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Comment by mlyle | Hacker News Reader

You know, honestly: thinking back to 1992 as a 13 year old, and downloading ircii source code and hacking on it (commenting out the 3 lines with build errors on AIX and then seeing what happened)... trying to add a function here or there or wire in a slash command...

This was a -great- experience. Inheriting code and not knowing what to do with it and trying to forensically triangulate what is going on and learning to read code in the process: this was the best way to learn. The argument that vibe coding is something like that is maybe one of the more hopeful arguments i've heard about it.

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had a stint as a programmer for a dark hat org back in the day and hacked my way around rdesktop to make it async. When i say hack I literally hacked down the entire codebase until there was not much left except the login flow which consisted of.. a LOT of functions that needed to be made async. I did not have the slightest idea what I was looking at, looked like arcane magic to me but I eventually managed to make rdesktop into what was probably the fastest RDP bruteforcer there was thanks to boost.asio and chopping it up months on end. I remember the bruteforcer that was circling the forums made a thread for each client, ate up a lot of ram and CPU and it crashed a lot too. Mine wasn't even keeping the machine at 20% CPU, couple gigs of RAM but was topping the bandwidth of the server.

I'm not proud of creating a malevolent tool but am proud of the technical achievement of it considering I just finished high school.

I remember stumbling into coding by way of CSS and HTML. For advanced functionality well there was "scripts" that you copy and paste in and magically worked. The ultimate boss came when stumbling onto "php scripts" that you needed some particular cgi-bin thing to run. Follow the instructions, paste in the php script and it worked! This PHP stuff led to Wordpress. Follow those instructions and WOW mind blown, full end-to-end site with admin, login, database, CRUD, and it looked beautiful.

The problem was I couldn't actually understand any of the code. I learned CSS and HTML!

After many trials, I used what I knew and realized well whatever this PHP code is doing, I'm going to put it in a div with style="border:5px solid red" and see what it does that way.

Fast forward 2, 5, 10, 12 years and that's how I learned to be a programmer.

The problem is with vibe coding a beginner just gives a new prompt to edit it. In the past, the code you got was static so you had no choice but to learn it little by little if you wanted to change it.

> In the past, the code you got was static so you had no choice but to learn it little by little if you wanted to change it.

Seeing a lot of programmers being raised in the age of Stack Overflow, there was a ton of web developers who definitly didn't understand the code they copy-pasted from Stack Overflow, and some of them literally had a spray-and-pray approach to programming that makes you question how it worked sometimes when they had almost no understanding of what the code actually did.

But they managed to produce stuff that made webpages do things, so management was happy.

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