I’ve been 90% vibe coding for a year or so now, and I’ve learned so much about networking just from spinning up a bunch of docker containers and helping GPT or Claude fix niggling issues.
I essentially have an expert (well, maybe not an expert but an entity far more capable than I am on my own) who’s shoulder I can look over and ask as many questions I want to, and who will explain every step of the process to me if I want.
I’m finally able to create things on my computer that I’ve been dreaming about for years.
I usually learn way more by having Claude do a task and then quizzing it about what it did than by figuring out how to do it myself. When I have to figure out how to do the thing, it takes much more time, so when I'm done I have to move on immediately. When Claude does the task in ten minutes I now have several hours I can dedicate entirely to understanding.
When you have a headache, do you avoid taking ibuprofen because one day it may not be available anymore? Two hundred years ago, if you gave someone ibuprofen and told them it was the solution for 99% of the cases where they felt some kind of pain, they might be suspicious. Surely that's too good to be true.
But it's not. Ibuprofen really is a free lunch, and so is AI. It's weird to experience, but these kinds of technologies come around pretty often, they just become ubiquitous so quickly that we forget how we got by without them.
If that happened at this point, it would be after societal collapse.
Every now and then I pause before I ask an LLM to undo something it just did or answer something I know it answered already, somewhere. And then I remember oh yeah, it's an LLM, it's not going to get upset.
My syntax writing skills may well be atrophying, but I'll just do a leetcode by hand once in a while.
>I have a significantly better understanding of the codebase than I would without AI at this point in my onboarding
One of the pitfalls of using AI to learn is the same as I'd see students doing pre-AI with tutoring services. They'd have tutors explain the homework to do them and even work through the problems with them. Thing is, any time you see a problem or concept solved, your brain is tricked into thinking you understand the topic enough to do it yourself. It's why people think their job interview questions are much easier than they really are; things just seem obvious when you've thought about the solution. Anyone who's read a tutorial, felt like they understood it well, and then struggled for a while to actually start using the tool to make something new knows the feeling very well. That Todo List app in the tutorial seemed so simple, but the author was making a bunch of decisions constantly that you didn't have to think about as you read it.
So I guess my question would be: If you were on a plane flight with no wifi, and you wanted to do some dev work locally on your laptop, how comfortable would you be vs if you had done all that work yourself rather than via Claude?
Probably about as comfortable as I would be if I also didn't have my laptop and instead had to sketch out the codebase in a notebook. There's no sense preparing for a scenario where AI isn't available - local models are progressing so quickly that some kind of AI is always going to be available.