4 ms·

I predict we will hit peak vibe coding by this summer. The tooling can't be sold at a loss forever/costs will go up for all sorts of reasons, and I think the t

I predict we will hit peak vibe coding by this summer. The tooling can't be sold at a loss forever/costs will go up for all sorts of reasons, and I think the tech debt generated by the tooling will eventually be recognized by management as velocity/error quotas start to inverse. I don't think self-driving developers will happen in time, and another AI winter will settle in with the upcoming recession.

apples_oranges 2y ago
IMHO: we will vibe:code with free local/cheaply hosted open source models and IDEs.. the hardware to facilitate is coming to consumers fast. But if Microsoft can sell Office to companies for decades then open ai can surely do the same for coding tools
- sebzim4500 2y ago
  Unless there is a massive change in archiecture, it will always be much more cost effective to have a single cluster of GPUs running inference for many users than have each user have hardware capable of running SOTA models but only using it for the 1% of the time where they have asked the model to do something.
- exitb 2y ago
  There are multiple orders of magnitude between the sizes of models people use for „vibe coding” and models most people can comfortably run. It will take many years to bridge that gap.
- nativeit 2y ago
  > But if Microsoft can sell Office to companies for decades then open ai can surely do the same for coding tools This seems like a bold statement.
ToValueFunfetti 2y ago
I've seen a lot of AI hype, but "AI will make management recognize that tech debt is important" takes the cake. Maybe in 2040
- Magma7404 2y ago
  Management realizing and saying publicly that they made a mistake? Maybe in 3025.
- croes 2y ago
  They still have to figure that out for cloud software
- tyre 2y ago
  I hope you’re able to find good managers. I prioritize paying down tech debt over feature development regularly, because it makes business sense. Like even in a cold capitalist analysis, the benefits to developer velocity, ease of new feature development, incident response, stability, customer trust, etc. It doesn’t always; there are certainly areas of tech debt that bother me personally but I know aren’t worth the ROI to clean up. These become weekend projects if I want a fun win in my life, but nothing terrible happens if there’s a little friction.
  - huntertwo 2y ago
    How? I find it hard for my team to reduce tech debt as an OKR since other feature work is 1) sexier for engineers to work on 2) easier to put concrete value on. Everybody agrees in principle that tech debt is bad
    - tyre 2y ago
      Great question. It depends on why you want to kill it. Sometimes it’s because there are regular bugs and on-call becomes a drag on velocity. Sometimes making code changes is difficult and there’s only one person who knows what going on, so you either have a bus factor risk or it limits flexibility on assigning projects / code review. Sometimes the system’s performance is, or will be in the short–medium term, going to start causing incidents. Sometimes incident recovery takes a long time. We had a pipeline that would take six–ten hours to run and couldn’t be restarted midway if it failed. Recovering from downtime was crazy! Sometimes there’s a host of features whose development timelines would be sped up by more than it would take to burn down the tech debt to unlock them. Sometimes a refactor would improve system performance enough to meaningfully affect the customer or reduce infra costs. And then… Sometimes you have career-driven managers and engineers who don’t want to or can’t make difficult long-term trade-offs, which is sometimes the way it is and you should consider switching teams or companies. So I guess my question to you is: why should you burn this down?
MostlyStable 2y ago
Ok, I'm going to make a slightly controversial statement: Vibe coding is both A)potentially hugely important and transofrmative and B)massively good. Most of the criticisms of vibe coding are coming from SWEs who work on large, complicated codebases whose products are used by lots of people and for whom security, edge cases, maintainability, etc. are extremely important considerations. In this context, vibe coding is obviously a horrible idea, and we are pretty far away from AI being able to do more than slightly assist around the edges. But small, bespoke scripts that will be used by exactly 1 person and are whose outputs are easily verified are actually _hugely_ important. Millions of things are probably done every single day where, if the person doing it had the skill to write up a small script, it would be massively sped up. But most people don't have that skill, and it's too expensive/there is too much friction to hire an actual programmer to solve it. AI can do these things. Each specific instance isn't a big deal, and won't make much productivity difference, but in aggregate, the potential gains are massive, and AI is already far more than good enough to be completely creating these kinds of scripts. It is just going to take people a while to shift their perspective and start asking about what small tasks they do every day that could be scripted. This is the true potential of "vibe coding". Someone who can't program, but knows what they need (and how to verify that it works), making something for their personal use.
- candiddevmike 2y ago
  I don't think that's a $3B market.
  - MostlyStable 2y ago
    I actually literally think that these small scripts, if widely applied, are far, far more bigger than that. Even solely in the US, let alone globally. I'm also relatively certain that, if they weren't sinking money into research etc, subscriptions on inference are probably already profitable. These companies are burning money because they are investing in research, not because $10/month doesn't cover the average inference costs. Although I'd love to find a better source than the speculative ones I've seen about it.
  - consumer451 2y ago
behnamoh 2y ago
> ... velocity/error quotas start to inverse ... Could you please elaborate? Is this how management (at least in your company) looks at code—as a ratio of how fast it's done over how many tests it passes?
bobxmax 2y ago
AirBnb just did a 1.5 year engineering migration in 6 weeks thanks to AI. "Vibe" coding is here to stay and it's only devs who don't know how to adapt that are wishfully hoping for otherwise.
- croes 2y ago
  Lets wait for the first wave security bugs because of vibe coded software. I doubt that error free code is outnumbering code with errors in the training data.
  - bobxmax 2y ago
    Nobody cares. Ancient devs are insisting that vibe coding is going to lead to a bunch of tech debt. 1. Nobody cares. It's still worth the insane productivity improvements. 2. There is no proof that it's going to lead to long-term issues, because why would it?
- gammarator 2y ago
  Whatever the term “vibe coding” is taken to mean, it assuredly doesn’t apply to a large scale migration undertaken by a professional software organization.
  - bobxmax 2y ago
    Vibe coding means AI-assisted programming. That is it.
    - fragmede 2y ago
      it means having it generate code and then not looking at the code and going purely off of vibes. If you have it generate some code and then dig deep into the code and edit it to the point that you're able to explain every variable name and the reasoning for each if clause like your boss is gonna call you out for cheating and using an LLM and is gonna fire you if you can't explain "your" code, that's gonna slow you down and you're no longer purely going off of ~/vibes/~
tyre 2y ago
I don’t know, I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 for a bit. The daily quota caps at effectively $55/day. It’s not a ton of development but it’s definitely worth it compared to a human for projects that Claude 3.7 can’t yet wrap its mind around. We’ll see if Gemini 2.5 Flash is good enough, but it definitely doesn’t feel like Google is selling for a huge loss post-training. Yes the training is a huge investment but are they really not going to do it? Doesn’t seem optional
yojo 2y ago
The chatter around vibe coding to me feels a lot like the late 90s early 2000s FUD around outsourcing. Who would pay a high-cost American engineer when you could get 10 in South Asia for the same price? Media was forecasting an irreversible IT offshoring mega trend. Obviously, some software development did move to cheaper regions. But the US tech sector also exploded. For some projects (e.g. your internal-facing CRUD app), cheap code is acceptable. For a high scale consumer product, the cost of premium engineering resources is a rounding error on your profits, and even small marginal improvements can generate high value in absolute dollar terms. I’m sure vibe coding will eat the lowest end of software development. It will also allow the creation of software that wouldn’t have been economically viable before. But I don’t see it notably denting the high end without something close to AGI.
- esafak 2y ago
  Asian programmers are not improving at the rate LLMs are.
mountainriver 2y ago
There hasn’t been an AI winter since 2008 and there sure isn’t going to be one now. In spite of everyone saying it every couple of months since then. Also what tech debt? If you have good engineers doing the vibe coding they are just way faster. And also faster at squashing bugs. I was one-shotting whole features into our Rust code base with 2.5 last week. Absolutely perfect code, better than I could have written it in places. Then later that week o3 solved a hard bug 2 different MLEs failed to solve as well as myself. I have no idea why people think this stuff is bad, it’s utterly baffling to me
- gopher_space 2y ago
  I won’t recognize bugs the machine fixes if they appear outside the original context later on. If I’m not learning something every day this profession holds very little for me.
NitpickLawyer 2y ago
> and another AI winter will settle in with the upcoming Oh, please. Even if every cent of VC funding dries up tomorrow we'd still have years of discovering how to use LLMs and "generative models" in general to do cool, useful stuff. And by "we" I mean everyone, at every level. The proverbial bearded dude in his mom's basement, the young college grad, phd researcher, big tech researcher, and everyone in the middle. The cat is out of the bag, and this tech is here to stay. The various AI winters came because of many reasons, none that are present today. Todays tech is cool! It's also immediately useful (oAI, anthropic, goog are already selling billions of $ worth of tokens!). And it's highly transformative. The amount of innovation in the past 2 years is bonkers. And, for the first time, it's also accessible to "home users". Alpaca was to llama what the home computer was to computers. It showed that anyone can take any of the open models and train them on their downstream tasks for cheap. And guess what, everyone is doing it. From horny teens to business analysts, they're all using this, today. Also, as opposed to the last time (which also coincided with the .com bubble), this time the tech is supported and mainly financed by the top tech firms. VCs are not alone in this one. Between MS, goog, AMZ, Meta and even AAPL, they're all pouring billions into this. They'll want to earn their money back, so like it or not, this thing is here to stay. (hell, even IBM! is doing gen ai =)) ) So no, AI winter is not coming.
deleted 2y ago
[deleted]
senko 2y ago
I agree on the underlying premise - current crop of LLMs isn't good enough at coding to completely autonomously achieve a minimum quality level for actually reliable products. I don't see how peak vibe coding in a few months follows that. Check revenue and growth figures for products like Lovable ($10m+ ARR) or Bolt.new ($30m+ ARR). This doesn't show costs (they might in fact be deep in red) but with story like that I don't see it crashing in 3-4 months. On the user experience/expectation side, I can see how the overhyped claims of "build complete apps" hit a peak, but that will still leave the tools positioned strong for "quick prototyping and experimentation". IMHO, that alone is enough to prevent a cliff drop. Even allowing for the peak in tool usage for coding specifically, I don't see how that causes "AI winter", since LLMs are now used in a wide variety of cases and that use is strongly growing (and uncorrelated to the whole "AI coding" market). Finally, "costs will go up for all sorts of reasons" claim is dubious, since the costs per token are dropping even while the models are getting better (for a quick example, cost of GPT-4.1 is roughly 50% of GPT-4o while being an improvement). For these reasons, if I could bet against your prediction, I'd immediately take that bet.

apples_oranges 2y ago

IMHO: we will vibe:code with free local/cheaply hosted open source models and IDEs.. the hardware to facilitate is coming to consumers fast. But if Microsoft can sell Office to companies for decades then open ai can surely do the same for coding tools

sebzim4500 2y ago
Unless there is a massive change in archiecture, it will always be much more cost effective to have a single cluster of GPUs running inference for many users than have each user have hardware capable of running SOTA models but only using it for the 1% of the time where they have asked the model to do something.
exitb 2y ago
There are multiple orders of magnitude between the sizes of models people use for „vibe coding” and models most people can comfortably run. It will take many years to bridge that gap.
nativeit 2y ago
> But if Microsoft can sell Office to companies for decades then open ai can surely do the same for coding tools This seems like a bold statement.

ToValueFunfetti 2y ago

I've seen a lot of AI hype, but "AI will make management recognize that tech debt is important" takes the cake. Maybe in 2040

Magma7404 2y ago
Management realizing and saying publicly that they made a mistake? Maybe in 3025.
croes 2y ago
They still have to figure that out for cloud software
tyre 2y ago
I hope you’re able to find good managers. I prioritize paying down tech debt over feature development regularly, because it makes business sense. Like even in a cold capitalist analysis, the benefits to developer velocity, ease of new feature development, incident response, stability, customer trust, etc. It doesn’t always; there are certainly areas of tech debt that bother me personally but I know aren’t worth the ROI to clean up. These become weekend projects if I want a fun win in my life, but nothing terrible happens if there’s a little friction.
- huntertwo 2y ago
  How? I find it hard for my team to reduce tech debt as an OKR since other feature work is 1) sexier for engineers to work on 2) easier to put concrete value on. Everybody agrees in principle that tech debt is bad
  - tyre 2y ago
    Great question. It depends on why you want to kill it. Sometimes it’s because there are regular bugs and on-call becomes a drag on velocity. Sometimes making code changes is difficult and there’s only one person who knows what going on, so you either have a bus factor risk or it limits flexibility on assigning projects / code review. Sometimes the system’s performance is, or will be in the short–medium term, going to start causing incidents. Sometimes incident recovery takes a long time. We had a pipeline that would take six–ten hours to run and couldn’t be restarted midway if it failed. Recovering from downtime was crazy! Sometimes there’s a host of features whose development timelines would be sped up by more than it would take to burn down the tech debt to unlock them. Sometimes a refactor would improve system performance enough to meaningfully affect the customer or reduce infra costs. And then… Sometimes you have career-driven managers and engineers who don’t want to or can’t make difficult long-term trade-offs, which is sometimes the way it is and you should consider switching teams or companies. So I guess my question to you is: why should you burn this down?

MostlyStable 2y ago

Ok, I'm going to make a slightly controversial statement: Vibe coding is both A)potentially hugely important and transofrmative and B)massively good. Most of the criticisms of vibe coding are coming from SWEs who work on large, complicated codebases whose products are used by lots of people and for whom security, edge cases, maintainability, etc. are extremely important considerations. In this context, vibe coding is obviously a horrible idea, and we are pretty far away from AI being able to do more than slightly assist around the edges. But small, bespoke scripts that will be used by exactly 1 person and are whose outputs are easily verified are actually _hugely_ important. Millions of things are probably done every single day where, if the person doing it had the skill to write up a small script, it would be massively sped up. But most people don't have that skill, and it's too expensive/there is too much friction to hire an actual programmer to solve it. AI can do these things. Each specific instance isn't a big deal, and won't make much productivity difference, but in aggregate, the potential gains are massive, and AI is already far more than good enough to be completely creating these kinds of scripts. It is just going to take people a while to shift their perspective and start asking about what small tasks they do every day that could be scripted. This is the true potential of "vibe coding". Someone who can't program, but knows what they need (and how to verify that it works), making something for their personal use.

candiddevmike 2y ago
I don't think that's a $3B market.
- MostlyStable 2y ago
  I actually literally think that these small scripts, if widely applied, are far, far more bigger than that. Even solely in the US, let alone globally. I'm also relatively certain that, if they weren't sinking money into research etc, subscriptions on inference are probably already profitable. These companies are burning money because they are investing in research, not because $10/month doesn't cover the average inference costs. Although I'd love to find a better source than the speculative ones I've seen about it.
- consumer451 2y ago

behnamoh 2y ago

> ... velocity/error quotas start to inverse ... Could you please elaborate? Is this how management (at least in your company) looks at code—as a ratio of how fast it's done over how many tests it passes?

bobxmax 2y ago

AirBnb just did a 1.5 year engineering migration in 6 weeks thanks to AI. "Vibe" coding is here to stay and it's only devs who don't know how to adapt that are wishfully hoping for otherwise.

croes 2y ago
Lets wait for the first wave security bugs because of vibe coded software. I doubt that error free code is outnumbering code with errors in the training data.
- bobxmax 2y ago
  Nobody cares. Ancient devs are insisting that vibe coding is going to lead to a bunch of tech debt. 1. Nobody cares. It's still worth the insane productivity improvements. 2. There is no proof that it's going to lead to long-term issues, because why would it?
gammarator 2y ago
Whatever the term “vibe coding” is taken to mean, it assuredly doesn’t apply to a large scale migration undertaken by a professional software organization.
- bobxmax 2y ago
  Vibe coding means AI-assisted programming. That is it.
  - fragmede 2y ago
    it means having it generate code and then not looking at the code and going purely off of vibes. If you have it generate some code and then dig deep into the code and edit it to the point that you're able to explain every variable name and the reasoning for each if clause like your boss is gonna call you out for cheating and using an LLM and is gonna fire you if you can't explain "your" code, that's gonna slow you down and you're no longer purely going off of ~/vibes/~

tyre 2y ago

I don’t know, I’ve been using Gemini 2.5 for a bit. The daily quota caps at effectively $55/day. It’s not a ton of development but it’s definitely worth it compared to a human for projects that Claude 3.7 can’t yet wrap its mind around. We’ll see if Gemini 2.5 Flash is good enough, but it definitely doesn’t feel like Google is selling for a huge loss post-training. Yes the training is a huge investment but are they really not going to do it? Doesn’t seem optional

yojo 2y ago

The chatter around vibe coding to me feels a lot like the late 90s early 2000s FUD around outsourcing. Who would pay a high-cost American engineer when you could get 10 in South Asia for the same price? Media was forecasting an irreversible IT offshoring mega trend. Obviously, some software development did move to cheaper regions. But the US tech sector also exploded. For some projects (e.g. your internal-facing CRUD app), cheap code is acceptable. For a high scale consumer product, the cost of premium engineering resources is a rounding error on your profits, and even small marginal improvements can generate high value in absolute dollar terms. I’m sure vibe coding will eat the lowest end of software development. It will also allow the creation of software that wouldn’t have been economically viable before. But I don’t see it notably denting the high end without something close to AGI.

esafak 2y ago
Asian programmers are not improving at the rate LLMs are.

mountainriver 2y ago

There hasn’t been an AI winter since 2008 and there sure isn’t going to be one now. In spite of everyone saying it every couple of months since then. Also what tech debt? If you have good engineers doing the vibe coding they are just way faster. And also faster at squashing bugs. I was one-shotting whole features into our Rust code base with 2.5 last week. Absolutely perfect code, better than I could have written it in places. Then later that week o3 solved a hard bug 2 different MLEs failed to solve as well as myself. I have no idea why people think this stuff is bad, it’s utterly baffling to me

gopher_space 2y ago
I won’t recognize bugs the machine fixes if they appear outside the original context later on. If I’m not learning something every day this profession holds very little for me.

NitpickLawyer 2y ago

> and another AI winter will settle in with the upcoming Oh, please. Even if every cent of VC funding dries up tomorrow we'd still have years of discovering how to use LLMs and "generative models" in general to do cool, useful stuff. And by "we" I mean everyone, at every level. The proverbial bearded dude in his mom's basement, the young college grad, phd researcher, big tech researcher, and everyone in the middle. The cat is out of the bag, and this tech is here to stay. The various AI winters came because of many reasons, none that are present today. Todays tech is cool! It's also immediately useful (oAI, anthropic, goog are already selling billions of $ worth of tokens!). And it's highly transformative. The amount of innovation in the past 2 years is bonkers. And, for the first time, it's also accessible to "home users". Alpaca was to llama what the home computer was to computers. It showed that anyone can take any of the open models and train them on their downstream tasks for cheap. And guess what, everyone is doing it. From horny teens to business analysts, they're all using this, today. Also, as opposed to the last time (which also coincided with the .com bubble), this time the tech is supported and mainly financed by the top tech firms. VCs are not alone in this one. Between MS, goog, AMZ, Meta and even AAPL, they're all pouring billions into this. They'll want to earn their money back, so like it or not, this thing is here to stay. (hell, even IBM! is doing gen ai =)) ) So no, AI winter is not coming.

deleted 2y ago

[deleted]

senko 2y ago

I agree on the underlying premise - current crop of LLMs isn't good enough at coding to completely autonomously achieve a minimum quality level for actually reliable products. I don't see how peak vibe coding in a few months follows that. Check revenue and growth figures for products like Lovable ($10m+ ARR) or Bolt.new ($30m+ ARR). This doesn't show costs (they might in fact be deep in red) but with story like that I don't see it crashing in 3-4 months. On the user experience/expectation side, I can see how the overhyped claims of "build complete apps" hit a peak, but that will still leave the tools positioned strong for "quick prototyping and experimentation". IMHO, that alone is enough to prevent a cliff drop. Even allowing for the peak in tool usage for coding specifically, I don't see how that causes "AI winter", since LLMs are now used in a wide variety of cases and that use is strongly growing (and uncorrelated to the whole "AI coding" market). Finally, "costs will go up for all sorts of reasons" claim is dubious, since the costs per token are dropping even while the models are getting better (for a quick example, cost of GPT-4.1 is roughly 50% of GPT-4o while being an improvement). For these reasons, if I could bet against your prediction, I'd immediately take that bet.