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"that’s when it struck me. coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing. its about the process. its about how you approach a problem. its cri

"that’s when it struck me. coding isn’t about the finished product. its a lot like writing. its about the process. its about how you approach a problem. its critical thinking." From a business perspective, they don't care about this. They just want it built as inexpensively as possible in a reasonable time frame. Vibe coding is here to stay.

isoprophlex 1y ago
Vibe coding is a death trap for juniors just starting out, as it kills critical thinking and understanding what a computer is. And a guaranteed paycheck for people with the experience to clean up the resulting messes. I hope...
- BayArea925 1y ago
  Coding will not be done by juniors anymore. We are quickly progressing to humans no longer needing to learn machine langauage (syntax) and computers better developing code by interpreting human languages (english). Teams will be led by one subject matter expert, and fulfilled by thousands of agents. I would not be advising anyone under 21 to become a "coder". Studying computer sceince still has value, but coding was the lowest hanging fruit for LLMs. Once we can do LLM code reviews with high confidence and little error, coding is essentially a dead field. The closer you are to atoms and further the way you are from bits, the better off you will be in the coming two decades as AI progresses
  - hotpepperishot 1y ago
    [dead]
  - pests 1y ago
    Same promise all the no-code or low-code app builders claim. Anyone who has done a serious project with LLM help knows it is no where near able to do half the things needed to run a project.
    - concordDance 1y ago
      Right now, sure. But when a 21 year old is picking a field they need to think 10 years from now.
      - BayArea925 1y ago
        Agreed
    - energy123 1y ago
      Skill issue, you aren't vibe coding properly. I am not joking.
      - BayArea925 1y ago
        I agree with this individual. Prompt engineering is a real skill right now. Will it be in 10 years? WHo knows
      - johnnyanmac 1y ago
        I'll let others figure it out first then while I get actual work done, in that case. It's not like prompt engineering is going to make the job search any easier.
  - hooverd 1y ago
    God, software is about to get so much worse, isn't it.
    - AlexandrB 1y ago
      Absolutely. If you thought Electron was bloated, prepare yourself for Electron running a bunch of AI-generated slop.
      - hooverd 1y ago
        The year is 2028. You open the AI enabled calculator app on your desktop. Your GPU overheats and catches fire.
  - trollied 1y ago
    Thanks for the laugh!
  - bloppe 1y ago
    I have a theory that all the people who truly believe this are either not software developers or have spent their whole career writing boring, cookie-cutter code. I'm over here trying to play with bleeding edge tech and push some boundaries. I keep trying to get LLMs to help me and they keep letting me down.
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      It's definitely domain specific. I'm sure people working in web or databases has a lot of data to train off of for obvious reasons. I'm sure this is less thann useless for stuff like embedded or other low level coding.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    >Teams will be led by one subject matter expert and in 20 years, how are we developing this "subject matter expert"? >Once we can do LLM code reviews with high confidence and little error, coding is essentially a dead field. Maybe by the time I retire. I think people in their early 20's will still get a solid career out of coding in the meantime while we go through the inevitable hype cycle of shiny new tech. Even if in the middle of their careers they may truly have their hands forced.
- caseyy 1y ago
  Vibe coding is what I’m selfishly expecting to take out many projects and keep my principal level swe skills in demand. Someone will have to mop all the vibes up when it’s time to deliver products.
  - Jtsummers 1y ago
    Honestly, I've made a career fixing other people's messes. Vibe coding just means a larger market, but the terrible, unmaintainable, non-extendable code has been around since the beginning and grows every year.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
whateveracct 1y ago
"stay" - we'll see how this vibe codes lives and breathes for years
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  I'm sure it'll stay the same thing any low effort actions stay around. People will instead just get better at identifying the low effort and filtering it out.
esalman 1y ago
What is coding without critical thinking? I never vibe coded, and I don't understand this trend AT ALL. I read how copilot and such are detrimental to critical thinking, and I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now.
- rocqua 1y ago
  Vibe coding hasn't really hampered my critical thinking. It just means I get ideas into practice faster, and it means that for new concepts I can get to itterating much faster. Perhaps I have the concept wrong, because half the time I'm still editing code by hand.
  - SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
    If you edit the code, instead of the prompt to the AI, it's not vibe coding. Vibe coding is letting the AI write the code, and only testing the output application.
  - danielbln 1y ago
    I agree, and I think it's a continuum. I can say "make me an Instagram clone" and then come back after 100 agent loops and no looking at the code. Or I can outline the architecture, the components, service layer, data structures etc in a back and forth with the LLM and then have it do the minutia implementation. You still get code hell after a while unless you review the code and refactor where needed, but I can absolutely imagine a future where the code is just a compile target for the architecture and design I specify. A little bit like a compiler spitting out assembly (caveats apply, LLMs being non-deterministic etc etc and at current state probably not reliable enough for full unsupervised coding)
- pliuchkin 1y ago
  "I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now." Very soon we will run out of human written articles.
alabastervlog 1y ago
> Vibe coding is here to stay. I agree, and it's why I'm not worried about running out of paying work as I head into the latter half of my career.
ToucanLoucan 1y ago
> From a business perspective, they don't care about this. Makes sense. Many businesses lately are churning out awful software that barely functions. Maybe if they were willing to support proper engineering that would be less of an issue.
boredemployee 1y ago
As I’ve been saying, many companies already expect you to use an LLM to speed up coding. Tasks now can be shipped in hours, not days or weeks.
cosmotic 1y ago
I can't remember the last time I had a "reasonable time frame" to build something for a business.
deleted 1y ago
[deleted]
barrell 1y ago
Just coupled with that quote, that’s like saying publishers don’t care about the writing process, they just care about whether the book sells. Which yeah, of course, that their job. It’s the authors job to write a good book. The publisher needing to sell books doesn’t contradict or supercede the authors need to write well or develop their process.
uludag 1y ago
> Vibe coding is here to stay. I would say this is true in the same way that copy-paste coding functioned and that vibe coding isn't fundamentally different. It can be a useful approach to a variety of problems. Having capable, knowledgable, and skilled employees is important to businesses though. If your business is something easily approachable then you are at risk of being outcompeted from companies with more skilled employees. There are truly hellscapes of codebases out there without the glimmer of hope of being worked on with vibe coding alone. On top of that, I'm getting the feeling that vibe coding is a sure way to hellscape your own codebase. Nothing can take the place of critical thinking.
- amarant 1y ago
  I'm not convinced the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. Surely a skilled developer could make use of AI to produce stuff faster, while still understanding everything and making sure the code is well written (well generated?) Haven't really tried vibe coding myself yet, but I'm tempted to give it a go. I imagine stuff like integrating external API's could be really handy, looking through external documentation and creating the correct calls to the correct endpoints is always a huge timesink. Seems like AI should be able to make short work of such tasks
  - theshrike79 1y ago
    It can. You can just feed pretty much any LLM an OpenAPI spec and tell it a moderately known language and it'll implement a client for that API.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    > Surely a skilled developer could make use of AI to produce stuff faster, while still understanding everything and making sure the code is well written (well generated?) Yes. But in these early stages, that will only prove the LLM's can't do much more than be a fancy autocomplete, as opposed to a way to accelerate the workflow navigating anything with real-world value. Maybe in a few years for the most common domains this will truly shine.
bloppe 1y ago
Software isn't just built. It has to be maintained over time. A long, unplanned outage is much more destructive to a brand than a delayed release. Vibe coding prioritizes the latter at the expense of the former.
- AlexandrB 1y ago
  I look forward to reading war stories about debugging "vibes" applications during a 3am outage.
rowanseymour 1y ago
Yes there are businesses (game companies?) which just want to get a thing out the door, sell it, and move on to the next thing. But I don't think that's how most software businesses function. Usually software is iterated on and maintained, and you've got a problem if nobody has invested time in understanding how that software actually works.
- HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
  Maybe, but the vast majority of software isn't written by, or for, software businesses. It's written by internal teams for businesses whose main product is insurance, or retail sales operations, or cabinet manufacturing, or real estate, etc. To quote Copilot, "According to recent data, nearly 70% of top economic performers use their own software to differentiate themselves from competitors."
coffeefirst 1y ago
The first significant business to face serious legal, regulatory, and reputational consequences for vibe slop will put a pretty quick end to that...
femiagbabiaka 1y ago
Virtually all businesses (even non-tech businesses) balance performance, reliability, cost, and revenue. Outages/bugs/crashes cost money, some can be fatal. They care.

isoprophlex 1y ago

Vibe coding is a death trap for juniors just starting out, as it kills critical thinking and understanding what a computer is. And a guaranteed paycheck for people with the experience to clean up the resulting messes. I hope...

BayArea925 1y ago
Coding will not be done by juniors anymore. We are quickly progressing to humans no longer needing to learn machine langauage (syntax) and computers better developing code by interpreting human languages (english). Teams will be led by one subject matter expert, and fulfilled by thousands of agents. I would not be advising anyone under 21 to become a "coder". Studying computer sceince still has value, but coding was the lowest hanging fruit for LLMs. Once we can do LLM code reviews with high confidence and little error, coding is essentially a dead field. The closer you are to atoms and further the way you are from bits, the better off you will be in the coming two decades as AI progresses
- hotpepperishot 1y ago
  [dead]
- pests 1y ago
  Same promise all the no-code or low-code app builders claim. Anyone who has done a serious project with LLM help knows it is no where near able to do half the things needed to run a project.
  - concordDance 1y ago
    Right now, sure. But when a 21 year old is picking a field they need to think 10 years from now.
    - BayArea925 1y ago
      Agreed
  - energy123 1y ago
    Skill issue, you aren't vibe coding properly. I am not joking.
    - BayArea925 1y ago
      I agree with this individual. Prompt engineering is a real skill right now. Will it be in 10 years? WHo knows
    - johnnyanmac 1y ago
      I'll let others figure it out first then while I get actual work done, in that case. It's not like prompt engineering is going to make the job search any easier.
- hooverd 1y ago
  God, software is about to get so much worse, isn't it.
  - AlexandrB 1y ago
    Absolutely. If you thought Electron was bloated, prepare yourself for Electron running a bunch of AI-generated slop.
    - hooverd 1y ago
      The year is 2028. You open the AI enabled calculator app on your desktop. Your GPU overheats and catches fire.
- trollied 1y ago
  Thanks for the laugh!
- bloppe 1y ago
  I have a theory that all the people who truly believe this are either not software developers or have spent their whole career writing boring, cookie-cutter code. I'm over here trying to play with bleeding edge tech and push some boundaries. I keep trying to get LLMs to help me and they keep letting me down.
  - johnnyanmac 1y ago
    It's definitely domain specific. I'm sure people working in web or databases has a lot of data to train off of for obvious reasons. I'm sure this is less thann useless for stuff like embedded or other low level coding.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  >Teams will be led by one subject matter expert and in 20 years, how are we developing this "subject matter expert"? >Once we can do LLM code reviews with high confidence and little error, coding is essentially a dead field. Maybe by the time I retire. I think people in their early 20's will still get a solid career out of coding in the meantime while we go through the inevitable hype cycle of shiny new tech. Even if in the middle of their careers they may truly have their hands forced.
caseyy 1y ago
Vibe coding is what I’m selfishly expecting to take out many projects and keep my principal level swe skills in demand. Someone will have to mop all the vibes up when it’s time to deliver products.
- Jtsummers 1y ago
  Honestly, I've made a career fixing other people's messes. Vibe coding just means a larger market, but the terrible, unmaintainable, non-extendable code has been around since the beginning and grows every year.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

whateveracct 1y ago

"stay" - we'll see how this vibe codes lives and breathes for years

johnnyanmac 1y ago
I'm sure it'll stay the same thing any low effort actions stay around. People will instead just get better at identifying the low effort and filtering it out.

esalman 1y ago

What is coding without critical thinking? I never vibe coded, and I don't understand this trend AT ALL. I read how copilot and such are detrimental to critical thinking, and I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now.

rocqua 1y ago
Vibe coding hasn't really hampered my critical thinking. It just means I get ideas into practice faster, and it means that for new concepts I can get to itterating much faster. Perhaps I have the concept wrong, because half the time I'm still editing code by hand.
- SAI_Peregrinus 1y ago
  If you edit the code, instead of the prompt to the AI, it's not vibe coding. Vibe coding is letting the AI write the code, and only testing the output application.
- danielbln 1y ago
  I agree, and I think it's a continuum. I can say "make me an Instagram clone" and then come back after 100 agent loops and no looking at the code. Or I can outline the architecture, the components, service layer, data structures etc in a back and forth with the LLM and then have it do the minutia implementation. You still get code hell after a while unless you review the code and refactor where needed, but I can absolutely imagine a future where the code is just a compile target for the architecture and design I specify. A little bit like a compiler spitting out assembly (caveats apply, LLMs being non-deterministic etc etc and at current state probably not reliable enough for full unsupervised coding)
pliuchkin 1y ago
"I am even consciously scaling back on copilot use now whenever possible, and prioritizing Google search, reading documentation, blog posts and stackoverflow now." Very soon we will run out of human written articles.

alabastervlog 1y ago

> Vibe coding is here to stay. I agree, and it's why I'm not worried about running out of paying work as I head into the latter half of my career.

ToucanLoucan 1y ago

> From a business perspective, they don't care about this. Makes sense. Many businesses lately are churning out awful software that barely functions. Maybe if they were willing to support proper engineering that would be less of an issue.

boredemployee 1y ago

As I’ve been saying, many companies already expect you to use an LLM to speed up coding. Tasks now can be shipped in hours, not days or weeks.

cosmotic 1y ago

I can't remember the last time I had a "reasonable time frame" to build something for a business.

deleted 1y ago

[deleted]

barrell 1y ago

Just coupled with that quote, that’s like saying publishers don’t care about the writing process, they just care about whether the book sells. Which yeah, of course, that their job. It’s the authors job to write a good book. The publisher needing to sell books doesn’t contradict or supercede the authors need to write well or develop their process.

uludag 1y ago

> Vibe coding is here to stay. I would say this is true in the same way that copy-paste coding functioned and that vibe coding isn't fundamentally different. It can be a useful approach to a variety of problems. Having capable, knowledgable, and skilled employees is important to businesses though. If your business is something easily approachable then you are at risk of being outcompeted from companies with more skilled employees. There are truly hellscapes of codebases out there without the glimmer of hope of being worked on with vibe coding alone. On top of that, I'm getting the feeling that vibe coding is a sure way to hellscape your own codebase. Nothing can take the place of critical thinking.

amarant 1y ago
I'm not convinced the two are necessarily mutually exclusive. Surely a skilled developer could make use of AI to produce stuff faster, while still understanding everything and making sure the code is well written (well generated?) Haven't really tried vibe coding myself yet, but I'm tempted to give it a go. I imagine stuff like integrating external API's could be really handy, looking through external documentation and creating the correct calls to the correct endpoints is always a huge timesink. Seems like AI should be able to make short work of such tasks
- theshrike79 1y ago
  It can. You can just feed pretty much any LLM an OpenAPI spec and tell it a moderately known language and it'll implement a client for that API.
- johnnyanmac 1y ago
  > Surely a skilled developer could make use of AI to produce stuff faster, while still understanding everything and making sure the code is well written (well generated?) Yes. But in these early stages, that will only prove the LLM's can't do much more than be a fancy autocomplete, as opposed to a way to accelerate the workflow navigating anything with real-world value. Maybe in a few years for the most common domains this will truly shine.

bloppe 1y ago

Software isn't just built. It has to be maintained over time. A long, unplanned outage is much more destructive to a brand than a delayed release. Vibe coding prioritizes the latter at the expense of the former.

AlexandrB 1y ago
I look forward to reading war stories about debugging "vibes" applications during a 3am outage.

rowanseymour 1y ago

Yes there are businesses (game companies?) which just want to get a thing out the door, sell it, and move on to the next thing. But I don't think that's how most software businesses function. Usually software is iterated on and maintained, and you've got a problem if nobody has invested time in understanding how that software actually works.

HeyLaughingBoy 1y ago
Maybe, but the vast majority of software isn't written by, or for, software businesses. It's written by internal teams for businesses whose main product is insurance, or retail sales operations, or cabinet manufacturing, or real estate, etc. To quote Copilot, "According to recent data, nearly 70% of top economic performers use their own software to differentiate themselves from competitors."

coffeefirst 1y ago

The first significant business to face serious legal, regulatory, and reputational consequences for vibe slop will put a pretty quick end to that...

femiagbabiaka 1y ago

Virtually all businesses (even non-tech businesses) balance performance, reliability, cost, and revenue. Outages/bugs/crashes cost money, some can be fatal. They care.