From Tutorial Hell to Vibe Coding Hell: The New Struggle of Learning to Code in 2025
Deric Yee
20th November 2025
When I first started obsessing about coding education back in 2019, “tutorial hell” was the final boss.
You knew you were trapped inside it when:
• You followed hours of tutorials but couldn’t build anything without someone holding your hand
• You watched more coding videos than you actually coded
• You memorised just enough syntax to survive a dinner conversation, but had no idea why anything worked
Students would binge 6-hour YouTube videos like Netflix, tap along in VS Code, feel like geniuses… then freeze the moment you asked them to build something from scratch.
Classic tutorial hell.
That’s why when we built Sigma School, we focused on three things:
1. Depth first, not surface-level tech tourism. Fundamentals matter, and CS concepts shouldn’t be a university-exclusive luxury.
2. Hands-on everything. if you’re not typing code, you’re not learning.
3. Fewer videos, more interactive learning. Videos are too easy to “feel productive” while absorbing nothing.
Back then, tutorial hell was everywhere. Long-form YouTube courses were printing millions of views.
Today? Many of those channels can’t crack 50k.
So did people stop wanting to learn to code?
I wondered the same, my livelihood depends on it, after all. But “learn to code” is still trending on Google. The desire is there. The struggle just mutated.
These days, thanks to cursor, AI agents, and LLMs, students aren’t stuck in tutorial hell.
They’ve migrated to a brand new hell.
I call it: Vibe Coding Hell.
What Is “Vibe Coding Hell”?
Tutorial hell was:
“I can’t build anything without a tutorial.”
Vibe coding hell is:
“I can build everything… but I don’t understand anything I built.”
The vibe coder says things like:
• “I built a full-stack marketplace in 2 days! Here’s the link: localhost:3000”
• “Claude wrote 3,000 lines of backend for me. Don’t ask me what they do.”
• “Cursor keeps hallucinating weird folders but… it works on my machine?”
Self-learners today are building more than ever, but their mental models are paper-thin.
They’re wrestling hallucinations, debugging code they didn’t write, and trusting chatbots that agree with everything like overly supportive life coaches.
They’re not learning to code. They’re learning to vibe.
And if you talk to enough students, like we do every day at Sigma School, you see the same pattern:
They’re producing projects faster, but understanding slower.
It’s a different flavour of stuckness… but stuckness nonetheless.
I’m not here to debate whether AI will replace developers.
Every six months someone says, “This is it. AI will take every dev job.”
And yet… every month we hire more engineers.
GPT-5 was supposed to be the AGI inflection point.
Instead, it felt like GPT-4, slightly less moody.
I use AI every day.
I double-check logic with it.
I brainstorm with it.
Sometimes I offload a well-scoped task.
But does it make me 20–25% more productive?
I feel like it does.
Then I read a 2025 study showing devs felt 25% faster… but were actually 19% slower in practice.
Not great ROI for the “AI writes all the code now” crowd.
Here’s what scares me most:
A whole generation of would-be learners has started thinking:
“Why learn anything? AI already knows it.”
If AI doesn’t take their jobs, their own mindset will.
Every week, I talk to non-technical people who genuinely believe:
“AI writes all the code now.”
Meanwhile, I talk to senior engineers who haven’t found a single meaningful use case for AI in their daily workflow.
People with least AI literacy trust it the most.
People with most literacy trust it the least.
That’s a brutal Dunning–Kruger cocktail.
If this continues, we won’t just have an AI bubble.
We’ll have a generation that self-selected out of learning.
As someone running a coding school, here’s my nuanced take:
AI can be incredible for learning, if used correctly.
But naive use destroys learning.
There are two big problems:
AI agrees too easily.
When a student asks a question with a wrong assumption, AI doesn’t push back, it adapts to their mistake.
Old-school Stack Overflow would roast you alive for a bad question, and while that sucked emotionally, it was great for learning.
AI? It’s too polite. Too agreeable. Too “sure, let’s go with your fantasy version of the problem.”
This creates confident incompetence, the worst kind.
AI loves balanced takes:
• “Some developers like X, some prefer Y.”
• “It depends.”
• “Both approaches can work.”
That’s useless for beginners.
Beginners need strong opinions, clearly stated, with bias and context:
• Why DHH hates TypeScript.
• Why Anders Hejlsberg invented TypeScript.
• Why senior backend devs fight about Python vs Go.
• Why frontend devs riot over frameworks monthly.
AI tends to give mushy, middle-of-the-road answers that help nobody build a real mental model.
At Sigma School, our students can check instructor solutions, like peeking at the back of the textbook.
Useful as a last resort, but not great for true mastery.
When we introduced our own teaching AI, results were different. Students interacted with it 4x more than solution peeking.
Because we trained it to:
• not give away answers
• use the Socratic method
• challenge assumptions
• guide thinking, not replace it
• reduce hallucinations via teacher-specific prompts
• and yes… give it a fun personality
Students use it as a learning partner, not a code-writing machine.
That’s the right direction.
The answer is boring, but true:
Do the thing without letting someone else (or something else) do it for you.
Escaping tutorial hell was:
→ turn off the tutorial and code independently.
Escaping vibe coding hell is:
→ turn off the AI autocomplete and code independently.
Don’t use AI for:
• coding entire files
• building full projects
• agentic workflows
• auto-fixing homework
• auto-writing everything
Do use AI for:
• concept explanations
• debugging hints
• examples
• clarifying your own thinking
• guidance, not outsourcing
Learning requires friction.
The right kind of friction.
Tutorial hell removed friction by letting you watch someone else code.
Vibe coding hell removes friction by letting AI code for you.
But the thing that rewires your brain — your actual neural network — is struggling through the problem.
Not watching.
Not auto-completing.
Doing.
We’re living through the easiest time in history to learn to code, but only for learners who embrace discomfort instead of outsourcing it.
At Sigma School, we’re doubling down on teaching people how to think, not just how to prompt.
Whether AI becomes your shortcut or your crutch depends entirely on how you choose to learn.
Check us out here! sigmaschool.co/csdp
