Comment by perrygeo

Comment by perrygeo 17 hours ago

2 replies

> Getting answers to those question is learning, regardless of where the answer comes from.

Sort of. The process of working through the question is what drives learning. If you just receive the answer with zero effort, you are explicitly bypassing the brain's learning mechanism.

There's huge difference between your workflow and fully Agentic AIs though.

Asking an AI for the answer in the way you describe isn't exactly zero effort. You need to formulate the question and mold the prompt to get your response, and integrate the response back into the project. And in doing so you're learning! So YOUR workflow has learning built in, because you actually use your brain before and after the prompt.

But not so with vibe coding and Agentic LLMs. When you hit submit and get the tokens automatically dumped into your files, there is no learning happening. Considering AI agents are effectively trying to remove any pre-work (ie automating prompt eng) and post-work (ie automating debugging, integrating), we can see Agentic AI as explicitly anti-learning.

Here's my recent vibe coding anecdote to back this up. I was working on an app for an e-ink tablet dashboard and the tech stack of least resistance was C++ with QT SDK and their QML markup language with embedded javascript. Yikes, lots of unfamiliar tech. So I tossed the entire problem at Claude and vibe coded my way to a working application. It works! But could I write a C++/QT/QML app again today - absolutely not. I learned almost nothing. But I got working software!

Eisenstein 16 hours ago

The logical conclusion of this is 'the AI just solves the problem by coding without telling you about it'. If we think about 'what happens when everyone vibe-codes to solve their problems' then we get to 'the AI solves the problem for you, and you don't even see the code'.

Vibe-coding is just a stop on the road to a more useful AI and we shouldn't think of it as programming.

  • icedchai 9 hours ago

    It "tells you about it" with code. You can still learn from the code AI has produced. It may be suboptimal or messy... but so is code produced by many of our fellow humans.