> When you spend two years making useless Arduino projects, you develop instincts about electronics, materials, and design that you can’t get from a tutorial. When vibe coding goes straight to production, you lose that developmental space. The tool is powerful enough to produce real output before the person using it has developed real judgment.

The crux of the problem. The only way to truly know is to get your hands dirty. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

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alwa an hour ago | parent | next [-]

Then again, sophisticated manufactured electronics had long been cheap and available by the time somebody thought to create Arduino as a platform in the first place.

And even today, people hack on assembly and ancient mainframe languages and demoscene demos and Atari ROMs and the like (mainly for fun but sometimes with the explicit intention of developing that flavor of judgment).

I predict with high confidence that not even Claude will stop tinkerers from tinkering.

All of our technical wizardry will become anachronistic eventually. Here I stand, Ozymandius, king of motorcycle repair, 16-bit assembly, and radio antennae bent by hand…

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bool3max 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

You're absolutely right -- that's the crux of the problem. There are no shortcuts, only future liabilities.

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Aurornis an hour ago | parent | next [-]

If you didn't catch it, this is a joke calling out the comment above it for using a couple obvious LLM-isms. The comment above may have been a joke, too. It's hard to tell any more.

	▲	the_af 39 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		> It's hard to tell any more. Wait, I think I have the answer! "You're in a desert, walking along in the sand when all of a sudden you look down and see a tortoise. It's crawling toward you. You reach down and flip the tortoise over on its back. The tortoise lays on its back, its belly baking in the hot sun, beating its legs trying to turn itself over. But it can't. Not without your help. But you're not helping. Why is that?"

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james2doyle 2 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> You're absolutely right

Bot detected

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tootubular an hour ago | parent | next [-]

But crucially they used "--" and not "—" which means they're safe. Unless it's learning. I may still be peeved that my beloved em dash has been tainted. :(

	▲	the_af an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Of course they'll learn. LLM bots have been spotted on HN using that hipster all lower case style of writing. i can write like this if i want. or if i were a clever ai bot.

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the_af an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I think that's the joke.

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names_are_hard an hour ago | parent [-]

I found the key insight -- when a human tries to sound like an LLM, that's perceived by other humans as humor.

	▲	teaearlgraycold 42 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		The issue is clear
	▲	groestl an hour ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Not sarcasm. Not cynism. Just pure humor.

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gowld 43 minutes ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Couldn't one rebut that Arduino is plug-and-play without getting your hands dirty in lower-level electronics?

	▲	rglover 32 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		The article addresses this by making the point that prototypes != production. Arduino is great for prototyping (authors opinion; I have limited experience) but not for production-level manufacturing. LLMs are effectively (from this article's pov) the "Arduino of coding" but due to their nature, are being misunderstood/misrepresented as production-grade code printers when really they're just glorified MVP factories. They don't have to be used this way (I use LLMs daily to generate a ton of code, but I do it as a guided, not autonomous process which yields wildly different results than a "vibed" approach), but they are because that's the extent of most people's ability (or desire) to understand them/their role/their future beyond the consensus and hype.

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epiccoleman an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

I might be tilting at a strawman of your definition of vibe coding - apologies in advance if so.

But LLM-aided development is helping me get my hands dirty.

Last weekend, I encountered a bug in my Minecraft server. I run a small modded server for my kids and I to play on, and a contraption I was designing was doing something odd.

I pulled down the mod's codebase, the fabric-api codebase (one of the big modding APIs), and within an hour or so, I had diagnosed the bug and fixed it. Claude was essential in making this possible. Could I have potentially found the bug myself and fixed it? Almost certainly. Would I have bothered? Of course not. I'd have stuck a hopper between the mod block and the chest and just hacked it, and kept playing.

But, in the process of making this fix, and submitting the PR to fabric, I learned things that might make the next diagnosis or tweak that much easier.

Of course it took human judgment to find the bug, characterize it, test it in-game. And look! My first commit (basically fully written by Claude) took the wrong approach! [1]

Through the review process I learned that calling `toStack` wasn't the right approach, and that we should just add a `getMaxStackSize` to `ItemVariantImpl`. I got to read more of the codebase, I took the feedback on board, made a better commit (again, with Claude), and got the PR approved. [2]

They just merged the commit yesterday. Code that I wrote (or asked to have written, if we want to be picky) will end up on thousands of machines. Users will not encounter this issue. The Fabric team got a free bugfix. I learned things.

Now, again - is this a strawman of your point? Probably a little. It's not "vibe coding going straight to production." Review and discernment intervened to polish the commit, expertise of the Fabric devs was needed. Sending the original commit straight to "production" would have been less than ideal.

But having an LLM help doesn't have to mean that less understanding and instinct is built up. For this case, and for many other small things I've done, it just removed friction and schlep work that would otherwise have kept me from doing something useful.

This is, in my opinion, a very good thing!

[1]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes/3e3... [2]: https://github.com/FabricMC/fabric-api/pull/5220/changes