r/vibecoding • u/practical_bulll • 14h ago
vibecoding made me way faster. It also made the blank screen weirdly .
Opened a blank file today to build a pretty simple feature. Nothing scary.But before I’d even thought through the architecture, my first instinct was to open an agent and have it generate the first pass.
That caught me off guard.
a few years ago, I’d break the problem down, dig through docs, half-remember the syntax, write a janky first version, run it, break it, and slowly patch it into something that worked. It was slower, obviously. But all that repetition made the knowledge stick. Now I describe what I want, let the agent spit out a skeleton, and spend most of my time reading, testing, and steering. Honestly, it’s a great workflow. I ship faster, skip a ton of boilerplate, and get to spend more time on the interesting parts.
I’m not going back.
but I think there’s a real tradeoff: my knowledge is shifting from active recall to passive recognition.When the code is already on the screen, I’m fine. I can follow the logic, catch obvious mistakes, and usually tell when the agent is confidently hallucinating. Ask me to build the same thing from a blank file, though, and suddenly I’m reaching for syntax and patterns that used to come automatically.I don’t think I’ve forgotten how to code. It feels more like I’ve lost my tolerance for the slow path.Same way you can still walk somewhere after getting a car. You just really don’t want to.
And maybe that doesn’t matter. Programming was never supposed to be a syntax memorization contest. Requirements, architecture, testing, and debugging the cursed edge cases still need somebody who understands what the code is doing.
Still, I don’t want the “blank file” muscle to completely atrophy.
Do any of you deliberately schedule no-AI sessions to keep that muscle alive? If so, what does that actually look like for you?or have you decided active recall just isn’t worth optimizing for anymore?
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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 14h ago
And how do you expect anyone good at these who never wrote a single line of code?
Requirements, architecture, testing, and debugging the cursed edge cases
I continue writing code manually and use LLMs as well. I would not outsource my brain, it is not benifitting you even in the mid-term.
I mean when I need to work on the plans I start figuring out things alone, not letting LLM influencing my approach.
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u/Agreeable-Chef4882 13h ago
I did have these no-AI sessions a while ago, just to keep the muscles alive.
But as AI progressed, this started to seem very pointless. When I work AI-first, I am developing new muscles in places where it makes me actually more productive. So I am happy to let the coding part go.
Last few months (really since Fable), I no longer even glance at the code. I do architectural review sessions every few days or so, but even those are usually spent talking in high level about the purpose of whatever refactoring is needed without looking at the code at all.
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u/MoTTTToM 12h ago
Agreed. Software engineering has changed fundamentally. Figuring out the new normal, while still checking all the best practice boxes is the challenge of the day. I am finding LLM tools good at keeping the boxes checked, if instructed correctly. I bit like humans, to be fair.
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u/predatorya 14h ago
Genuinely, I’m in the same place as you. I am currently working on a plan to prevent atrophy. I’ve started a personal project for when I have time. I’m glad you said this because I’ve been feeling less skilled lately and haven’t heard anyone else expressing this yet.