Good Vibes?

Down with pure “vibe coding.” And I’m not just saying that as an over-the-hill grey-whiskered dude-bro who’s been driving stick in IDEs for 25 years. I’m very open to driving automatic for a commute. I’m still gonna drive stick at the racetrack on the weekends, but companies have bottom lines and well-utilized AIs bring productivity, no doubt.

I built the last three game engine plugins ~3X as fast as I could alone. Cursor and VSCode today are like Bugatis with paddle shifters. You CAN stall them or put them into a wall in seconds, but they’re bad, bad machines in the best possible way.

I don’t think the productivity gains have all arrived yet by a long shot. Most tools (ESPECIALLY game engines) are not even in an embryonic form of “agent-friendly”. As that changes, our production pace will progress.

By how much? 2X faster? 5X faster? We won’t 10X good-code-per-unit-time-spent compared to the 20-teens, but 7X? 8X? When everything is full-on agentic and containerized, the limiting factor is the number of agents a qualified human programmer can cleanly code-review per day. Seven or eight sounds about right. Maybe by 2030 it’s just standard operating procedure. Maybe among web devs, it already is. Not really in game engines yet. Lots of old dogs dragging their feet (like I’m not long in the tooth).

BUT… if you’re coming of age in an automatic-only world… trying to get the AI to code for you with ZERO programming experience? Yikes.

For the love of all things holy, learn A LITTLE code. You will not last on my teams without the basics. Know your times tables before you grab the calculator. Learn long division before you trust the AI. The AI WILL bite you if you don’t.

It’s the most ridiculous Iron Man suit ever built in real life, but you can either let it drag you down BS rabbit holes for weeks, or you can slap its hand a few times a day and keep it digging in the right places for gold.

You won’t know what “right places” even means if the AI is a 10× better programmer than you are.

Even the basics will get you insanely far. Don’t let the suit make you lazy. Take the time to review every line it writes, and you’ll learn a LOT faster than I did.

“Vibe-coding” is bad marketing. It’s code for “lazy team member.” I vote we replace it with “legioneer” or “agent manager” if you wanna get corporate with it, or anything that conveys you can code, but instead you wrangle AIs who code like you but faster. We’ll workshop it.

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This is post #2.

See you in the next .md file.