Downfall of the 7-Hour Coding Tutorial

vibe coding is tutorial hell in disguise

As a game dev professor, I always tell that last bit to my students: you can't build muscle by watching someone else exercise. It must be uncomfortable.

Ive traveled back in time and gone into textbook hell

GPT: Is it A? YES ! Is it B? YES ! Is it C? YES ! Which is it? YES !

I'm a programmer for roughly 40 years, and I've recommended quite a few of those long term "learn programming" playlists. The issue is not tutorials or their quality, but that people have stopped learning how to learn. People in tutorial hell believe, *consuming* 8 hours of tutorial gives you any insights. That's not how this works. You need to stop after one chapter, and then put what you just learned into practical use in your own mini projects. There's a reason, when I was at school (in a different millenium :D ), that we were taught to note things down in our own words. Vibe coding is just the next natural step in that decline. You don't even consume how it's done anymore, you just grab the solution. So many people coming in on discord have zero idea why a line of code is in their failing program. School failed these people by not explaining why exploring it yourself is so important for your brain.

is this truwe ?

And gpt is like enabling people, I asked it to act as an interviewer and ask questions and after a basic question it’s like “amazing only the best developers catch that” like bruh

lowkey love it how boot dev supports ppp (purchasing power parity)

As some of you noticed, this video was uploaded yesterday, but somehow YouTube screwed over the upload causing audio and video issues, so we took it down, figured the issues and moved the upload to today :)

thats a really long boot dev ad

When I started to work as a freelance dev 6 months out of a 3 month coding bootcamp, I knew nothing really, I learned on the job, things that take me 15 minutes now took me 8 hours then. It was great, I was getting paid to learn. Now for what I charge, there are expectations to get things delivered on time. So I end having to use ai to deliver. I realize though, I delivered fine without AI, and learned, I just got in the mindset that I have to deliver as fast as possible, and set time expections with AI coding help in mind. I spend hundreds of dollars a month on having the optimal tools to deliver faster, but I charge hourly and end up billing the same, and clients are still upset anyways. Don't mind me, im just having an existencial crisis in the yt comment section.

"Tutorial hell" is actually a common trap in all domains, not just programming and is mainly a function of the student not being told that theory and practice have to be done together if they hope to achieve any sort of mastery. You can listen to 1000 hours of math lectures and until you actually sit down and solve problems, you will most likely not learn anything or master the material. Its not an inherent flaw of tutorials but a flaw in approach by the learner that can be easily fixed by incorporating projects and practice problems. The problem with vibe coding is inherent in the very nature of vibe coding. It prevents you from learning by taking away the most vital aspect of learning, doing things yourself, breaking things, and learning from those mistakes.

To all guys struggling with this. READ (other's code, documentation, blogs, chapters from tech books), implement the learned stuff in your problem, and analyze the possible solution before and after solving the problem. You can use bots for the reading part, but you got to tingle with the prompts in order to minimize the hallucination and push the bot to help you think, not to solve the problem for you, but with you.

I made a simple game in Python without even finishing the "learn to code in Python" course. Of course I used AI to help me, but you still need to know where to put your code and understand how it works, otherwise you can’t make a proper game. It took me 5 days to make just one small game, but I had fun. I had lots of headaches and bugs, but I learned a lot during the progress. Now I simply want to finish all courses to become back-end dev and from there I climb up, wish me luck!

i am always stuck in low level hell wanting to know how stuff works at a lower and lower level that i never learn how to actually do anything, but i do know how a transitor works and the process of manufacturing semiconductors

I started coding in 2021 Loved the grind to learn by myself Then AI came and I started to vibe code (copy paste at the time). It sucked the fun out of coding so I stopped. Now Im back at it using cursor but only the ask feature and tab - Im not using it to generate code ans the fun to learn is back ! Very easy to go from language to language with these features and learn while doing !

in my class most students vibe coded their college projects. and now in final year they don't even feel confident about their own technical skills

I really enjoyed this perspective on AI. I was slow to adopt use of LLMs and only started using them about six months ago and have learned a ton about what they can and can't do, and how it affects my self-development as a programmer. To your comment about introducing Boots in 2023, I would argue that regardless of AI's effectiveness, Boots as a "dumb chat bot" probably has value as "rubber duck" debugging. If learners can explain their problem to Boots, they're kind of thinking critically about the issue and that in itself might lead them to the underlying issue.

I find myself reading the docs more now than when i started

Me now able to read through a book while we find ourself in-between tutorial hell and vibe coding hell