Pitfalls of vibe coding

Today I spent the whole day working on my game development. For a few month, I’ve been practicing developing games with Godot Engine along with its GDScript. It took me a long time to escape the tutorial hell because I wasn’t confident enough to start my own projects.

After completing a couple of Udemy tutorial projects and grokking the super basic concepts, I ran out of excuses. After getting encouragement from my good friend and accountability partner, I took the plunge and started making my own game. I thought everything from them on would be a breeze just like when I used to code along the tutorials. And with all the help I can get from AI these days through vibe coding, I thought I’ll be able to finish the project in a matter of few days.

I couldn’t be more wrong it turned out. Yes, chatGPT surely generated the codes for me, but the problem was that it hallucinated big time and kept running in circles many times and since I don’t fully understand the logic and sintax of GDScript and programming language in general, I couldn’t put finger on what’s wrong and what I can do to fix it. Sometimes it turned out that it’s such simple and basic takes as a bracket ChatGPT forgot to place. Grrrr….

Lesson learned. Vibe coding’s all the rage these days and it certainty empowered lots of motivated but not fully skilled people, but I should still strive to build strong fundamentals of coding. Vibe coding is like me being a manager giving orders to AI apps as my direct reports. As someone who provides vision and guidance, I should be on top of things so I can review if they did it right.

Another lesson learned. I should have a very clear vision and come up with a clear set of requirements. AIs cannot fix that for me, and if all of us are confused and disoriented, the project will go sideways and will fizzle out.

Going forward, I will focus on the basics and fully understand the logic and syntax of the codes. I will not ask AI to generate the codes fully but will rather ask for hints when stuck.