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What is vibe coding? How creators are building software with no coding knowledge

82 points by Bocajmai 2y ago

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yawpitch 2y ago
Oh the many, many ways this will go wrong. The world ended not with a bang and not with a whimper… in the end, it was the sound of someone double clicking on a file written in a language the person “vibing” it couldn’t read and didn’t understand.
- Bocajmai 2y ago
  It could go so wrong, but the vectors for disaster are already innumerable in this world we live in. I prefer to think about the ways it could go right. To empower people to create is the very purpose of computers, no?
  - yapyap 2y ago
    Yeah, but does this really empower people? Of course ‘letting someone do what they want’ seems like it’d be the most empowering thing, what’s more empowering than free will. But doing it this way will not give you any knowledge or skill, if you’d ever need to code without an AI or would need to understand a deeper concept you’d have no ground to stand on. Basically it’s the instant gratification vs delayed gratification but for programming. Is instant gratification empowerment? maybe for a moment.
    - jbombadil 2y ago
      I agree. This is empowering people to program in the most superficial level. It’s about volume, not quality. It’s the same vein in which social media “empowers” social relationships. It’s not that it won’t help anyone. But what will be the second order effects if it becomes the norm? And I’m not talking just about “jobs”. I’m talking about the growth and empowerment that comes from learning, the critical thought process, etc.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    Let's empower a gorilla to handle a chainsaw and see how that goes.
inSenCite 2y ago
Its called fuck around and find out innit. Coding is easy, testing and maintaining is hard.
rvz 2y ago
Ignore this nonsense fad of "Vibe coding". There is no thought about software maintenance which is what will really test those with no "coding" knowledge. It's just like the infinite monkey theorem, hitting the enter key repeatedly without understanding the actions and eventually reaching their goal. You would not see software engineers at SpaceX or NASA "Vibe coding" on software that will be running on rockets or defense technology companies vetting candidates that have been doing "vibe coding". This euphoria feels like a repeat of the years 1999 - 2000 which we will see a crash that will revert back to reality.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  > You would not see software engineers at SpaceX or NASA "Vibe coding" Sure that's true, but I doubt the people with no coding experience who use LLMs to create some application are working on safety critical systems. For me this fad should be embraced, especially by non coders, as it allows them to be creative in new ways.
- nom 2y ago
  No no, you see, there will be no more maintenance done by humans. The AI will rewrite the app completely from scratch every time you deploy. The whole product will be defined by a specification distilled out of company meetings, slack messages and emails. There will be only one button labeled "build and deploy" and if something breaks you press it again.
  - timrichard 2y ago
    A button with a dice icon.
- muixoozie 2y ago
  > It's just like the infinite monkey theorem, hitting the enter key repeatedly without understanding the actions and eventually reaching their goal. Reminds me of this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632... >Non-trivial text generation during the lifespan of our universe is almost certainly impossible.
zeristor 2y ago
I thought debugging RAD software was a pain.
yapyap 2y ago
I thought vibe coding meant going in on a project without first laying out a plan, basically KANBAN’ing it and just programming functions based on vibes. I guess this is even more vibe based, the AI’s vibe that is.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  i think that's called AGILE
UrineSqueegee 2y ago
I see many gatekeepers in the comments. I've made hundreds of small apps and scrips for me with with vibe coding, i dont want them maintainable, I dont want them safety critical, I dont want to launch a rocket with them. I just want a free script or addon that will do its job instead of paying someone on upwork to do it for me. simple as. Additionally it's only up from here. The agents will be able to do maintainable code and safety critical code at some point in the future. It's not all gonna happen overnight.
- gardenhedge 2y ago
  The article itself doesn't have comments. On HN, there's 2 posts that are against vibe coding which could be seen as gatekeeping. What are you referring to when you say "I see many gatekeepers in the comments."?
  - card_zero 2y ago
    Hey, that could be considered many. 2 many.
  - dudefeliciano 2y ago
    there are now 6 comments all critical of the notion of vibe coding, this thread being the only one started by someone who praises its benefits
  - greenchair 2y ago
    some people see what they want to see
- withinboredom 2y ago
  I don’t see anyone “gatekeeping” but I do see warnings. I don’t know what you’re good at, to give a good example. But if you have a hobby or job, imagine the new guy coming in, knowing absolutely nothing and doing shit they technically can do, but shouldn’t be done. That’s what this is. Just like a new cashier can technically just not give correct change, everyone knows this will end badly; eventually, even though everything looks fine from the outside. That’s what AI code tends to do. It looks fine to the outsiders, it might even function correctly MOST of the time. Programmers are trained, mostly through experience but also classically, to think through every exceptional case and figure out how to handle it (or return an error so a human can handle it). That isn’t to say this is ALWAYS the case with AI code, but rather it TENDS to be the case. YMMV, which is where these warnings are coming from.
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nkrisc 2y ago
Oh, it makes sense now. The previous owner of my home was doing vibe plumbing and vibe electrical work. Without the AI, but all the same regardless. This is no different than what amateurs have been doing for a long time. Hopefully they’re not taking in PII or charging anyone for these apps.
- nxpnsv 2y ago
  I've been dealing with a particularly vibed plumbling, luckily it's going away with the remodeling...
- jeremy151 2y ago
  My previous homeowner was also a vibe maintainer! The difference that I see in this is that the LLM is reasonably at 'expert' level for many of these things. If I sit down with Stevie Wonder and ask him to help me write a song, the resulting song is probably going to be pretty good. Stevie also knows by experience lots of things to avoid, and is intuitively going to help me avoid them unless I instruct him specifically to make a poor choice. I think there are likely opportunities too to have models or system prompts that cater or adapt to the experience level of the person it's working with. "As you interact with the user, determine their relative level of knowledge and experience. If they seem to be relatively inexperienced with software development, be much more aggressive in helping to warn them about and avoid common pitfalls, bad architectural decisions, and security issues." I suspect it's probably going to enable a lot of poor quality stuff, but it also may to some degree raise the floor of what's being produced at the same time.
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    It's going to lower the floor, because lots of stuff that would otherwise not get produced will be made, and it will be hard to see how incompetent the people behind it are at first glance because the UI could be decent. Imagine putting your valuable information into one of these garbage apps only to find out that the app wasn't even written by a programmer! If it goes just a little farther, and the AI deploys it for you too, how many disclosure and data retention laws are going to be broken by it? You'd have to be awfully desperate to want to use one of these 100% AI monstrosities created by an amateur.
iammrpayments 2y ago
“non-programmers can now build functional software by working with AI rather than writing code directly.” I’m not sure about that, it may be true, but you can also build a ecom store without coding knowledge using wordpress and shopify but you still face a lot of limitations.
- Joker_vD 2y ago
  Non-programmers always could build functional software by hiring programmers, you know. And we all know how well that usually goes.
  - Bocajmai 2y ago
    That's very true. But programmers are extremely expensive. I don't think these tools or vibe coding replace expensive programmers, but they do make it possible to noodle where once it would have taken a potentially very risky commitment for a small business / solopreneur.
  - econ 2y ago
    We do? I thought we were clueless how long things will take.
- Bocajmai 2y ago
  We're not talking about building an ecom store, though, are we? We're talking about building useful tools. Small things, that work in a way that makes sense to the individual. Something that could be churned out in a day or two by a competent dev, but is completely out of reach for Joe public. That's where we're at.
  - mexicocitinluez 2y ago
    > That's where we're at. Tools to build web apps and web pages without coding knowledge have been around for over 2 decades. Microsoft Frontpage allowed uses to build a website using a WYSIWYG editor.
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rakoo 2y ago
The age of write-only programs is back, perl is relevant again
- haolez 2y ago
  And APL! It saves so much tokens :D
  - makapuf 2y ago
    Just tried making a LLM generate primes for fun in APL : gave me primes ← {⍵/⍨2=+⌿0=⍵∘.|⍵}⍳ :) I'll try submitting that to my colleagues
    - marcosdumay 2y ago
      I wonder... Is the smile part of the program?
      - pineaux 2y ago
        Yes. APL is written in symbols
someothherguyy 2y ago
They are programmers. Its not much different from coding using cookbooks or snippets, which plenty of people have done in the past and continue to do.
- croes 2y ago
  If AI does all the coding you are customer not a programmer. Or do you think a customer who describes his requirements to a programmer who writes the actual program is a programmer too?
  - deleted 2y ago
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  - someothherguyy 2y ago
    Have you used what is being called AI here to program? It is a bit more involved than providing requirements once.
    - nickthegreek 2y ago
      I recently made a quest 3 minesweeper game using ChatGPT to code 95% of everything. I felt more like a manager than a coder. A manager with unlimited patience. By the end though, I felt accomplished and understood Unity IDE at a rudimentary level. I learned a lot and had a great time.
    - croes 2y ago
      Have you ever been a customer to a programmer? It’s more than telling your requirements once. Did you use AI to program something you couldn’t do yourself? Did you get the same satisfaction because you solved the challenges or did you feel some kind estranged from the result because or wasn’t really your achievement.
59327ZAG 2y ago
The AI propaganda and hype is so strong that even Starmer mentioned AI fealty in his meeting with Trump. After Trump was overtly lying about the US spending $360 billion on Ukraine and that the EU had given their aid as a loan.
- Bocajmai 2y ago
  Is it propaganda if we can see it feel it and use it ourselves? I'm not so sure. The hype is real, the bubble is real, but that doesn't mean it's meritless.
  - 59327ZAG 2y ago
    I have no issues that an isolationist US uses it. I have issues if the US foists the garbage on the EU, just like it now wants to dump Biden's Ukraine war on the EU by insulting Zelensky and deliberately provoking a protective counter reaction in EU leaders. EU/British leaders are very naive. Just like getting everyone dragged into that Ukraine conflict, the US now drags everyone into AI and makes them pay for it. Just like the war hype, the AI hype will collapse. In one case the MIC made the profits, in the other case it will be tech bros.
- deergomoo 2y ago
  > Starmer The UK recently announced plans to go big on AI even before the Trump meeting. Much to my dismay, as we've actually done a really good job of grid decarbonisation so far and there's no way building a ton of GPU-filled data centres is going to aid that or our spiralling energy costs.
cube2222 2y ago
One thing that AI made possible for me (amongst many other benefits) is to frequently build auxiliary development tooling that I would otherwise not bother with, with almost no required time investment. Tools and visualizations for debugging that I might need only for a week, local dev automations, linters, etc. As long as I can eye-ball correctness, it's a huge time-saver and help.
- jfcisco 2y ago
  That's a really good idea. I have a few tool ideas for the team I work with but I never felt like I had enough time between tasks to implement them
madduci 2y ago
It's nice that not technical people can also create something new but it is more or less the same like DIY approaches Vs hiring professionals to do something. About software, it works, fine, but do you ever deal with maintenance, security patches and so on?
- Bocajmai 2y ago
  That's a very valid concern. What kind of maintenance though? Most of the examples in this article are very simple. Maintenance might involve iterating on features, no real live services that would require any work. Security patches though, yeah, that's tougher. My position is that if security is a concern, you need to hire someone. As much as many of these tools can integrate with databases and set up auth, I'm not sure how much I trust it personally. Especially if the actual code is hidden.
whall6 2y ago
I have no formal software development experience beyond a $15 Udemy course. If you think vibe coding is as easy as this article makes it sound, try deploying a simple website.
- Bocajmai 2y ago
  I would encourage you to try Replit! Deployment is literally a button. Granted, to a replit subdomain. But following some documentation to add your own domain is not out of reach.
  - ImaCake 2y ago
    You can do this with github pages too, including your own subdomain. ChatGPT could walk you through the steps but there is no requirement for an LLM. There's been big efforts to simplify this stuff for years. Lots of good tooling out there (which the right questions to an LLM will yield for you). I think LLMs help with stuff like deploying a website, but they aren't a requirement. You still need to know what you are doing if you want to do something complex.
  - dtgmzac 2y ago
    Cloudflare pages is another option for simple static sites, it's easy to set it up in minutes just following ChatGPT response. Though I feel this only works well for tech that are widely used.
FollowingTheDao 2y ago
Wait...what about all the "Learn to Code!" shouting four years ago?
- drpossum 2y ago
  Funny, that went away after corporations flooded the market with cheap inexperienced developers and decided they couldn't afford them either without ZIRP.
- croes 2y ago
  Still valid otherwise you can’t distinguish a working app from an app with security issues or even malware.
  - JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
    Or an application that works 50% of the time but is filled with bugs.
DeathArrow 2y ago
I hope no one will try vibe surgery.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  We did that for thousands of years and it’s still done in many parts of the world
oneplane 2y ago
Isn't this the same thing as no-code, low-code, MS Access, Excel, HyperCard, 4GL, COBOL etc. we've already had? The idea being that you can build something without knowing how to build something (on a gradient -- you could argue that on the COBOL end of the spectrum you need much more than the no-code end). I doubt this time around, the AI-flavoured variant is going to change much, except perhaps the volume.
- layer8 2y ago
  The existing no/low-code has a more limited and controlled design space, and what the “coder” works with has deterministic behavior. With LLMs, they can do anything (including things you don’t want), and you don’t know how well your instructions map onto what they generate (only by testing, not by reasoning). When LLM-created designs run into unmaintainable territory, the corresponding code is invisible to the “coder”. This is unlike no/low-code, where even if the application becomes unmaintainable, the “coder” still has the full overview over their design. Vibes-coding is akin to write-only, you can’t tinker with your specification and see how the output changes; instead all previous output becomes part of the specification, an increasingly growing part that the “coder” doesn’t understand.
silver_silver 2y ago
If this annoys you as a software developer consider that you’re now experiencing what the artists have been going through
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  Both in coding and arts it is still painfully obvious when something is just pure AI slop. At the same time there are both coders and artists that have learned to use these tools to create some truly unique and interesting things
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  Most people I know actively hate the AI art slop that has been flooding the internet. I would wager a lot of people do, evident when a common insult is to say a piece of art looks AI generated. This reaction hasn't happened for AI programming. People just assume it will work because AI is made by programmers.
williamcotton 2y ago
I've done plenty of vibe coding over the last year or so and I generally find it to be a fun and rewarding experience. Of course my prompts frequently refer to advanced concepts like memory arenas, left associative operators, and other concepts that are beyond the beginner level. But to be honest I do take the time to read some code both to clean things up a bit and to learn something new, killing the vibe entirely. So unchill.
codetrotter 2y ago
When I started programming, I didn’t have an AI to help me. I wrote a lot of spaghetti and I confused myself a lot. And it was a lot of fun. I think the doomsayers ITT are wrong. I think you’ve forgotten what it was like to go from “how do you even make a program” to “I put something on the screen and it’s amazing that I did that”. I think AI will help a lot of people get over the bump from not even comprehending how software works, to putting something on their screen and evolving their skills from there. Who cares if they make some spaghetti along the way. That’s necessary for learning. AI or not.
- mexicocitinluez 2y ago
  You're 1000% underestimating the experience of learning it yourself vs just getting info shot right into your brain.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  > get over the bump You call learning, making mistakes and fixing them, and improving "a bump"? That's the whole point. > That’s necessary for learning You haven't learned anything in the end. I read a lot of programming books in the past thinking I would be a computer god at the end, and I realized I learned nothing because "I did nothing" exactly like what we have with ChatGPT.
- deergomoo 2y ago
  > evolving their skills from there What skills? If you are just asking a computer for what you want you're not developing any skills, apart from maybe how to describe your requirements better†. If you take the code the LLM outputs and use that as a basis to be able to write your own code I would call that "learning to program" and I applaud it whether you learn from adapting LLM code or by reading K&R cover-to-cover before you even touch a keyboard. But that's not what this article describes—what this article describes is the very deliberate act of not learning anything. †Technically just describing your requirements in a way the particular LLM you're using responds best to, which is not necessarily "better" in an objective sense.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  Everyone knows that copy pasting code without understanding it is exactly how you don't learn. Every programming class you're in has an underperforming student that does exactly this. Than they barely graduate, get interviewed, and they're somehow worse than the bootcamp grads. Cursor is that, but prompted by you instead of a stackoverflow question.
nabla9 2y ago
Accenture, IBM and other big companies have employed vibe coders for years. Java is a language designed to make it possible. Java style classes make it possible for someone to design the overall structure and pass it to someone who just vomits something inside it. They have teams where maybe 1 in 3 consultants have programming knowledge and the rest just vibe something into the Java API that is given to them. Back and forth until it passes and then to the customers. LLMs make this just faster and maybe even better. The code will be bloated, slow, and hard to maintain.
- nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  > Accenture, IBM and other big companies have employed vibe coders for years. Having worked in a few codebases/projects by these companies (and some other "big name" consultancy companies in this same "space"), I cannot imagine copypasta from Claude/Copilot would be anything other than a massive improvement. What companies have paid these firms to do is nothing short of appalling, and I'm not even referring to the notorious Hertz lawsuit, just the average run of the mill junk.
- Nursie 2y ago
  Wow, what a ridiculous load of tripe. Java classes are no more enabling of shit code than any other language. Idiots can and do “vomit” code into pre-canned structures built for them in any language.
  - nabla9 2y ago
    Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. Java classes and types are strict and "save" enough that it make it possible to put straight jacked to coder, but loose enough that they can make it compile. You can't do that with C++, Python because they are too loose and you can't do it with Rust or strict functional programming language because vibe programmer can't make the code compile. It's perfect when you have software architect who does the intelligent work and code monkeys who fill the blanks.
    - 2y ago
DeathArrow 2y ago
Hey Siri! Please build for me a trading tool using some custom made AI models and some smart-ass quantitative models so I can build a hedge fund and become rich fast.
_pdp_ 2y ago
A quick scan of various reddit forums reveals how "vibe coders" experience exponential levels of difficulty past the simple landing page. Things like setting up basic auth for example is non-trivial (outside of PasS) and there are many other aspects that require at least some understanding of what is going on. My only concern of this type of programming is when it starts involving end users, specifically around privacy and security. It is not that AI written software is less or more secure. It is just about the whole live-cycle of software development and maintenance. Vibe-coders might not visit this forum for example and might not be aware of a security exploit that must be fixed asap... or even be aware that they need to perform basic level of software support to avoid costly intervention in the future. It is not going to happen - not today. I am thinking that this type of coding is only going to increase the demand for professional services. The closest analogy I can provide is that almost anyone can perform basic level of DYI and many do - but when it comes to more serious work you rely on contractors to get the job done.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  > Vibe-coders might not visit this forum for example and might not be aware of a security exploit that must be fixed asap. This is true of "regular" coders too, i've worked with/for extremely experienced programmers who, while knowing the security risks, implemented (or even worse, asked me to implement) flakey authentication systems, exposed databases, etc. I don't think this is an AI issue, it's a "care about your users" issue. > is only going to increase the demand for professional services Then shouldn't we be happy that more people are embracing vibe coding?
  - wakawaka28 2y ago
    There's a big difference between someone knowing about security and taking a calculated risk, and someone who understands neither the risks nor the semantics of code handed to them. There are also legal issues. Even in the most optimistic cases, I think we're 50 years away from this making sense for most software.
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    > Then shouldn't we be happy that more people are embracing vibe coding? I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to reverse engineering and maintaining someone else’s vibe coded mess. It’s like when someone makes a quick and dirty proof of concept to impress management and then hands it off to another team to make it usable in production. They did 20% of the work but took 80% of the credit. Now you have to to the remaining 80% of the work to make it into what it needs to be, but management is only going to be disappointed because you’re moving so slowly relative to the proof of concept creator.
karpejdiem 2y ago
Actually, this could be a good thing.
thro1 2y ago
"There's a new kind of coding .. where you .. forget that the code even exists" That's not coding at all - if is taken out (the best user inter interface is that one that doesn't stop you and doesn't exist between you and that thing you interact with - it's about the thing, not about how). It's magic (and magical thinking, wishes) - things have to happen, doesn't matter how (that how was the coding): > The magic is always real, but once you understand magic it simply becomes knowledge. That makes it no less magical ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43216041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43216041 ). BTW Why we calling it AI - not AK - Artificial Knowledge as it is indeed ? ( isn't the intelligence something you supposed to have ?)
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megaloblasto 2y ago
I think this idea, and AI in general, really scares a lot of professional programmers, but this is the world we live in now. You can't spend too long denying the impact of AI on writing code. The ability to adapt to a changing world is one of the most useful skills you can have.
- aleph_minus_one 2y ago
  > I think this idea, and AI in general, really scares a lot of professional programmers, but this is the world we live in now. You can't spend too long denying the impact of AI on writing code. I am such a denier. Some colleagues in my department were allowed/instructed to try out AI for coding for months just so that the company could get substantive judgements whether AI is useful or not for coding work. It basically did not help for the tasks that we are doing (and the tasks that we are doing are quite varied (so there are a lot of different topics where an AI could (purely hypothetically) help), but none of them is "create a scrappy CRUD prototype" :-) ). Thus: the only impact that AI has on writing code that I don't deny is that a lot of stupid managers fall for the siren call of the various A"I" companies, and cause lots of damage. Of course none of these managers will at the end carry the can for the damage caused.
wakawaka28 2y ago
I doubt this will ever make sense, but if it does someday actually work, the next step will be for the AI companies to use the tools to auto-inject spyware into the projects of amateurs. If you want something according to your own needs, you'll have to either edit the code to clean it up or use an even better AI to remove it (and this may be forbidden by the EULA).
CyberDildonics 2y ago
Why are people immediately buying in to a nonsense term that some blogger came up with? This means nothing but somehow there are people replying as if this is some scientific technical term that they grew up with after reading it once.
JKCalhoun 2y ago
New York Times talked about this from the other day (shorter article): https://archive.ph/ruDI8 https://archive.ph/ruDI8
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listenfaster 2y ago
This is a good snapshot of the landscape for those wondering who’s competing in this space - I bookmarked it for that reason. I’m left wondering who the intended audience is for this - devs with no xp or experienced devs looking to leverage new toolkits. Though the former is implied, it seems like the latter is the case. This comment thread and this author are mostly experienced devs. Obviously, Automating the first 80% of development this way, you get less happy accidents and less rabbitholing on minutiae which make you a stronger programmer, and give joy. But dang, you get a lot of joy from finishing something too. And also obvious is the cost of deploying and maintaining. All the SDLC things that come with releasing a product are out of scope here, but that’s likely temporary. It would be great to have assisted deploy build pipeline development I can trust in a product that has a complex blend of old, new, in-house and proprietary service development. Coffee’s still kicking in. These are my thoughts.
layer8 2y ago
Some commenters are likening this to no-code/low-code. However, there is an important difference: When you prompt an LLM to generate some code, then for any further modification, the generated code becomes part of the software’s specification instead of the original prompt. In other words, as soon as you have some history of “coding” the software, you can’t experiment with modifying previous prompts to see how it changes the software. (You can in theory and replay the whole history, but then subsequent existing prompts won’t make sense anymore in the context of the changes made to preceding prompts.) This is unlike no-code/low-code, where the “coder” still has full control and visibility over the specification and can tinker with it. With LLM-generated code, an increasing part of the “specification” is constituted by the code that has been generated so far, into which the “coder” has no insight. The “coder” can only try to run it to see how it behaves, but cannot reason about it like a no-code/low-code coder can about their specification.
- itishappy 2y ago
  It may not be auditable in the same was a block-based workflow, but there's nothing stopping you from saying "hey, this code doesn't do what I want, please improve it" to the LLM. The whole point about the article is that reasoning about the code isn't always required any more, reasoning about the output is enough.
  - layer8 2y ago
    My point is that it is not the same, in a similar sense in which testing (as a software engineering discipline) is not a substitute for proving the correctness of code. Another way in which it is different is that the “coder” cannot test hypotheses of the kind “when I prompt x, then y will happen” other than as a one-off, because that conversion is lossy, whereas in no-code/low-code “when I specify x, then y will happen” is deterministic. In other words, with no-code/low-code, the “coder” can with time learn to predict precisely and reliably what their change will do, which is not really the case with LLM-based coding, where you have to go by the “vibe”.
    - itishappy 2y ago
vander_elst 2y ago
Old man yelling at cloud here, I guess but, what do you do when something doesn't work? How do you ensure security if you have no clue what's going on underneath?
adityaathalye 2y ago
OH: "Modern vibe coding is to traditional software what traditional remedies are to modern evidence based medicine."
- deleted 2y ago
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satisfice 2y ago
You can also fly an airplane without knowing how to fly. It’s profoundly irresponsible, but ethics is no barrier, is it?
rohansx 2y ago
Vibe code for passion projects, but call a pro for anything mission-critical
satisfice 2y ago
Call it slop coding.
mrandersen 2y ago
As a means to increase my own productivity while working on a new startup. I went on to pursue a new concept, and to fix the issues with vibe coding and other related editors/agents. I'm excited to be releasing soon, I think you all would find it interest. codeaway.ai
Jotalea 2y ago
As a lazy person, I've been using this method for a while now, and I greatly appreciate it. But there are two major flaws: - the end results usually suck: they either feel incomplete, have a major flaw, or just don't work. - sometimes, the AI just won't understand what the request was, or it will get stuck on a loop while trying to troubleshoot one bug and causing even more. I believe that code written by actual reasoning people will be miles better than what a machine can. AI should be used for "au-to-ma-tion", and tasks that one doesn't want to or doesn't like to do, like writing documentation. Here's one instance where this "vibe coding" went right and I got a mostly functional program (game): https://chatgpt.com/share/67a125b3-15cc-8001-9863-13372338e3d3 https://chatgpt.com/share/67a125b3-15cc-8001-9863-13372338e3...
wickdninja 2y ago
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82 points by Bocajmai 2y ago

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

Oh the many, many ways this will go wrong. The world ended not with a bang and not with a whimper… in the end, it was the sound of someone double clicking on a file written in a language the person “vibing” it couldn’t read and didn’t understand.

Bocajmai 2y ago
It could go so wrong, but the vectors for disaster are already innumerable in this world we live in. I prefer to think about the ways it could go right. To empower people to create is the very purpose of computers, no?
- yapyap 2y ago
  Yeah, but does this really empower people? Of course ‘letting someone do what they want’ seems like it’d be the most empowering thing, what’s more empowering than free will. But doing it this way will not give you any knowledge or skill, if you’d ever need to code without an AI or would need to understand a deeper concept you’d have no ground to stand on. Basically it’s the instant gratification vs delayed gratification but for programming. Is instant gratification empowerment? maybe for a moment.
  - jbombadil 2y ago
    I agree. This is empowering people to program in the most superficial level. It’s about volume, not quality. It’s the same vein in which social media “empowers” social relationships. It’s not that it won’t help anyone. But what will be the second order effects if it becomes the norm? And I’m not talking just about “jobs”. I’m talking about the growth and empowerment that comes from learning, the critical thought process, etc.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  Let's empower a gorilla to handle a chainsaw and see how that goes.

inSenCite 2y ago

Its called fuck around and find out innit. Coding is easy, testing and maintaining is hard.

rvz 2y ago

Ignore this nonsense fad of "Vibe coding". There is no thought about software maintenance which is what will really test those with no "coding" knowledge. It's just like the infinite monkey theorem, hitting the enter key repeatedly without understanding the actions and eventually reaching their goal. You would not see software engineers at SpaceX or NASA "Vibe coding" on software that will be running on rockets or defense technology companies vetting candidates that have been doing "vibe coding". This euphoria feels like a repeat of the years 1999 - 2000 which we will see a crash that will revert back to reality.

dudefeliciano 2y ago
> You would not see software engineers at SpaceX or NASA "Vibe coding" Sure that's true, but I doubt the people with no coding experience who use LLMs to create some application are working on safety critical systems. For me this fad should be embraced, especially by non coders, as it allows them to be creative in new ways.
nom 2y ago
No no, you see, there will be no more maintenance done by humans. The AI will rewrite the app completely from scratch every time you deploy. The whole product will be defined by a specification distilled out of company meetings, slack messages and emails. There will be only one button labeled "build and deploy" and if something breaks you press it again.
- timrichard 2y ago
  A button with a dice icon.
muixoozie 2y ago
> It's just like the infinite monkey theorem, hitting the enter key repeatedly without understanding the actions and eventually reaching their goal. Reminds me of this https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2773186324001014 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S277318632... >Non-trivial text generation during the lifespan of our universe is almost certainly impossible.

zeristor 2y ago

I thought debugging RAD software was a pain.

yapyap 2y ago

I thought vibe coding meant going in on a project without first laying out a plan, basically KANBAN’ing it and just programming functions based on vibes. I guess this is even more vibe based, the AI’s vibe that is.

dudefeliciano 2y ago
i think that's called AGILE

UrineSqueegee 2y ago

I see many gatekeepers in the comments. I've made hundreds of small apps and scrips for me with with vibe coding, i dont want them maintainable, I dont want them safety critical, I dont want to launch a rocket with them. I just want a free script or addon that will do its job instead of paying someone on upwork to do it for me. simple as. Additionally it's only up from here. The agents will be able to do maintainable code and safety critical code at some point in the future. It's not all gonna happen overnight.

gardenhedge 2y ago
The article itself doesn't have comments. On HN, there's 2 posts that are against vibe coding which could be seen as gatekeeping. What are you referring to when you say "I see many gatekeepers in the comments."?
- card_zero 2y ago
  Hey, that could be considered many. 2 many.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  there are now 6 comments all critical of the notion of vibe coding, this thread being the only one started by someone who praises its benefits
- greenchair 2y ago
  some people see what they want to see
withinboredom 2y ago
I don’t see anyone “gatekeeping” but I do see warnings. I don’t know what you’re good at, to give a good example. But if you have a hobby or job, imagine the new guy coming in, knowing absolutely nothing and doing shit they technically can do, but shouldn’t be done. That’s what this is. Just like a new cashier can technically just not give correct change, everyone knows this will end badly; eventually, even though everything looks fine from the outside. That’s what AI code tends to do. It looks fine to the outsiders, it might even function correctly MOST of the time. Programmers are trained, mostly through experience but also classically, to think through every exceptional case and figure out how to handle it (or return an error so a human can handle it). That isn’t to say this is ALWAYS the case with AI code, but rather it TENDS to be the case. YMMV, which is where these warnings are coming from.

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nkrisc 2y ago

Oh, it makes sense now. The previous owner of my home was doing vibe plumbing and vibe electrical work. Without the AI, but all the same regardless. This is no different than what amateurs have been doing for a long time. Hopefully they’re not taking in PII or charging anyone for these apps.

nxpnsv 2y ago
I've been dealing with a particularly vibed plumbling, luckily it's going away with the remodeling...
jeremy151 2y ago
My previous homeowner was also a vibe maintainer! The difference that I see in this is that the LLM is reasonably at 'expert' level for many of these things. If I sit down with Stevie Wonder and ask him to help me write a song, the resulting song is probably going to be pretty good. Stevie also knows by experience lots of things to avoid, and is intuitively going to help me avoid them unless I instruct him specifically to make a poor choice. I think there are likely opportunities too to have models or system prompts that cater or adapt to the experience level of the person it's working with. "As you interact with the user, determine their relative level of knowledge and experience. If they seem to be relatively inexperienced with software development, be much more aggressive in helping to warn them about and avoid common pitfalls, bad architectural decisions, and security issues." I suspect it's probably going to enable a lot of poor quality stuff, but it also may to some degree raise the floor of what's being produced at the same time.
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  It's going to lower the floor, because lots of stuff that would otherwise not get produced will be made, and it will be hard to see how incompetent the people behind it are at first glance because the UI could be decent. Imagine putting your valuable information into one of these garbage apps only to find out that the app wasn't even written by a programmer! If it goes just a little farther, and the AI deploys it for you too, how many disclosure and data retention laws are going to be broken by it? You'd have to be awfully desperate to want to use one of these 100% AI monstrosities created by an amateur.

iammrpayments 2y ago

“non-programmers can now build functional software by working with AI rather than writing code directly.” I’m not sure about that, it may be true, but you can also build a ecom store without coding knowledge using wordpress and shopify but you still face a lot of limitations.

Joker_vD 2y ago
Non-programmers always could build functional software by hiring programmers, you know. And we all know how well that usually goes.
- Bocajmai 2y ago
  That's very true. But programmers are extremely expensive. I don't think these tools or vibe coding replace expensive programmers, but they do make it possible to noodle where once it would have taken a potentially very risky commitment for a small business / solopreneur.
- econ 2y ago
  We do? I thought we were clueless how long things will take.
Bocajmai 2y ago
We're not talking about building an ecom store, though, are we? We're talking about building useful tools. Small things, that work in a way that makes sense to the individual. Something that could be churned out in a day or two by a competent dev, but is completely out of reach for Joe public. That's where we're at.
- mexicocitinluez 2y ago
  > That's where we're at. Tools to build web apps and web pages without coding knowledge have been around for over 2 decades. Microsoft Frontpage allowed uses to build a website using a WYSIWYG editor.

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rakoo 2y ago

The age of write-only programs is back, perl is relevant again

haolez 2y ago
And APL! It saves so much tokens :D
- makapuf 2y ago
  Just tried making a LLM generate primes for fun in APL : gave me primes ← {⍵/⍨2=+⌿0=⍵∘.|⍵}⍳ :) I'll try submitting that to my colleagues
  - marcosdumay 2y ago
    I wonder... Is the smile part of the program?
    - pineaux 2y ago
      Yes. APL is written in symbols

someothherguyy 2y ago

They are programmers. Its not much different from coding using cookbooks or snippets, which plenty of people have done in the past and continue to do.

croes 2y ago
If AI does all the coding you are customer not a programmer. Or do you think a customer who describes his requirements to a programmer who writes the actual program is a programmer too?
- deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
- someothherguyy 2y ago
  Have you used what is being called AI here to program? It is a bit more involved than providing requirements once.
  - nickthegreek 2y ago
    I recently made a quest 3 minesweeper game using ChatGPT to code 95% of everything. I felt more like a manager than a coder. A manager with unlimited patience. By the end though, I felt accomplished and understood Unity IDE at a rudimentary level. I learned a lot and had a great time.
  - croes 2y ago
    Have you ever been a customer to a programmer? It’s more than telling your requirements once. Did you use AI to program something you couldn’t do yourself? Did you get the same satisfaction because you solved the challenges or did you feel some kind estranged from the result because or wasn’t really your achievement.

59327ZAG 2y ago

The AI propaganda and hype is so strong that even Starmer mentioned AI fealty in his meeting with Trump. After Trump was overtly lying about the US spending $360 billion on Ukraine and that the EU had given their aid as a loan.

Bocajmai 2y ago
Is it propaganda if we can see it feel it and use it ourselves? I'm not so sure. The hype is real, the bubble is real, but that doesn't mean it's meritless.
- 59327ZAG 2y ago
  I have no issues that an isolationist US uses it. I have issues if the US foists the garbage on the EU, just like it now wants to dump Biden's Ukraine war on the EU by insulting Zelensky and deliberately provoking a protective counter reaction in EU leaders. EU/British leaders are very naive. Just like getting everyone dragged into that Ukraine conflict, the US now drags everyone into AI and makes them pay for it. Just like the war hype, the AI hype will collapse. In one case the MIC made the profits, in the other case it will be tech bros.
deergomoo 2y ago
> Starmer The UK recently announced plans to go big on AI even before the Trump meeting. Much to my dismay, as we've actually done a really good job of grid decarbonisation so far and there's no way building a ton of GPU-filled data centres is going to aid that or our spiralling energy costs.

cube2222 2y ago

One thing that AI made possible for me (amongst many other benefits) is to frequently build auxiliary development tooling that I would otherwise not bother with, with almost no required time investment. Tools and visualizations for debugging that I might need only for a week, local dev automations, linters, etc. As long as I can eye-ball correctness, it's a huge time-saver and help.

jfcisco 2y ago
That's a really good idea. I have a few tool ideas for the team I work with but I never felt like I had enough time between tasks to implement them

madduci 2y ago

It's nice that not technical people can also create something new but it is more or less the same like DIY approaches Vs hiring professionals to do something. About software, it works, fine, but do you ever deal with maintenance, security patches and so on?

Bocajmai 2y ago
That's a very valid concern. What kind of maintenance though? Most of the examples in this article are very simple. Maintenance might involve iterating on features, no real live services that would require any work. Security patches though, yeah, that's tougher. My position is that if security is a concern, you need to hire someone. As much as many of these tools can integrate with databases and set up auth, I'm not sure how much I trust it personally. Especially if the actual code is hidden.

whall6 2y ago

I have no formal software development experience beyond a $15 Udemy course. If you think vibe coding is as easy as this article makes it sound, try deploying a simple website.

Bocajmai 2y ago
I would encourage you to try Replit! Deployment is literally a button. Granted, to a replit subdomain. But following some documentation to add your own domain is not out of reach.
- ImaCake 2y ago
  You can do this with github pages too, including your own subdomain. ChatGPT could walk you through the steps but there is no requirement for an LLM. There's been big efforts to simplify this stuff for years. Lots of good tooling out there (which the right questions to an LLM will yield for you). I think LLMs help with stuff like deploying a website, but they aren't a requirement. You still need to know what you are doing if you want to do something complex.
- dtgmzac 2y ago
  Cloudflare pages is another option for simple static sites, it's easy to set it up in minutes just following ChatGPT response. Though I feel this only works well for tech that are widely used.

FollowingTheDao 2y ago

Wait...what about all the "Learn to Code!" shouting four years ago?

drpossum 2y ago
Funny, that went away after corporations flooded the market with cheap inexperienced developers and decided they couldn't afford them either without ZIRP.
croes 2y ago
Still valid otherwise you can’t distinguish a working app from an app with security issues or even malware.
- JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
  Or an application that works 50% of the time but is filled with bugs.

DeathArrow 2y ago

I hope no one will try vibe surgery.

dudefeliciano 2y ago
We did that for thousands of years and it’s still done in many parts of the world

oneplane 2y ago

Isn't this the same thing as no-code, low-code, MS Access, Excel, HyperCard, 4GL, COBOL etc. we've already had? The idea being that you can build something without knowing how to build something (on a gradient -- you could argue that on the COBOL end of the spectrum you need much more than the no-code end). I doubt this time around, the AI-flavoured variant is going to change much, except perhaps the volume.

layer8 2y ago
The existing no/low-code has a more limited and controlled design space, and what the “coder” works with has deterministic behavior. With LLMs, they can do anything (including things you don’t want), and you don’t know how well your instructions map onto what they generate (only by testing, not by reasoning). When LLM-created designs run into unmaintainable territory, the corresponding code is invisible to the “coder”. This is unlike no/low-code, where even if the application becomes unmaintainable, the “coder” still has the full overview over their design. Vibes-coding is akin to write-only, you can’t tinker with your specification and see how the output changes; instead all previous output becomes part of the specification, an increasingly growing part that the “coder” doesn’t understand.

silver_silver 2y ago

If this annoys you as a software developer consider that you’re now experiencing what the artists have been going through

dudefeliciano 2y ago
Both in coding and arts it is still painfully obvious when something is just pure AI slop. At the same time there are both coders and artists that have learned to use these tools to create some truly unique and interesting things
Capricorn2481 2y ago
Most people I know actively hate the AI art slop that has been flooding the internet. I would wager a lot of people do, evident when a common insult is to say a piece of art looks AI generated. This reaction hasn't happened for AI programming. People just assume it will work because AI is made by programmers.

williamcotton 2y ago

I've done plenty of vibe coding over the last year or so and I generally find it to be a fun and rewarding experience. Of course my prompts frequently refer to advanced concepts like memory arenas, left associative operators, and other concepts that are beyond the beginner level. But to be honest I do take the time to read some code both to clean things up a bit and to learn something new, killing the vibe entirely. So unchill.

codetrotter 2y ago

When I started programming, I didn’t have an AI to help me. I wrote a lot of spaghetti and I confused myself a lot. And it was a lot of fun. I think the doomsayers ITT are wrong. I think you’ve forgotten what it was like to go from “how do you even make a program” to “I put something on the screen and it’s amazing that I did that”. I think AI will help a lot of people get over the bump from not even comprehending how software works, to putting something on their screen and evolving their skills from there. Who cares if they make some spaghetti along the way. That’s necessary for learning. AI or not.

mexicocitinluez 2y ago
You're 1000% underestimating the experience of learning it yourself vs just getting info shot right into your brain.
JTyQZSnP3cQGa8B 2y ago
> get over the bump You call learning, making mistakes and fixing them, and improving "a bump"? That's the whole point. > That’s necessary for learning You haven't learned anything in the end. I read a lot of programming books in the past thinking I would be a computer god at the end, and I realized I learned nothing because "I did nothing" exactly like what we have with ChatGPT.
deergomoo 2y ago
> evolving their skills from there What skills? If you are just asking a computer for what you want you're not developing any skills, apart from maybe how to describe your requirements better†. If you take the code the LLM outputs and use that as a basis to be able to write your own code I would call that "learning to program" and I applaud it whether you learn from adapting LLM code or by reading K&R cover-to-cover before you even touch a keyboard. But that's not what this article describes—what this article describes is the very deliberate act of not learning anything. †Technically just describing your requirements in a way the particular LLM you're using responds best to, which is not necessarily "better" in an objective sense.
Capricorn2481 2y ago
Everyone knows that copy pasting code without understanding it is exactly how you don't learn. Every programming class you're in has an underperforming student that does exactly this. Than they barely graduate, get interviewed, and they're somehow worse than the bootcamp grads. Cursor is that, but prompted by you instead of a stackoverflow question.

nabla9 2y ago

Accenture, IBM and other big companies have employed vibe coders for years. Java is a language designed to make it possible. Java style classes make it possible for someone to design the overall structure and pass it to someone who just vomits something inside it. They have teams where maybe 1 in 3 consultants have programming knowledge and the rest just vibe something into the Java API that is given to them. Back and forth until it passes and then to the customers. LLMs make this just faster and maybe even better. The code will be bloated, slow, and hard to maintain.

nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
> Accenture, IBM and other big companies have employed vibe coders for years. Having worked in a few codebases/projects by these companies (and some other "big name" consultancy companies in this same "space"), I cannot imagine copypasta from Claude/Copilot would be anything other than a massive improvement. What companies have paid these firms to do is nothing short of appalling, and I'm not even referring to the notorious Hertz lawsuit, just the average run of the mill junk.
Nursie 2y ago
Wow, what a ridiculous load of tripe. Java classes are no more enabling of shit code than any other language. Idiots can and do “vomit” code into pre-canned structures built for them in any language.
- nabla9 2y ago
  Java was, as Gosling says in the first Java white paper, designed for average programmers. Java classes and types are strict and "save" enough that it make it possible to put straight jacked to coder, but loose enough that they can make it compile. You can't do that with C++, Python because they are too loose and you can't do it with Rust or strict functional programming language because vibe programmer can't make the code compile. It's perfect when you have software architect who does the intelligent work and code monkeys who fill the blanks.
  - 2y ago

DeathArrow 2y ago

Hey Siri! Please build for me a trading tool using some custom made AI models and some smart-ass quantitative models so I can build a hedge fund and become rich fast.

_pdp_ 2y ago

A quick scan of various reddit forums reveals how "vibe coders" experience exponential levels of difficulty past the simple landing page. Things like setting up basic auth for example is non-trivial (outside of PasS) and there are many other aspects that require at least some understanding of what is going on. My only concern of this type of programming is when it starts involving end users, specifically around privacy and security. It is not that AI written software is less or more secure. It is just about the whole live-cycle of software development and maintenance. Vibe-coders might not visit this forum for example and might not be aware of a security exploit that must be fixed asap... or even be aware that they need to perform basic level of software support to avoid costly intervention in the future. It is not going to happen - not today. I am thinking that this type of coding is only going to increase the demand for professional services. The closest analogy I can provide is that almost anyone can perform basic level of DYI and many do - but when it comes to more serious work you rely on contractors to get the job done.

dudefeliciano 2y ago
> Vibe-coders might not visit this forum for example and might not be aware of a security exploit that must be fixed asap. This is true of "regular" coders too, i've worked with/for extremely experienced programmers who, while knowing the security risks, implemented (or even worse, asked me to implement) flakey authentication systems, exposed databases, etc. I don't think this is an AI issue, it's a "care about your users" issue. > is only going to increase the demand for professional services Then shouldn't we be happy that more people are embracing vibe coding?
- wakawaka28 2y ago
  There's a big difference between someone knowing about security and taking a calculated risk, and someone who understands neither the risks nor the semantics of code handed to them. There are also legal issues. Even in the most optimistic cases, I think we're 50 years away from this making sense for most software.
- Aurornis 2y ago
  > Then shouldn't we be happy that more people are embracing vibe coding? I don’t know about you, but I’m not looking forward to reverse engineering and maintaining someone else’s vibe coded mess. It’s like when someone makes a quick and dirty proof of concept to impress management and then hands it off to another team to make it usable in production. They did 20% of the work but took 80% of the credit. Now you have to to the remaining 80% of the work to make it into what it needs to be, but management is only going to be disappointed because you’re moving so slowly relative to the proof of concept creator.

karpejdiem 2y ago

Actually, this could be a good thing.

thro1 2y ago

"There's a new kind of coding .. where you .. forget that the code even exists" That's not coding at all - if is taken out (the best user inter interface is that one that doesn't stop you and doesn't exist between you and that thing you interact with - it's about the thing, not about how). It's magic (and magical thinking, wishes) - things have to happen, doesn't matter how (that how was the coding): > The magic is always real, but once you understand magic it simply becomes knowledge. That makes it no less magical ( https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43216041 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43216041 ). BTW Why we calling it AI - not AK - Artificial Knowledge as it is indeed ? ( isn't the intelligence something you supposed to have ?)

deleted 2y ago

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megaloblasto 2y ago

I think this idea, and AI in general, really scares a lot of professional programmers, but this is the world we live in now. You can't spend too long denying the impact of AI on writing code. The ability to adapt to a changing world is one of the most useful skills you can have.

aleph_minus_one 2y ago
> I think this idea, and AI in general, really scares a lot of professional programmers, but this is the world we live in now. You can't spend too long denying the impact of AI on writing code. I am such a denier. Some colleagues in my department were allowed/instructed to try out AI for coding for months just so that the company could get substantive judgements whether AI is useful or not for coding work. It basically did not help for the tasks that we are doing (and the tasks that we are doing are quite varied (so there are a lot of different topics where an AI could (purely hypothetically) help), but none of them is "create a scrappy CRUD prototype" :-) ). Thus: the only impact that AI has on writing code that I don't deny is that a lot of stupid managers fall for the siren call of the various A"I" companies, and cause lots of damage. Of course none of these managers will at the end carry the can for the damage caused.

wakawaka28 2y ago

I doubt this will ever make sense, but if it does someday actually work, the next step will be for the AI companies to use the tools to auto-inject spyware into the projects of amateurs. If you want something according to your own needs, you'll have to either edit the code to clean it up or use an even better AI to remove it (and this may be forbidden by the EULA).

CyberDildonics 2y ago

Why are people immediately buying in to a nonsense term that some blogger came up with? This means nothing but somehow there are people replying as if this is some scientific technical term that they grew up with after reading it once.

JKCalhoun 2y ago

New York Times talked about this from the other day (shorter article): https://archive.ph/ruDI8 https://archive.ph/ruDI8

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listenfaster 2y ago

This is a good snapshot of the landscape for those wondering who’s competing in this space - I bookmarked it for that reason. I’m left wondering who the intended audience is for this - devs with no xp or experienced devs looking to leverage new toolkits. Though the former is implied, it seems like the latter is the case. This comment thread and this author are mostly experienced devs. Obviously, Automating the first 80% of development this way, you get less happy accidents and less rabbitholing on minutiae which make you a stronger programmer, and give joy. But dang, you get a lot of joy from finishing something too. And also obvious is the cost of deploying and maintaining. All the SDLC things that come with releasing a product are out of scope here, but that’s likely temporary. It would be great to have assisted deploy build pipeline development I can trust in a product that has a complex blend of old, new, in-house and proprietary service development. Coffee’s still kicking in. These are my thoughts.

layer8 2y ago

Some commenters are likening this to no-code/low-code. However, there is an important difference: When you prompt an LLM to generate some code, then for any further modification, the generated code becomes part of the software’s specification instead of the original prompt. In other words, as soon as you have some history of “coding” the software, you can’t experiment with modifying previous prompts to see how it changes the software. (You can in theory and replay the whole history, but then subsequent existing prompts won’t make sense anymore in the context of the changes made to preceding prompts.) This is unlike no-code/low-code, where the “coder” still has full control and visibility over the specification and can tinker with it. With LLM-generated code, an increasing part of the “specification” is constituted by the code that has been generated so far, into which the “coder” has no insight. The “coder” can only try to run it to see how it behaves, but cannot reason about it like a no-code/low-code coder can about their specification.

itishappy 2y ago
It may not be auditable in the same was a block-based workflow, but there's nothing stopping you from saying "hey, this code doesn't do what I want, please improve it" to the LLM. The whole point about the article is that reasoning about the code isn't always required any more, reasoning about the output is enough.
- layer8 2y ago
  My point is that it is not the same, in a similar sense in which testing (as a software engineering discipline) is not a substitute for proving the correctness of code. Another way in which it is different is that the “coder” cannot test hypotheses of the kind “when I prompt x, then y will happen” other than as a one-off, because that conversion is lossy, whereas in no-code/low-code “when I specify x, then y will happen” is deterministic. In other words, with no-code/low-code, the “coder” can with time learn to predict precisely and reliably what their change will do, which is not really the case with LLM-based coding, where you have to go by the “vibe”.
  - itishappy 2y ago

vander_elst 2y ago

Old man yelling at cloud here, I guess but, what do you do when something doesn't work? How do you ensure security if you have no clue what's going on underneath?

adityaathalye 2y ago

OH: "Modern vibe coding is to traditional software what traditional remedies are to modern evidence based medicine."

deleted 2y ago
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satisfice 2y ago

You can also fly an airplane without knowing how to fly. It’s profoundly irresponsible, but ethics is no barrier, is it?

rohansx 2y ago

Vibe code for passion projects, but call a pro for anything mission-critical

satisfice 2y ago

Call it slop coding.

mrandersen 2y ago

As a means to increase my own productivity while working on a new startup. I went on to pursue a new concept, and to fix the issues with vibe coding and other related editors/agents. I'm excited to be releasing soon, I think you all would find it interest. codeaway.ai

Jotalea 2y ago

As a lazy person, I've been using this method for a while now, and I greatly appreciate it. But there are two major flaws: - the end results usually suck: they either feel incomplete, have a major flaw, or just don't work. - sometimes, the AI just won't understand what the request was, or it will get stuck on a loop while trying to troubleshoot one bug and causing even more. I believe that code written by actual reasoning people will be miles better than what a machine can. AI should be used for "au-to-ma-tion", and tasks that one doesn't want to or doesn't like to do, like writing documentation. Here's one instance where this "vibe coding" went right and I got a mostly functional program (game): https://chatgpt.com/share/67a125b3-15cc-8001-9863-13372338e3d3 https://chatgpt.com/share/67a125b3-15cc-8001-9863-13372338e3...

wickdninja 2y ago

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