I Vibe-Coded SwiperTab While Watching TV<br>← back<br>Why coding by hand still matters
Before I share my vide-coding experience, I’d like to quickly talk about why coding by hand still matters.
I am a software engineer with 5+ years of professional experience and 7+ years of “fiddling” experience. I got out of college about 7 months ago. In other words, I am the perfect age to experience the ongoing shift in the way we approach programming.
I have always loved writing software. You can see that by taking a look at my GitHub page. I have 51 public repositories, ~40 private ones, and I also have around 80 projects sitting locally on my machine. COVID was a hyper-productive time for me.
The only thing I loved more than writing software was learning about the technologies powered by software. I will never forget the feeling I had a couple of years ago when I realized what “HTTP is built on top of TCP” actually means. Everyone knows that sentence. But what does it actually (intuitively) mean? I wanted to find out. I created a simple HTTP server and connected to it using a raw TCP socket.
At first, I sent random data. The HTTP server ignored me :( Nothing happened.
Then I sent bytes formatted like an HTTP/1.1 request.
GET /heok HTTP/1.1<br>Host: marindedic.com<br>User-Agent: CustomTCPClient/1.0<br>Accept: */*<br>Connection: close<br>What I received was the same kind of response I would have received if I had used the regular fetch route.
I’ve had many moments where I realized that something I’ve considered “complex” is actually much simpler in reality, and this was one of those moments.
HTTP/1.1 is not magic. It is an application-layer protocol where the client sends a formatted text request over a TCP connection, and the server parses that byte stream according to HTTP rules. People are scared of the word protocol so they just assume it’s too complex to dive into. A protocol is just a set of rules , and those rules can turn out to be pretty simple.
The reason I took this memory trip is because I still remember that moment as if it happened yesterday. I had a question, wrote a script, failed, tried again, got a eureka moment, and remembered it for life — because I did it with my own hands . I learned something.
If you do not code by hand at all anymore, you will not learn the topic in the same way. You may read about it, understand it temporarily, even memorize some of the stuff, but it will eventually become one of those things where you know that you knew it at one moment, but can’t remember it because it made no impact on you.
The same thing happens with high-school and college knowledge. You may ace the exam, but a few years later you barely remember the topic, because you stopped using that knowledge. That is perfectly OK and it happens to everyone. The important part is that we actually learned it. It changed our brain chemistry. We exercised our brain. We became smarter. These are life-lasting positive changes.
Look at the smartest people in the world. They were all heavy readers and learners at their young age, and now, at 50 years old, they still have the habit of learning and they are very good generalists, or even polymaths. These are the people that run companies and make moneeeey.
As Jordan Peterson would (hilariously) put it, READ MORE!
I went off-road a bit up there, but I wanted to express my concern for the future generations. As we go further into the future, we need smarter thinkers, mathematicians, physicists and scientists. I am not saying that the usage of AI is bad for that direction, but I see younger generations refusing to employ their mental faculties for even the simplest of problems
They ask an LLM, quickly scan the bolded parts of the response, copy the answer, and move on. Not great.
Why I wanted to vibe-code a whole project
I love using LLMs to boost my productivity. I’m even instructing other branches in my company on how to automate their common workflows using LLMs.
Vibe coding vs coding with agents
When talking about software engineering with AI, people often use the term “vibe coding.” But I think it is important to separate vibe coding from coding with agents.
Coding with agents means you still behave like an engineer. You define requirements, review the implementation, understand the architecture, test carefully, and remain responsible for the result.
Vibe coding is when you roughly know what you want, let the LLM make some decisions, and are not even obligated to look at the code. It allows you to watch TV shows while programming. As long as the vibe-coded product cannot harm the PC, expose confidential data, or become critical for anyone, I think vibe coding is fine.
For my own needs, I have vibe-coded two browser extensions, some shell scripts for my workflow, OS and monitor support scripts — I use i3wm, btw — and my personal website. I looked at the code because I was curious, but I did not really have to. The code was acceptable, the outcome was only for myself,...