Charles exposed me to the expression vibe coding, which is when you give AI prompts, clues, and parameters in plain language (your vibes, basically) so that it can generate code to give you what you want. For the relatively simple task of vibe coding five-question quizzes for my quiz/test site, I had been using ChatGPT, which had done a decent job. But ChatGPT outright balked when, tonight, I presented it with a much more ambitious quiz: my Do You Deserve to Vote? quiz. I uploaded the MS Word document with all of the quiz questions and coding parameters... and ChatGPT simply froze. Refreshing did nothing. Re-uploading did nothing. Waiting for minutes did nothing. The whole thing was a waste of time, so I switched over to Grok, which spat out code (janky code) in under a minute, and it didn't slow down when I embarked upon the slow, painful revision/reiteration process. (I might think about subscribing to Grok; I'm already subscribed to ChatGPT.)
Unfortunately, what happened next with Grok was the same thing that normally happens with ChatGPT: I got to a point where almost half of the code was looking good, then Grok began to introduce errors in its subsequent drafts of code that started undoing all of the work it had done. Luckily, I was able to find an earlier draft where Grok had successfully coded three out of six sections of my quiz, so I've got that code saved in Blogger for the moment. I might try manually coding the rest of the quiz myself; so long as the code follows the same pattern in each of these sections, things ought to be okay. But there's also a good chance that I might mess things up worse than Grok had been doing, so I'll need to keep a copy of Grok's best code thus far to use as a jumping-off point for when I work with the AI Thursday afternoon. This may take longer than I'd originally thought. But it'll teach be a lot about coding, vibe coding, and what my and the AI's limits are. So for the moment, there's just the rough draft of a quiz up on my quiz/test site. It's far from perfect, but I'll see what kinks I or Grok can iron out of it in the midafternoon. I'm meeting my ex-boss and his wife around 1 p.m. to see the same tea exhibition at which I'd had my major angina attack in early 2024, a few months before my heart attack. I doubt we'll need more than two hours.
So—a brief interlude a bit after lunchtime (it's actually a fasting day for me), then it's back to the slog. Wish me luck as I try to get what I want through code.
Welcome to the reality of vibe coding. Companies that have tried to replace software engineers with LLMs are now learning this the hard way, if they haven't already. Honestly, you would be better off just learning how to code. It's not all that hard, especially for what you want to do, and it is a useful skill to have.
ReplyDeleteTo put it in terms that might make more sense, imagine if we didn't bother teaching our students how to write properly because LLMs can just do the writing for them. Writing properly is hard and takes time to learn, yet we still think it is worth doing.