For most of my career I have always written scripts or small programs as a systems administrator and data engineer. I used powershell, python, bash and SQL. While scripting involved programming and writing code, none of those small programs spanned across multiple files and directories. Now that I am (re)learning to program, it is quite interesting that I am choosing to become a software engineer in an era when LLMs and agents can write code and build entire programs.
I tried vibecoding a few things - a personal website, a blog and a note taking app. However, it bothered me to not know what any of these meant. Whenever I ran into an error, I would prompt the agent to make corrections until I eventually ran out tokens for the day. I think it’s been easier writing programs from scratch than trying to understand a behemoth of tools, languages and frameworks I had never used before - all at once.
The difference between a script and an application is that applications have a lot of moving parts. The connection to the database, keeping a file open, connecting to a server, uploading files and modifying them. That’s why some errors are harder to track down. Troubleshooting and debugging also takes longer and I have to figure out where each problem stems from. Was the database schema defined incorrectly or did I make the wrong connection to the database?
Finally, learning from scratch has been a great privilege. Vibecoding made easy for me.
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