The dark flows and Loss Disguised as a Win felt quite relatable. I've had 3 days in a row at work where I've vibe coded heavily with Opus 4.5 and was flowing and felt super productive and almost manic.
At the end of every one of those days when I went for a walk with my dog I realized "hold on, I don't need all that crap that it generated" and immediately thought of solutions that required a 10th of the code mass.
I've wasted hours on refining something that was crap. Maybe I needed to do that to discover the simple solutions, maybe it was a skills issue. But I was deep in the dark flow and the amount of code I generated definitely felt like a slot machine rewarding me for losing (time).
I had NotebookLM make a 15 min podcast about it and listened to it while walking the dogs. It was a very interesting way of trying to understand a research paper!
”In my experience, the stronger programmers don't use an IDE and also have no problem producing code at the same speed as IDE users. I also find that the code produced with an IDE is lower quality. I have no idea why”
Zed Shaw in Learn C The Hard Way. For some reason, the most brilliant devs I’ve worked with all used Vim, so I can echo this statement.
At the end of every one of those days when I went for a walk with my dog I realized "hold on, I don't need all that crap that it generated" and immediately thought of solutions that required a 10th of the code mass.
I've wasted hours on refining something that was crap. Maybe I needed to do that to discover the simple solutions, maybe it was a skills issue. But I was deep in the dark flow and the amount of code I generated definitely felt like a slot machine rewarding me for losing (time).