I’ve seen this term thrown around a lot lately and I just wanted to read your opinion on the matter. I feel like I’m going insane.
Vibe coding is essentially asking AI to do the whole coding process, and then checking the code for errors and bugs (optional).
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I like writing code. Like, physically typing it. It’s fun and probably my favorite pastime.
Why would I wanna give that up?
Lol. I keep saying that programming is great if you enjoy the act of using a computer.
Seems like a recipe for subtle bugs and unmaintainable systems. Also those Eloi from the time machine, where they don’t know how anything works anymore.
Management is probably salivating at the idea of firing all those expensive engineers that tell them stuff like “you can’t draw three red lines all perpendicular in yellow ink”
I’m also reminded of that ai-for-music guy that was like “No one likes making art!”. Soulless husk.
^ this
Using AI leads to code churn and code churn is bad for the health of the project.
If you can’t keep the code comprehensible and maintainable then you end up with a worse off product where either everything breaks all the time, or the time it takes to release each new feature becomes exponentially longer, or all of your programmers become burnt out and no one wants to touch the thing.
You just get to the point where you have to stop and start the project all over again, while the whole time people are screaming for the thing that was promised to them back at the start.
It’s exactly the same thing that happens when western managers try to outsource to “cheap” programming labor overseas, it always ends up costing more, taking longer, and ending in disaster
Three perpendicular lines are possible in 3D, and saffron is initially red, but becomes yellow when used in cooking. Checkmate!
I agree with you.
The reason I wrote this post in the first place was because I heard people I respect a lot at work talk about this as being the future of programming. Also the CEO has acknowledged this and is actively riding the “vibe-coding” train.
I’m tired of these “get rich quick the easy way” buzz-words and ideas, and the hustle culture that perpetuates them.
I mean, at some point you have to realize that instructing an AI on every single thing you want to do starts to look a lot like programming.
Programming isn’t just writing code. It’s being able to reason about a method of doing things. Until AI is at the level of designer, you can expect humans to have to do the brunt of the work to bring software to life.
Yeah, there’s also the “debugging is just as hard as writing elegant code” side of things. Vibe coding is largely just putting yourself in a permanent debugging role.
The big issue I see with vibe coding is that you need to know best practices to build secure code. Even if you don’t adhere to them all the time, best practices exist for a reason. And a programmer who doesn’t even know them is a dangerous thing, because they won’t even be able to see what is insecure (until it’s far too late).
Studies have found that vibe coders tend to produce less secure code, but have higher confidence in their code being secure; It’s essentially Dunning-Kruger in practice. I’d have no issue with someone using AI to get the broad strokes down. But then they need to be able to back it up with actual debugging. Not just “I didn’t even bother looking at it. If it compiles, push it to prod.”
They can vibe as much as they want, but don’t ever ask me to touch the mess they create.
Once companies recognize the full extent of their technical debt, they will likely need to hire a substantial number of highly experienced software engineers to address the issues, many of which stem from over-reliance on copying and pasting outputs from large language models.
A new post-LLM coding opportunity: turd polishing
Nearly every time I ask ChatGPT a question about a well established tech stack, it’s responses are erroneous to the point of being useless. It frequently provides examples using fabricated, non-existent functionality and the code samples are awful.
What’s the point in getting AI to write code that I’m just going to have to completely rewrite?
Gell-Mann Amnesia effect
There’s one valid use-case for LLMs: when you have writer’s block, it can help to have something resembling an end product instead of a blank page. Sadly, this doesn’t really work for programming, because incorrect code is simply worse than no code at all. Every line of code is a potential bug and every line of incorrect code is a guaranteed bug.
I use an LLM with great success to write bad fanfiction though.
But it’s AI
That’s a bad vibe if I’ve ever seen one.
So you mean debugging then?
If you don’t write a single line then you aren’t coding
Yup, sure, but this is basically a “no true scotsman” argument, which isn’t at all what the “AI” hype is about.
Put yourself in the shoes of some naive corporate exec. You want the software to get made, but you don’t want to pay for it. To you, people (especially experts like programmers) are an expense. You’d very much like to skip that pesky part and go straight from an idea to the product. This is what the “AI” hype is largely about.
“AI” companies are trying to set up a narrative, in which programmers can be replaced with LLMs. Execs don’t care whether you’re coding or not - they care about expenses and profits, and they know a team of programmers is more expensive than an OpenAI subscription.
I don’t want to be put in the shoes of a greedy corporate exec but i can put myself in the shoes of a non developer wanting to create an app for his own need, so i understand why some people may need AI for that. I’m ok with that but that is not coding
I think calling that vibe coding is a very unfitting term. I haven’t seen it called that before.
lol wut, asking AI to do the work and then going back and fixing bugs…?
To me, vibe coding is pick a project to work on and get building. Very basic planning stages without much design, like building with legos without instruction manuals. I make design decisions and refactor as I code. I certainly get some AI input when I don’t know how to implement something, but I will usually work “blindly” using my own ideas and documentation. I probably visit stackoverflow while vibe coding more than I do chatgpt.
This seems like a game you’d do with other programmers, lol.
I can understand using AI to write some potentially verbose or syntactically hell lines to save time and headaches.
The whole coding process? No. 😭
You can save time at the cost of headaches, or you can save headaches at the cost of time. You cannot save both time and headaches, you can at most defer the time and the headaches until the next time you have to touch the code, but the time doubles and the headaches triple.
AI can type tedious snippets faster than me, but I can just read the code and revise it if needed.
Somewhat impressive, but still not quite a threat to my professional career, as it cannot produce reliable software for business use.
It does seem to open up for novices to create ‘bespoke software’ where they previously would not have been able to, or otherwise unable to justify the time commitment, which is fun. This means more software gets created which otherwise would not have existed, and I like that.
If it wasn’t for the fact that even an AI trained on only factually correct data can conflagrate those data points into entirely novel data that may no longer be factually accurate, I wouldn’t mind the use of AI tools for this or much of anything.
But they can literally just combine everything they know to create something that appears normal and correct, while being absolutely fucked. I feel like using AI to generate code would just give you more work and waste time, because you’ll still need to fucking verify that it didn’t just output a bunch of unusable bullshit.
Relying on these things is absolutely stupid.
Completely agree. My coworkers spend more time prompting and trying to get useful text from ChatGPT and then fixing that text than the time it’d take them to actually write the thing in the first place. It’s nonsense.
Based on my experience of AI coding I think this will only work for simple/common tasks, like writing a Python script download a CSV file and convert it to JSON.
As soon as you get anywhere that isn’t all over the internet it starts to bullshit.
But if you’re working in a domain it’s decent at, why not? I found in those cases fixing the AI’s mistakes can be faster than writing it myself. Actually often I find it useful for helping me decide how I want to write code because the AI does something dumb, and I go “no I obviously don’t want it like that”…
IMO it will “succeed” in the early phase. Pre-seed startups will be able demo and get investors more easily, which I hear is already happening.
However, it’s not sustainable, and either somebody figures out a practical transition/rewrite strategy as they try to go to market, or the startup dies while trying to scale up.
We’ll see a lower success rate from these companies, in a bit of an I-told-you-so-moment, which reduces over-investment in the practice. Under a new equilibrium, vibe coding remains useful for super early demos, hackathons, and throwaway explorations, and people learn to do the transition/rewrite either earlier or not at all for core systems, depending on the resources founders have available at such an early stage.
