Baldur Bjarnason@baldur@toot.cafe

“Bad Vibes Coding – Spectre Collie”

spectrecollie.com/2026/09/05/b

> My take on generative AI has pretty rapidly gone from a tentative, “it sucks and I hate it, but after the bubble pops, there might be a few very specific use cases for it, like with programming,” to a vehemently zero-tolerance stance. It’s all garbage, burn it down.

Spectre CollieBad Vibes CodingTaking a short break from being spitting mad about AI, to just being sad about how it never needed to be like this
Starry@Starry@chitter.xyz

Replying to @⁨baldur@toot.cafe⁩

@baldur This is so fucking real.

> When I write something that I have a dozen times before, and it works the first time, that’s the purest dopamine hit I get as a programmer. It’s all of the rewards of having something working, without the struggle. And it’s mine. It takes me back, Ratatouille-style, to when I was sitting in front of a Commodore 64 hooked up to an old TV set, typing in programs from a BASIC tutorial, learning how it all works. Being able to do it without thinking much about it means that I’ve learned it, that it’s a part of me, and there’s been a point to all of the repetition. It’s not going to impress anyone else, but it’s one of the few areas where I don’t feel the need to impress anyone else. I just get the simple and pure satisfaction of knowing I know how to do this. And someday, maybe, I’ll be able to do the same with the dot product without having to refer back to an interactive tutorial.

en
patter@patterfloof@meow.social

Replying to @⁨Starry@chitter.xyz⁩

@Starry @baldur and when it doesn't work first time, there's enjoyment in hunting down why it doesn't quite work, whether you've simply written it a little wrong & can spot it yourself, or need to refer to language documentation, there's a further sense of joy in fixing it, and you'll have those debugging techniques in your toolbox for later. You miss all that knowledge, experience & practice when you trust spicy autocorrect.

You're going to spend more time modifying existing code than building systems from scratch.