Vibe coding as a coding veteran: from 8-bit assembly to English-as-code

I don't feel good doing it, but is anyone else feeling not capitalizing text, maintaining a slightly abrasive attitude, and consciously stealing credits, yield better results from coding agents? e.g. "i want xxx implemented, can you do", "ok you do" than "I'm wondering if..." etc.

There is so much subjective placebo with “prompt engineering” that anyone pushing any one thing like this just shows me they haven’t used it enough yet. No offense, just seeing it everywhere.

Better results if you… tip the AI, offer it physical touch, you need to say the words “go slow and take a deep breath first”…

It’s a subjective system without control testing. Humans are definitely going to apply religion, dogma, and ritual to it.

The best research I've seen on this is:

- Threatening or tipping a model generally has no significant effect on benchmark performance.

- Prompt variations can significantly affect performance on a per-question level. However, it is hard to know in advance whether a particular prompting approach will help or harm the LLM's ability to answer any particular question.

https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.00614

That 100% tracks expectation if your technical knowledge exceeds past “believer”.

Now… for fun. Look up “best prompting” or “the perfect prompt” on YouTube. Thousands of videos “tips” and “expect recommendations” that are bordering the arcane.

The worst people are just writing D&D Character backstories as agent prompts:

"You are a world-class developer in <platform>..." type of crap.