Lazy coding is a middle ground between vibe coding and traditional. Write code that may be buggy and inelegant, but clearly shows exactly what you intend to do. Then feed it into AI to fix edge cases and gold-plate it.
Writing code is a great way to think through what you’re trying to do. Prose can be a lot harder, especially when you’ve spent vastly more time expressing concepts in code (nested for loop) than you have in language (Cartesian product). AI’s also seen these ideas in code more than it has in language.
At this point, I think it’s safe to say that AI’s just better than most people at code generation. It struggles with context, and no wonder. A lot of that context is in your head, not the training data. Writing crappy but illustrative code is just a way to provide that context. You’re in a better position to vet it, having written the shitty first draft yourself.
Lazy coding is a middle ground between vibe coding and traditional. Write code that may be buggy and inelegant, but clearly shows exactly what you intend to do. Then feed it into AI to fix edge cases and gold-plate it.
Writing code is a great way to think through what you’re trying to do. Prose can be a lot harder, especially when you’ve spent vastly more time expressing concepts in code (nested for loop) than you have in language (Cartesian product). AI’s also seen these ideas in code more than it has in language.
At this point, I think it’s safe to say that AI’s just better than most people at code generation. It struggles with context, and no wonder. A lot of that context is in your head, not the training data. Writing crappy but illustrative code is just a way to provide that context. You’re in a better position to vet it, having written the shitty first draft yourself.
Or you could just write a pseudo-code.