Ask HN: Will vibe coding better motivate students to learn to read and write? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will vibe coding better motivate students to learn to read and write?

5 pointsamichail7 comments

Maybe making a video game using English would be more compelling than reading stories and writing book reports?

I highly doubt that.

LLMs don't need perfect, precise English. So long as you get the gist of what you mean across, they can work with it.

There is also a limited correlation between good prose and good information transfer to an LLM. Something with questionable spelling, typoes, grammatical inconsistencies, and generally irritating prose that is precise and accurate will beat lyrical, poetic prose that skirts around the point.

You could instruct the LLM to be more picky about user input in terms of grammar, style, and spelling.

Oh, I see. So you're less looking at it as an intrinsic motivation - kids wanting to get good at English so that they can make things of their own - than as a way to build a task for students.

I quite like that idea. Maybe you could use them for verbal exercises that stretch those linguistic muscles - e.g. getting them to explain a complex concept in precise language to an agent that is constantly trying to poke holes in their response. Though maybe that'd just end up being frustrating!

Playing games has been a method to motivate learning a language for decades, but I'm not sure why having software produce hallucinated text would ever help learning a language you don't yet understand.

Whether applied to vibe coding or other tasks, I think it's the iteration and interaction that is the hook. And I do think it could be leveraged to practice and improve reading and writing.

I like the idea of creating some kind of old-school text-based dungeon crawler to practise English. That way you are forced to at least write a bit of text, or alter suggestions of a certain story.

the point of vibe "coding" is to be unmotivated

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