I’m really happy to see my LinkedIn feed finally catching up with what I’ve been saying for the last nine months: vibe coding sucks, and fundamentals are important.

Also, before the haters go and hate, “all vibe coding is coding with AI, but not all coding with AI is vibe coding”. My dislike is and always has been with “the vibe”.

I’ve been reading books like Masters of Doom and Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution lately, and looking back at those pioneers, they didn’t just have an intense love for what they did, they had a crazy deep fundamental knowledge of the things they worked with. And if they didn’t understand something? They took the time to figure it out.

And I mean really figure it out.

Like spending a week locked in a room rewriting the assembly language for a new machine delivered to the university because they didn’t like the one bundled with it. Where do you see that kind of dedication today in this AI-driven world?

Don’t get me wrong; I’m not saying we all need to go rewrite assembly (though honestly, probably wouldn’t hurt). But I am saying that fundamentals matter, especially in this day and age. Because one day, all of us old-ass developers who actually care about this stuff are going to be dead, and you’re going to be left with the people on LinkedIn commenting on Java polls saying that a Java int is “not 8, 16, 32, or 64 bits, it’s 4 bytes.”

Yes. That is the world we live in now.

So please, for the love of all that is holy: learn the fundamentals. Understand how things actually work under the hood. Don’t just copy-paste AI-generated code without understanding what it does or why it works. Because when the AI hallucinates (and it will), or when you need to optimize something (and you will), or when you need to debug a production issue at 2am (and you definitely will), that fundamental knowledge is what’s going to save you.

The craft matters. The fundamentals matter. And if you disagree, well, I’m sure ChatGPT can explain why you’re wrong. 😏

EDIT: removed a legit use of an em-dash because I keep forgetting that everyone and their aunt think that means an AI wrote this… what a world we live in.

This post was originally published on LinkedIn