Doubao Voice Input
This thing hits no less hard than discovering Claude Code did back in the day. It sounds incredibly corny, but it genuinely works.
The biggest bottleneck in my vibe coding used to be typing speed. Say I wanted to multi-task across several sessions — grinding a humanities/social-science final proposal on one side while juggling a few other projects — my eyes could barely keep up, but there was no way for me to output with three hands at once. I type fast, but never fast enough to feed prompts into that many windows.
Now I just hold the FN key and talk. Input speed is roughly five times typing, and the accuracy is close to invincible. I still mix Chinese and English mid-sentence when I talk, and the few errors that slip through basically come from my non-standard pronunciation of certain words. Beyond that, no other big mistakes. Apple’s built-in voice input is nearly unusable, which is why I’d never dug into how convenient this could be.
One thing to note: the audio does get processed on ByteDance’s servers, so dictating prompts is fine — anything a bit more private is probably not a great fit.
From 20 Minutes to 3
About 3 minutes of talking, and the Word doc was showing 700-plus characters. By my previous experience, even with my thoughts flowing freely, a 600–700 character piece took 20-plus minutes. Now everything I wanted to say was out in 3 minutes flat. Meanwhile, my Kiro was brainstorming a final proposal for a humanities/social-science course, my Codex was doing my data mining homework, and my CC was doing CI/CD.
Of course, the output comes out in spoken-language form and needs some fine-tuning afterwards. But either way, the mental load drops enormously — once you can already see a finished draft, the urge to edit it is far lighter than the pressure of writing from zero. The only downside is needing an environment where you can talk freely; the library isn’t great for it, but at home it’s pure bliss.
The Cost of Vibe Coding
This semester, the only code I’ve handwritten is a few lines during the live-coding LeetCode rounds of interviews. Other than that, I have not written a single line of code.
I honestly can’t tell whether this is skill decay or a paradigm shift. Coding itself just seems to give me less feedback than before — that old rush of debugging Java forever and then clicking Run and having it finally work is gone. It might breed short-termism, but clearly we no longer have the heart or the patience to go back to how things used to be.
A couple months ago I fired off a pile of summer internship applications and finally landed one offer. Not sure whether this company counts as big tech or mid-tier, but its reputation is decent. The role I applied to is apparently mostly Kotlin; honestly, I’m really not familiar with Kotlin or Android architecture — but I’m not panicked in the slightest. I’m genuinely looking forward to stepping into industry and seeing how AI Agents are actually being used in real work these days.
Stay tuned for more updates!