning atrophia.
This is a clean and concise section that could actually go on Wikipedia with enough references. My only criticism is that they still didn't learn that it's generally a good solution to externalize comments from the actual document it is about. Well, that's why I'm on Lobster for at least.
Yeah, this is the "skills atrophy" concern.
Letting your skills atrophy is a choice. If you're mindful about how you use these new tools you can use them to boost your skills instead.
I actually don't think it's a choice. Practice and habit produce competency. If you stop doing the things that produce competency, you lose it. LLMs will have an effect on competency that is somewhere between digital calculators and written language.
You, as someone who developed their skills before these tools were available, may choose a subset of your skills to keep sharp, and jettison the ones you don't think are valuable anymore, but there's a limited amount of time to do things each day and you will get out of practice in the things you choose to no longer do.
"But LLMs enable people to do so much more!" someone might retort, so they have more time to hone skills. This may prove true, but I have might doubts: the growing reports of mental exhaustion from LLM enthusiasts indicate the mental context switching is not without cost.
I think choice here blends into the societal issues. To what I saw and my own experience, you need to give a child the chances for them to develop skills. Some get born in poorer, families, who don't have time, money, energy, and technology.
So in a way, it's not a choice to the eyes of the child, I agree @jcd. Only to those who have the mean to make the earth a better place for each and everyone to learn and practice as freely and humanly as possible, with responsibility for each other, being all equals.
thanks for the thoughtful comment
I don't have clearly-enough articulated arguments just yet, but my intuition is that knowing how to write code and doing it regularly, rewires your brain similarly to how writing in general does; we simply don't know what other higher-level abilities this skill and practice allows. Letting go of that skill might over time make you worse at design, architecture or any other programming-like skill; we simply don't know.
I will continue to practice for now.
The writing comparison is a really good one.
One of my biggest concerns around LLMs and education is that students are using them to write essays.
I firmly believe that writing is a skill you gain through tedium. You have to write a lot in order to get competent. And writing is both thinking and communication, so it's important to build those muscles.
If you get AI to write everything for you during those formative years it's going to really hurt you.
I learned to program 20+ years ago so I'm completely out of touch with what it takes to start down that path. Could it be that it's like writing in that without the tedium you never develop the critical mental muscles you need?
I would bet that yes, you cannot develop it without the tedium.
We might have a debate at what point it's no longer necessary to continue training to keep the brain-rewiring benefits, but without the initial struggle for at least some time, you will simply not unlock certain skills, aptitudes and modes of thinking.
I think writing is an excellent comparison for this. Because writing is something where we have already seen this massive improvement and the effect on cognitive learning paths.
Mainly hand written > typewriter > computer (> LLM are probably the next iterator). We already have plenty of studies who all (at least in core principle) have proven that the reduction in "tedium" has shown to reduce the retention (which I analogue with learning) capabilities. Mainly proving that with more tedium (hand writing something), retention is greater.
LLMs are the first to make me worry because they completely obsolete the "tedium" part of writing (= writing being the actual act of writing something, not coming up with the idea itself). I wonder if this will completely disintegrate the retention. And we already see idea/concepts shaping (tech debt moving to mental debt, teams vibe coding that lose overview in weeks/months).
My two cents on the matter is: I have mild dyslexia. Writing lots of code - particularly in verbose languages like Rust - becomes a tremendous struggle.
They become fantastic for sharpening my design and code review skills, which are areas I'd rather develop anyways. It's not like I don't still write code, but it's not something I need to get bogged down in constantly.
Maybe that's a bit harsh. Let's give her/him the benefit of the doubt. First post of the blog... It seems unintentional.
This is a selfish reason not to.
There are plenty more unselfish reasons not to that quite frankly I think are more compelling.
They require you to have a conscience though, so maybe that’s not as compelling for many of you.