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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 the

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.
- dudefeliciano 2y ago
  > 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 Isn't that the definition of gatekeeping? and even so, who cares? the new guy coming in creating/doing something in a way that "shouldn't be done" will eventually fail and notice the shortcomings of what they did. Then they will either drop their project or learn the way "it should be done" (like we all did, except now with AI).
  - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
    I kinda feel like this attitude, like “free market capitalism”, allows more bad things to happen with the potential for some unseen/immeasurable force to “correct” the environment once the Bad Thing is recognized and rationally dealt with. But there are probably better ways to avoid Bad Things that require only a little additional forethought, planning, and deciding ahead of time what sorts of things we’d like to avoid (oh no, regulation!).
    - itishappy 2y ago
      Do we care? Is the podcast script timer from the article a Bad Thing? Are people actually hiring vibe coders for critical infrastructure? I write really bad Haskell code sometimes without any AI assistance. Am I doing a Bad Thing when I create my own tools? What are you intending to regulate here?
      - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
        > Are people actually hiring vibe coders for critical infrastructure? It appears to be happening right now in the US federal government.
        itishappy 2y ago
        To be clear, you're saying that people with no ability to reason about code are currently in a position to push unreviewed code into critical government infrastructure? Do you have an example?
Bocajmai 2y ago
I'm not sure it's explicitly gatekeeping, more a lack of perspective. The benefit and excitement is most felt by people with little to no experience writing code themselves. The fear seems to come from building.. what, code for critical infrastructure? That's just not what we're talking about here.
croes 2y ago
> I dont want them safety critical Then hopefully they run on a computer without network access, otherwise everything is safety critical.
dartos 2y ago
No gatekeeping. Anyone can write programs. But to build something which could handle a customer’s credit card, password, or other PII and charge them for it, you better know what you’re doing. It’s all fun and games until you’re the cause of someone’s identity or password getting stolen. Anyone can use CAD software, but if you’re designing a public space, you better know something about safety.
- sbarre 2y ago
  To be fair, lots of "actual" programmers who don't know good from bad have been shipping insecure code to prod for decades. AI is just another vector for this, not something entirely new. When you have your amazing idea, instead of hiring an inexpensive low-skill developer (whose work you are also incapable of evaluating) to build and ship your idea in a low quality way, you're just paying AI to do it. It's just putting they money into different (centralized) pockets.
  - Capricorn2481 2y ago
    No, people should not be knowingly half assing important things like PII just because "it's been done badly before." We make the good faith assumption that people who mess this up don't know better, not that they're willingly using a tool that will mess it up for them because they don't care.
    - sbarre 2y ago
      I think you misunderstood my comment.. When a non-technical person hires an incompetent developer (that they likely don't know is incompetent at the time of hiring) to build something that turns out to be insecure - because the developer didn't know any better and the non-technical person doesn't have the skills to evaluate the output - no one was trying to do a bad thing, but they didn't know what they didn't know. The non-technical person got something that did what they asked, without understanding all the underlying deficiencies. It's the same with AI, I don't think non-technical people using AI are thinking "I don't care that this is building garbage code full of problems".. Just like the first scenario, they don't know what they don't know, and they end up with something that does what they want, and that's a good outcome based on their limited knowledge. To be clear, I don't think either of these scenarios is excusable or acceptable if you're working with PII or other security-sensitive things, I was just pointing out that this isn't new.
chewbacha 2y ago
> 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. So, you pay the billionaires to rent their graphics cards so you can avoid paying a normal person? -_-
- auggierose 2y ago
  If it is much cheaper, and the outcome is acceptable, probably even better, then that is what people should do.
- UrineSqueegee 2y ago
  I run my own model locally?
wakawaka28 2y ago
>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. Don't hold your breath. If the AI was good enough to do all that, "maintainability" would look very different from what it does today. What does it mean to be maintainable when an AI can completely rewrite the software in every iteration? If AI ever gets good enough to do all this, for safety-critical applications no less, probably 95% of the white collar jobs that exist today will be gone. There may also be robots to do 90% of all other work too.
EndShell 2y ago
What is important that it works for you. I think it is good that more users can solve their own problems.
Aurornis 2y ago
There’s some gate keeping, but many of us are also worried about the inevitable future where we have to take over someone else’s “vibe coding” mess of code. The vibe coding style translates to trying a lot of different prompts and small adjustments until it looks like it works. In the past these people copied from StackOverflow and poked at lines until it compiled and appeared to work, but that only gets you so far. Now those same people can bang away at an LLM assistant all day long and produce volumes of code that appear to kind of work. I’m in another forum dedicated to programming careers. Every day there’s a new thread from someone asking how to deal with all of their junior employees spamming code review with obvious LLM generated code that they don’t even understand. A lot of the defenses of vibe coding rely on the assumption that it’s in the hands of someone knowledgeable who only wants to save a little time for something inconsequential. That’s fine. What’s worrying is that vibe coding is being used as a replacement for understanding code for many juniors and lazy seniors across the industry as long as they think they can get away with it.
- dingnuts 2y ago
  > worried about the inevitable future where we have to take over someone else’s “vibe coding” mess of code. worried? we're going to make a goddamned fortune
  - Aurornis 2y ago
    Doubtful. Usually when one person makes the proof of concept they do 20% of the work and collect 80% of the credit. The people tasked with cleaning up the mess and making it usable in production do the remaining 80% of the work, but management is always disappointed that it’s going so slow relative to how quickly the proof of concept was created. At one company it was widely known that the key to taking credit for technical work was to be the team presenting the GUI pieces to management. If you were working on something that couldn’t be shown to management with a “wow” factor, you were not valued. I see the same thing happening here, with vibe coders capturing the wow factor and the people who actually make it production stable being viewed as the slow and expendable ones.
  - plorkyeran 2y ago
geor9e 2y ago
I think the issue is Hacker News users are so deep in the space that they're surrounded by AI noise at work every day and might even be forced to use it every day. So they've essentially accepted that it's a useful invention. There's this foundational, overwhelmingly positive assumption that goes unsaid, while 100% of their comment text is pure criticism and negativity. But in their brain, it comes across as maybe like 1% criticism and negativity and 99% positive lived experience. So they don't realize how bizarrely negative they're all sounding about a good thing. Of course, there are some people do really completely hate AI coding, but I don't think the general sentiment one gets from reading hacker news comments literally is accurate. It has to be read in context. At my work, people prefix their critical comments with "nit -" to reassure the reader that it's overall good.

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.

dudefeliciano 2y ago
> 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 Isn't that the definition of gatekeeping? and even so, who cares? the new guy coming in creating/doing something in a way that "shouldn't be done" will eventually fail and notice the shortcomings of what they did. Then they will either drop their project or learn the way "it should be done" (like we all did, except now with AI).
- GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
  I kinda feel like this attitude, like “free market capitalism”, allows more bad things to happen with the potential for some unseen/immeasurable force to “correct” the environment once the Bad Thing is recognized and rationally dealt with. But there are probably better ways to avoid Bad Things that require only a little additional forethought, planning, and deciding ahead of time what sorts of things we’d like to avoid (oh no, regulation!).
  - itishappy 2y ago
    Do we care? Is the podcast script timer from the article a Bad Thing? Are people actually hiring vibe coders for critical infrastructure? I write really bad Haskell code sometimes without any AI assistance. Am I doing a Bad Thing when I create my own tools? What are you intending to regulate here?
    - GuinansEyebrows 2y ago
      > Are people actually hiring vibe coders for critical infrastructure? It appears to be happening right now in the US federal government.
      - itishappy 2y ago
        To be clear, you're saying that people with no ability to reason about code are currently in a position to push unreviewed code into critical government infrastructure? Do you have an example?

Bocajmai 2y ago

I'm not sure it's explicitly gatekeeping, more a lack of perspective. The benefit and excitement is most felt by people with little to no experience writing code themselves. The fear seems to come from building.. what, code for critical infrastructure? That's just not what we're talking about here.

croes 2y ago

> I dont want them safety critical Then hopefully they run on a computer without network access, otherwise everything is safety critical.

dartos 2y ago

No gatekeeping. Anyone can write programs. But to build something which could handle a customer’s credit card, password, or other PII and charge them for it, you better know what you’re doing. It’s all fun and games until you’re the cause of someone’s identity or password getting stolen. Anyone can use CAD software, but if you’re designing a public space, you better know something about safety.

sbarre 2y ago
To be fair, lots of "actual" programmers who don't know good from bad have been shipping insecure code to prod for decades. AI is just another vector for this, not something entirely new. When you have your amazing idea, instead of hiring an inexpensive low-skill developer (whose work you are also incapable of evaluating) to build and ship your idea in a low quality way, you're just paying AI to do it. It's just putting they money into different (centralized) pockets.
- Capricorn2481 2y ago
  No, people should not be knowingly half assing important things like PII just because "it's been done badly before." We make the good faith assumption that people who mess this up don't know better, not that they're willingly using a tool that will mess it up for them because they don't care.
  - sbarre 2y ago
    I think you misunderstood my comment.. When a non-technical person hires an incompetent developer (that they likely don't know is incompetent at the time of hiring) to build something that turns out to be insecure - because the developer didn't know any better and the non-technical person doesn't have the skills to evaluate the output - no one was trying to do a bad thing, but they didn't know what they didn't know. The non-technical person got something that did what they asked, without understanding all the underlying deficiencies. It's the same with AI, I don't think non-technical people using AI are thinking "I don't care that this is building garbage code full of problems".. Just like the first scenario, they don't know what they don't know, and they end up with something that does what they want, and that's a good outcome based on their limited knowledge. To be clear, I don't think either of these scenarios is excusable or acceptable if you're working with PII or other security-sensitive things, I was just pointing out that this isn't new.

chewbacha 2y ago

> 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. So, you pay the billionaires to rent their graphics cards so you can avoid paying a normal person? -_-

auggierose 2y ago
If it is much cheaper, and the outcome is acceptable, probably even better, then that is what people should do.
UrineSqueegee 2y ago
I run my own model locally?

wakawaka28 2y ago

>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. Don't hold your breath. If the AI was good enough to do all that, "maintainability" would look very different from what it does today. What does it mean to be maintainable when an AI can completely rewrite the software in every iteration? If AI ever gets good enough to do all this, for safety-critical applications no less, probably 95% of the white collar jobs that exist today will be gone. There may also be robots to do 90% of all other work too.

EndShell 2y ago

What is important that it works for you. I think it is good that more users can solve their own problems.

Aurornis 2y ago

There’s some gate keeping, but many of us are also worried about the inevitable future where we have to take over someone else’s “vibe coding” mess of code. The vibe coding style translates to trying a lot of different prompts and small adjustments until it looks like it works. In the past these people copied from StackOverflow and poked at lines until it compiled and appeared to work, but that only gets you so far. Now those same people can bang away at an LLM assistant all day long and produce volumes of code that appear to kind of work. I’m in another forum dedicated to programming careers. Every day there’s a new thread from someone asking how to deal with all of their junior employees spamming code review with obvious LLM generated code that they don’t even understand. A lot of the defenses of vibe coding rely on the assumption that it’s in the hands of someone knowledgeable who only wants to save a little time for something inconsequential. That’s fine. What’s worrying is that vibe coding is being used as a replacement for understanding code for many juniors and lazy seniors across the industry as long as they think they can get away with it.

dingnuts 2y ago
> worried about the inevitable future where we have to take over someone else’s “vibe coding” mess of code. worried? we're going to make a goddamned fortune
- Aurornis 2y ago
  Doubtful. Usually when one person makes the proof of concept they do 20% of the work and collect 80% of the credit. The people tasked with cleaning up the mess and making it usable in production do the remaining 80% of the work, but management is always disappointed that it’s going so slow relative to how quickly the proof of concept was created. At one company it was widely known that the key to taking credit for technical work was to be the team presenting the GUI pieces to management. If you were working on something that couldn’t be shown to management with a “wow” factor, you were not valued. I see the same thing happening here, with vibe coders capturing the wow factor and the people who actually make it production stable being viewed as the slow and expendable ones.
- plorkyeran 2y ago

geor9e 2y ago

I think the issue is Hacker News users are so deep in the space that they're surrounded by AI noise at work every day and might even be forced to use it every day. So they've essentially accepted that it's a useful invention. There's this foundational, overwhelmingly positive assumption that goes unsaid, while 100% of their comment text is pure criticism and negativity. But in their brain, it comes across as maybe like 1% criticism and negativity and 99% positive lived experience. So they don't realize how bizarrely negative they're all sounding about a good thing. Of course, there are some people do really completely hate AI coding, but I don't think the general sentiment one gets from reading hacker news comments literally is accurate. It has to be read in context. At my work, people prefix their critical comments with "nit -" to reassure the reader that it's overall good.