Vibe Coding in the 90s

You know, that's exactly how I learned to program.

I started up QBasic knowing nothing other than that it seemed like a thing for programming computers and programming seemed like a cool thing to do.

I typed in random words, and eventually I typed "screen". When I pushed enter, QBasic capitalized it, so it seemed important. I hit F1 and read the help. It made no sense, but the example ran and had other capitalized words so I could repeat the process.

Eventually I started making really terrible text-based Final Fantasy knock-offs.

The closest to vibecoding in the 10's was to keep searching Stack Overflow for questions vaguely asking similar things as what you wanted and copy-paste things until it kind of worked.

Turbo pascal help for me! The polynomial example taught me how to use pointers. Before that, I could only use static arrays up to a certain length.

Learning about heap allocation was euphoric. I kept beaming because I had unlocked infinite memory, and people around me didn't get why I was such a happy teenager.

To be fair, I already knew about memory regions from PEEK/POKEing on a commodore as a child, but it was always static and pre-populated.

I checked and there's also lib\str\basic\pad\right - they really thought of everything!

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.

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.

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.

Please share your understanding!

This is pretty close. I once spent 4 hours in college (circa 1997) looking for an error in a C++ program. The compiler's error messages were rubbish.

It ended up being a missing semicolon in an odd spot and the compiler was just confused.

I remember walking homing thinking, "hey, if I can survive that, maybe I can just hack this CS thing..."

Look how far we've come! Now we add random .unsqueeze(-1) and .permute(-1,-2) until our PyTorch models run without shape errors!