I'm in Vibe Code Hell

Summary

When I started thinking about the problems with coding education in 2019, “tutorial hell” was enemy number one. You’d know you were living in it if you: Successfully followed plenty of tutorials, but couldn’t build anything on your own Spent more time watching videos about programming than actually programming Had flash-card level knowledge of many technologies, but didn’t understand anything under the hood Students would watch (or fall asleep to) 6-hour videos, code along in their own editors, feel like they got it, and then freeze up the moment they had to write anything from scratch. Classic tutorial hell. That’s why I wanted to focus on three things when I started Boot.dev: In-depth curriculum. CS fundamentals shouldn’t only be taught at traditional institutions. Hands-on everything. You gotta be writing code - not just in projects, but interactively alongside every concept you learn. Fewer videos, more rich text. Videos are too easy to consume without thinking. Again, in 2019, tutorial hell was everywhere. Hours-long YouTube courses were pulling in millions of views. But these days? Those same channels struggle to hit 50,000 views on their new content. Check out FreeCodeCamp, Traversy Media, and Web Dev Simplified. To be clear: I’m not throwing shade, I love those channels and they’ve helped a ton of people, but the numbers are what they are. You might think, “Maybe no one wants to learn to code anymore?” I wondered the same (my livelihood depends on it after all). But here’s the Google Trends data for “learn to code”: There’s still plenty of interest in coding, so why are long-form tutorials on the decline? Well, I talk to a lot of students on Boot.dev. We get around 1,300 new registered users every day, many of whom join our Discord. And at least anecdotally, I’ve noticed far fewer complaints about “tutorial hell” over the last 18 months. Students are still struggling, they’ve just found a fresh new hell. I’ve come to call it “vibe code hell.” What Is “Vibe C...