6 ms·

Andrew Ng says vibe coding is a bad name for a real and exhausting job

44 points by cumo 1y ago

cumo 1y ago
What if someone still doesn’t understand the code from the prompt— does it still make sense to call them a 'pro'?
cumo 1y ago
I agree ...
- deleted 1y ago
  [deleted]
iLoveOncall 1y ago
> The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said the term misleads people into imagining engineers just "go with the vibes" when using AI tools to write code. This is exactly what is happening. I think HE doesn't understand what vibe coding means. Vibe coding is NOT "AI-assisted coding", it is letting the AI do everything with 0 checks beyond manually validating surface-level functionality and passing back the obvious issues to the AI.
- closewith 1y ago
  > Vibe coding is NOT "AI-assisted coding" That was the original intent, but now vibe coding is exactly synonymous with AI-assisted coding with the public at large. That's probably irreversible, and it's what Ng is highlighting.
  - ysosirius 1y ago
    How depressing. I sure hope it's not irreversible, but I feel it will be, because the number of novice "vibe coders" out there severely outweighs the number of experienced programmers.
  - rxtexit 1y ago
    Exactly, the train has already left the station. I think Rick Rubin has it right that this is a kind of "punk" coding and I think vibe coding is actually a good term in that regard. This rings especially true for me as a non-software engineer that took decades to appreciate punk music. I grew up on "virtuoso" shred guitar music and jazz. "A real musician spends hours a day in the woodshed learning their craft. Not just anyone can pick up a guitar and start making music." I think the analogy also works because the virtuoso had a huge leg up on the untrained musician if they also decided to make simpler music. On a longer time frame with the analogy, the next fed chairman obviously will not have a degree in clarinet from Juilliard like 99 year old Alan Greenspan.
raffael_de 1y ago
> "Vibe coding," coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February, describes giving AI prompts to write code. As Karpathy puts it, developers can "fully give in to the vibes" and "forget the code even exists." To be fair, Karpathy coined the term specifically for a playful, just-for-fun, quarter-serious approach to software development where you just tell the machine what you want and then be open for surprises. Assisted coding is not vibe coding in that sense.
- antihero 1y ago
  We use the term as an ironic and silly thing here in the UK, at least amongst my friends, also somewhat in the pejorative. People who have no concept of what they are doing are a joke. I have a Vibecoding sticker in the SUPREME style on my work laptop, which I think accurately summarises my opinion towards it.
- iammrpayments 1y ago
  I thought it was a joke when I first saw it.
- xnx 1y ago
  Has anyone proposed "yolo coding"?
  - HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
    That's where you "vibe code" the autopilot software for a plane you are about to fly in.
  - chriswarbo 1y ago
    I've seen YOLO applied to "agents", to mean granting it full access to run whatever it likes on your machine, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262705
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Cursor has a YOLO/auto run mode
fsniper 1y ago
I am tired of this "Everyone needs to learn programming" idea. It's exhausting. No. People doe not need to learn programming unless they need to deal with computers in a sense that they need to instruct them for automation.
- uncircle 1y ago
  [dead]
- eviks 1y ago
  > in a sense that they need to instruct them for automation. So basically everyone?
  - fsniper 1y ago
    There are people who do not interact with computers at all. There are areas where there is no electricity. There are people in war zones. Examples that comes to my mind is, a janitor, an oil rig worker, a miner, a private in 3rd world country. Perhaps they never interact with computers in their lifetimes.
    - jappgar 1y ago
      These people all have cell phones or know someone who does.
    - mapt 1y ago
      A janitor can't program his cleaning bots without it. The Deepwater Horizon movie clips show workers arguing over all the things that have failed diagnostics testing, and how important that is or isn't. They're interacting with machinery 5.6km down. Developed-world underground miners are already using heavy machinery that has to conform a cut to a specific 3d model which is adapted to the seam and the structural engineering of the tunnel. Open pit mines have similar structural concerns, but also environmental remediation issues. The trucks making that long journey down into the pit are all going robotic now. An infantry unit in 2025 that hasn't already won or lost on overwhelming air superiority, is rapidly adapting drones to help it fight. If you aren't making software, you're at least using software that somebody else created, you need to understand the problems and strengths of a software aided approach (as opposed to an apprentice aided approach, or a mechanically aided approach) and you're in a (hopefully) collaborative relationship to make that software better.
mellosouls 1y ago
We need a cool sounding name for AI-assisted coding as opposed to actual "vibe coding" (no process or thought beyond feels) which is constantly being confused with the former despite Karpathy's clear original definition. My suggestion: Pro-coding The "pro" can be thought of as either "process" or "professional" or similar. The main point is that unlike vibe coding it's not just flying by the seat of your pants, you're actually doing intellectual work as described by Ng.
- pavlov 1y ago
  Metacoding? Managed coding?
- hlynurd 1y ago
  Just call it coding? Like how we don't have a particular word for using stack overflow while coding.
- shafyy 1y ago
  Let's bring back no-coding /s
- smoe 1y ago
  I think that is just "coding" now. Most people will make use of some form of AI-assistance to the degree it is perceived useful and permissable in the context. So the thing in between vibe coding and say artisanal coding where everything is crafted by hand.
- AznHisoka 1y ago
  Programming.
- AnonymousPlanet 1y ago
  Assuming you didn't mean this in jest, I strongly disagree with your suggestion of "pro-coding". The thing we're talking about is most of the time pretty much the opposite of "professional", which your term alludes to. UIs, e.g., are not my field of expertise, but I can use AIs to help me produce UI code that is useful to me. It's still a hassle as described by Ng and I'm certainly not flying by the seat of my pants. The term for someone who dabbles in a field without being an expert in it is not "professional" but "dilettante". I therefore propose the term Dilletante-coding or short Dilletanting It is many, many times more apt than "pro-coding".
blitzar 1y ago
There are a lot of real and exhausting jobs out there that make the realest and most exhausted Googler look like they sit on their arse all day poking at a keyboard. Vibe coding ain't it. Next people will be claiming that "influencer" or "twitter shit poster" is a real and exhausting job.
- dismalaf 1y ago
  This. One summer I worked 80 hour weeks doing construction. I did restaurants when I was young and in university. Coding is a walk in the park compared to actual exhausting work.
  - Energiekomin 1y ago
    [dead]
  - manmal 1y ago
    Well one is taxing the muscles and the other the brain, can’t both be exhausting, in different ways? Neurotransmitters are not an infinite resource, and there’s trash the brain generates in response to activity that needs clearing out every night.
    - Yizahi 1y ago
      Physical work exhaustion also means complete mental exhaustion at the same time. You can write code for 10h/day and be completely mentally exhausted but turn off laptop and immediately go enjoy swimming in pool or running or sitting in bar drinking with friends. On the other hand you can move heavy boxes for 10h/day and the only thing that you could do afterwards is lay down half-dead. Certainly not having energy for coding or using computer in any way, or no longer than 10-15 minutes before going to sleep in the chair. At least this is how it works for me personally.
      - manmal 1y ago
        I don’t agree. I’ve been in this situation multiple times where I worked physically until exhaustion. Grabbing the MacBook and doing some coding felt good afterwards.
rsynnott 1y ago
> He said it's "fantastic" that developers can now write software faster with these tools, sometimes while "barely looking at the code." It there _any_ empirical evidence for this, at all? Like, beyond the _perception_ of the users.
- shafyy 1y ago
  No
- spacecadet 1y ago
  Yes none. However, one cannot discredit lived experience... and for many the lived experience of vibe coding is transformative and democratizing. Dare I say thats only fare given all the unwarranted "democratizing" the tech industry thought was helpful over the last 30 years...
- logicchains 1y ago
  >It there _any_ empirical evidence for this, at all? Like, beyond the _perception_ of the users. Someone managed to write a standards-compliant HTTP 2.0 server in just two weeks, 40k+ lines of code (including tests) with almost all of the coding done by Gemini Pro: https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-written-standards https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-writ... . No unassisted programmer could do that so fast (except maybe Fabrice Bellard).
- Energiekomin 1y ago
  [dead]
- fragmede 1y ago
  How would that evidence exist? Aider writes how much code was generated in each release, and it's in the 80%s, but what you're asking for is for someone to do a timed trial on writing a bit of code unassisted, then for that same person to write the same bit of code with LLM assistance and also with forgetting the first version they wrote. Are we so caught up in proving they're not idk that we're stuck with the parachute engineering/science problem? Because, scientifically, the only way we can know parachutes are any good is to test the hypothesis by throwing the control group out of the plane without parachutes and comparing them to a group of people who jumped out of the plane with parachutes.
bgwalter 1y ago
Now the AI rainmakers are infighting about the best public relations for their hot air products. It is encouraging though that Ng admits that dealing with AI "coding" is like wading through a swamp and leaves you exhausted. Regarding "vibe coding": I'm waiting for the first National Security Letter that demands that a secret backdoor is inserted in the generated code. No one will notice, because we "can forget about the code".
- shaky-carrousel 1y ago
  I can imagine also a government agency asking OpenAI to have ChatGPT very subtly align people to the official discourse, whatever it would be. With its access to previous conversations and memories, it's a child's game to slowly nudge people's opinions in the "right" direction. Because something that LLMs excel at is being convincing.
- Energiekomin 1y ago
  Andrew Ng is an expert in ML. I'm not sure why you generalise this as he represents everyone on the whole planet. And you continue doing so with every other point you are making. Just because some random people think they can vibecode real products, doesn't mean that this didn't happen before just slower. A company i worked for, had their MySql server unprotected on the internet for no reason at all. They still used MD5 too. Another company saved credit card information in their DB with a simple generic key in code accessable by everyone.
  - benterix 1y ago
    > A company i worked for, had their MySql server unprotected on the internet for no reason at all. They still used MD5 too. Another company saved credit card information in their DB with a simple generic key in code accessable by everyone. So your argument is that since we had incompetence before, let's have more of it?
    - Energiekomin 1y ago
      I'm saying that this was already a issue before, its not a new issue and we have to deal with this the same way as we did before: Security experts, audits etc.
ysosirius 1y ago
Haven't met a programmer who likes the "vibe coding" terminology. It seems to be only popular among circles with no programming experience.
- codegladiator 1y ago
  hi, lets meet. imo this is bad for the whole community to bad mouth vibe coding with such negative connotations, effectively gate keeping. vibe coding is like a car for people in the age of walking. sure you like to walk, want to keep walking, even enjoy walking, but there is no comparison with how far you will get if you start using a car. you still need to walk to your car and all effectively holds.
- JoeyJoJoJr 1y ago
  I haven’t met (IRL) a programmer who has a strong opinion on the term one way or the other. It just seems like internet outrage to me.
PaulRobinson 1y ago
I always know when we're in an interesting point of a change when people are tripping over language to describe things. It seems to me that everybody has a slightly different expectation of what vibe coding is, and what to expect from it. Same with AI generally. On the one end you get people insisting its going to change the World, and on the other you get "vibe debt" references and, well, this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qWJUWinWWnQ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qWJUWinWWnQ My experience is that all AI today is good at helping experts be more productive by giving them first draft artefacts that might need editing, and sometimes that editing is extensive, sometimes maybe nothing. That's it. They are not "doing the job", they're assisting the job. People who expect AI to "do the job", are setting themselves up for failure, whether its filing paperwork in courts [0], writing book reviews [1], or writing software [2]. Sure you can use midjourney to produce some artwork for you, but if an artist used it, they'd be able to make it even better and fix it up in all sorts of ways, so maybe you will still need to pay the artist, they will just take less time and maybe lower their unit price of work. If you are an expert at software engineering, and you are using AI, your job is changing, but it's not going away. I think every mature conversation about current agentic coding practices acknowledge this. And I think people who are getting good at this will be more productive, and they will get more done, but they're not going to be getting their job done in 4 hours and taking the rest of the week off, because they're just going to try and add more value to get paid more, or even just to keep their jobs. That's the treadmill of free market capitalism. The "vibe coding" stance tries to counter this, but doesn't acknowledge the limitations of the technology. I think it can be taken in one of two ways: ignore the code and be surprised at what comes out and have fun with the results, which I think is fine for a hobby, you do you; or, ignore the code because you don't need to understand it, and let's get rid of all the expensive developers, and hey, what could possibly go wrong in this production stack, which I think is going to end very badly for all involved. While today the expectation of vibe coding with current technology is as ridiculous as me saying I'm going to replace my lawyer with a bot and YOLO it [3], I am not sure that will hold forever, or for the rest of my career, or for even the next year. The only way to find out is for experts to try it, and qualitatively and quantitatively assess the results. I'd love to see a vibe coding index which periodically tries to get apps of increasing complexity built and then assess the results, and we track this over time. At some point maybe we'll get through a tipping point, and we can have conversations about what that means. I think we might need a better term for it though, that isn't AI-assisted development (as the intention is that its not assisting you, it's doing it). Natural language programming? Entirely Generative programming? [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/lawyers-london-england-high-court-b2765655.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/lawyers-london-england-hi... [1] https://chicago.suntimes.com/opinion/2025/05/29/lessons-apology-from-sun-times-ceo-ai-generated-book-list https://chicago.suntimes.com/opinion/2025/05/29/lessons-apol... [2] https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114546174330023840 https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114546174330023840 [3] https://petapixel.com/2025/04/14/man-tries-to-use-ai-generated-lawyer-in-courtroom-judge-unhappy/ https://petapixel.com/2025/04/14/man-tries-to-use-ai-generat...
nikanj 1y ago
We didn't come up with a new word for programming when we transitioned from hand-writing assembly to instructing a compiler on how to produce said assembly. We didn't need it later either, when we got automatic parallelization and other meta-code-generation. Why would we need a term now? Our job remains the same: take ambiguous customer statements, transform them into well-defined instructions that lead the computer to do what the customer was trying to ask for
- kgwxd 1y ago
  exactly. where's "vibe searching", "vibe writing", "vibe drawing", etc?
  - JoeyJoJoJr 1y ago
    The implicit assumption about drawing and writing is that it is vibe based. That’s why we do have terms like “technical drawing” and “technical writing”?
    - kgwxd 1y ago
      Yeah, when they're done by humans. And, when I code, it's generally more vibe based, unless I'm getting ready to publish. AI assisted writing and drawing should have a prefix too.
abhisek 1y ago
Vibe “migrated” our docs portal to another framework the other day. Looked awesome. Only when I decided to do a quick review before switchover did I found all subtle hallucinations. Not sure what would be faster. Manually reviewing and fixing the AI migrated docs or just give up and use sed or something to do it from scratch.
- xiphias2 1y ago
  Whenever you feel ,,not sure if fixing what a huge change did is faster'' you are asking something too big and not specific enough. It's much better to ask the specific queries that you yourself would do with sed and treat the models as smarter sed (or ask them to generate the sed statements themselves)
andyjohnson0 1y ago
I write software that controls industrial equipment that generates ionising radiation. Where can I get me some of this vibe coding?
- fragmede 1y ago
  by making many many small programs in your field in the language that your field uses, with libraries that are de facto standards, and documenting them, and selling it as training data or publishing it up on GitHub for everyone to train on.
  - andyjohnson0 1y ago
    clearly I forgot the /s
    - fragmede 1y ago
      Poe's law strikes again!
butz 1y ago
After all this "vibe coding" thing will blow over, someone will have to clean up all the mess so called "vibe coders" made. I'm looking at it as an opportunity. And it won't be cheap.
zazazx 1y ago
Vibe coders and Trump supporters share the same space in my heart. You should all disappear before you completely destroy something beautiful.
- coreypreston 1y ago
  Weirdest comment I've ever seen here.
  - zazazx 1y ago
    Get out more.

44 points by cumo 1y ago

cumo 1y ago

What if someone still doesn’t understand the code from the prompt— does it still make sense to call them a 'pro'?

cumo 1y ago

I agree ...

deleted 1y ago
[deleted]

iLoveOncall 1y ago

> The Stanford professor and former Google Brain scientist said the term misleads people into imagining engineers just "go with the vibes" when using AI tools to write code. This is exactly what is happening. I think HE doesn't understand what vibe coding means. Vibe coding is NOT "AI-assisted coding", it is letting the AI do everything with 0 checks beyond manually validating surface-level functionality and passing back the obvious issues to the AI.

closewith 1y ago
> Vibe coding is NOT "AI-assisted coding" That was the original intent, but now vibe coding is exactly synonymous with AI-assisted coding with the public at large. That's probably irreversible, and it's what Ng is highlighting.
- ysosirius 1y ago
  How depressing. I sure hope it's not irreversible, but I feel it will be, because the number of novice "vibe coders" out there severely outweighs the number of experienced programmers.
- rxtexit 1y ago
  Exactly, the train has already left the station. I think Rick Rubin has it right that this is a kind of "punk" coding and I think vibe coding is actually a good term in that regard. This rings especially true for me as a non-software engineer that took decades to appreciate punk music. I grew up on "virtuoso" shred guitar music and jazz. "A real musician spends hours a day in the woodshed learning their craft. Not just anyone can pick up a guitar and start making music." I think the analogy also works because the virtuoso had a huge leg up on the untrained musician if they also decided to make simpler music. On a longer time frame with the analogy, the next fed chairman obviously will not have a degree in clarinet from Juilliard like 99 year old Alan Greenspan.

raffael_de 1y ago

> "Vibe coding," coined by OpenAI cofounder Andrej Karpathy in February, describes giving AI prompts to write code. As Karpathy puts it, developers can "fully give in to the vibes" and "forget the code even exists." To be fair, Karpathy coined the term specifically for a playful, just-for-fun, quarter-serious approach to software development where you just tell the machine what you want and then be open for surprises. Assisted coding is not vibe coding in that sense.

antihero 1y ago
We use the term as an ironic and silly thing here in the UK, at least amongst my friends, also somewhat in the pejorative. People who have no concept of what they are doing are a joke. I have a Vibecoding sticker in the SUPREME style on my work laptop, which I think accurately summarises my opinion towards it.
iammrpayments 1y ago
I thought it was a joke when I first saw it.
xnx 1y ago
Has anyone proposed "yolo coding"?
- HarHarVeryFunny 1y ago
  That's where you "vibe code" the autopilot software for a plane you are about to fly in.
- chriswarbo 1y ago
  I've seen YOLO applied to "agents", to mean granting it full access to run whatever it likes on your machine, e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262705 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44262705
- fragmede 1y ago
  Cursor has a YOLO/auto run mode

fsniper 1y ago

I am tired of this "Everyone needs to learn programming" idea. It's exhausting. No. People doe not need to learn programming unless they need to deal with computers in a sense that they need to instruct them for automation.

uncircle 1y ago
[dead]
eviks 1y ago
> in a sense that they need to instruct them for automation. So basically everyone?
- fsniper 1y ago
  There are people who do not interact with computers at all. There are areas where there is no electricity. There are people in war zones. Examples that comes to my mind is, a janitor, an oil rig worker, a miner, a private in 3rd world country. Perhaps they never interact with computers in their lifetimes.
  - jappgar 1y ago
    These people all have cell phones or know someone who does.
  - mapt 1y ago
    A janitor can't program his cleaning bots without it. The Deepwater Horizon movie clips show workers arguing over all the things that have failed diagnostics testing, and how important that is or isn't. They're interacting with machinery 5.6km down. Developed-world underground miners are already using heavy machinery that has to conform a cut to a specific 3d model which is adapted to the seam and the structural engineering of the tunnel. Open pit mines have similar structural concerns, but also environmental remediation issues. The trucks making that long journey down into the pit are all going robotic now. An infantry unit in 2025 that hasn't already won or lost on overwhelming air superiority, is rapidly adapting drones to help it fight. If you aren't making software, you're at least using software that somebody else created, you need to understand the problems and strengths of a software aided approach (as opposed to an apprentice aided approach, or a mechanically aided approach) and you're in a (hopefully) collaborative relationship to make that software better.

mellosouls 1y ago

We need a cool sounding name for AI-assisted coding as opposed to actual "vibe coding" (no process or thought beyond feels) which is constantly being confused with the former despite Karpathy's clear original definition. My suggestion: Pro-coding The "pro" can be thought of as either "process" or "professional" or similar. The main point is that unlike vibe coding it's not just flying by the seat of your pants, you're actually doing intellectual work as described by Ng.

pavlov 1y ago
Metacoding? Managed coding?
hlynurd 1y ago
Just call it coding? Like how we don't have a particular word for using stack overflow while coding.
shafyy 1y ago
Let's bring back no-coding /s
smoe 1y ago
I think that is just "coding" now. Most people will make use of some form of AI-assistance to the degree it is perceived useful and permissable in the context. So the thing in between vibe coding and say artisanal coding where everything is crafted by hand.
AznHisoka 1y ago
Programming.
AnonymousPlanet 1y ago
Assuming you didn't mean this in jest, I strongly disagree with your suggestion of "pro-coding". The thing we're talking about is most of the time pretty much the opposite of "professional", which your term alludes to. UIs, e.g., are not my field of expertise, but I can use AIs to help me produce UI code that is useful to me. It's still a hassle as described by Ng and I'm certainly not flying by the seat of my pants. The term for someone who dabbles in a field without being an expert in it is not "professional" but "dilettante". I therefore propose the term Dilletante-coding or short Dilletanting It is many, many times more apt than "pro-coding".

blitzar 1y ago

There are a lot of real and exhausting jobs out there that make the realest and most exhausted Googler look like they sit on their arse all day poking at a keyboard. Vibe coding ain't it. Next people will be claiming that "influencer" or "twitter shit poster" is a real and exhausting job.

dismalaf 1y ago
This. One summer I worked 80 hour weeks doing construction. I did restaurants when I was young and in university. Coding is a walk in the park compared to actual exhausting work.
- Energiekomin 1y ago
  [dead]
- manmal 1y ago
  Well one is taxing the muscles and the other the brain, can’t both be exhausting, in different ways? Neurotransmitters are not an infinite resource, and there’s trash the brain generates in response to activity that needs clearing out every night.
  - Yizahi 1y ago
    Physical work exhaustion also means complete mental exhaustion at the same time. You can write code for 10h/day and be completely mentally exhausted but turn off laptop and immediately go enjoy swimming in pool or running or sitting in bar drinking with friends. On the other hand you can move heavy boxes for 10h/day and the only thing that you could do afterwards is lay down half-dead. Certainly not having energy for coding or using computer in any way, or no longer than 10-15 minutes before going to sleep in the chair. At least this is how it works for me personally.
    - manmal 1y ago
      I don’t agree. I’ve been in this situation multiple times where I worked physically until exhaustion. Grabbing the MacBook and doing some coding felt good afterwards.

rsynnott 1y ago

> He said it's "fantastic" that developers can now write software faster with these tools, sometimes while "barely looking at the code." It there _any_ empirical evidence for this, at all? Like, beyond the _perception_ of the users.

shafyy 1y ago
No
spacecadet 1y ago
Yes none. However, one cannot discredit lived experience... and for many the lived experience of vibe coding is transformative and democratizing. Dare I say thats only fare given all the unwarranted "democratizing" the tech industry thought was helpful over the last 30 years...
logicchains 1y ago
>It there _any_ empirical evidence for this, at all? Like, beyond the _perception_ of the users. Someone managed to write a standards-compliant HTTP 2.0 server in just two weeks, 40k+ lines of code (including tests) with almost all of the coding done by Gemini Pro: https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-written-standards https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-writ... . No unassisted programmer could do that so fast (except maybe Fabrice Bellard).
Energiekomin 1y ago
[dead]
fragmede 1y ago
How would that evidence exist? Aider writes how much code was generated in each release, and it's in the 80%s, but what you're asking for is for someone to do a timed trial on writing a bit of code unassisted, then for that same person to write the same bit of code with LLM assistance and also with forgetting the first version they wrote. Are we so caught up in proving they're not idk that we're stuck with the parachute engineering/science problem? Because, scientifically, the only way we can know parachutes are any good is to test the hypothesis by throwing the control group out of the plane without parachutes and comparing them to a group of people who jumped out of the plane with parachutes.

bgwalter 1y ago

Now the AI rainmakers are infighting about the best public relations for their hot air products. It is encouraging though that Ng admits that dealing with AI "coding" is like wading through a swamp and leaves you exhausted. Regarding "vibe coding": I'm waiting for the first National Security Letter that demands that a secret backdoor is inserted in the generated code. No one will notice, because we "can forget about the code".

shaky-carrousel 1y ago
I can imagine also a government agency asking OpenAI to have ChatGPT very subtly align people to the official discourse, whatever it would be. With its access to previous conversations and memories, it's a child's game to slowly nudge people's opinions in the "right" direction. Because something that LLMs excel at is being convincing.
Energiekomin 1y ago
Andrew Ng is an expert in ML. I'm not sure why you generalise this as he represents everyone on the whole planet. And you continue doing so with every other point you are making. Just because some random people think they can vibecode real products, doesn't mean that this didn't happen before just slower. A company i worked for, had their MySql server unprotected on the internet for no reason at all. They still used MD5 too. Another company saved credit card information in their DB with a simple generic key in code accessable by everyone.
- benterix 1y ago
  > A company i worked for, had their MySql server unprotected on the internet for no reason at all. They still used MD5 too. Another company saved credit card information in their DB with a simple generic key in code accessable by everyone. So your argument is that since we had incompetence before, let's have more of it?
  - Energiekomin 1y ago
    I'm saying that this was already a issue before, its not a new issue and we have to deal with this the same way as we did before: Security experts, audits etc.

ysosirius 1y ago

Haven't met a programmer who likes the "vibe coding" terminology. It seems to be only popular among circles with no programming experience.

codegladiator 1y ago
hi, lets meet. imo this is bad for the whole community to bad mouth vibe coding with such negative connotations, effectively gate keeping. vibe coding is like a car for people in the age of walking. sure you like to walk, want to keep walking, even enjoy walking, but there is no comparison with how far you will get if you start using a car. you still need to walk to your car and all effectively holds.
JoeyJoJoJr 1y ago
I haven’t met (IRL) a programmer who has a strong opinion on the term one way or the other. It just seems like internet outrage to me.

PaulRobinson 1y ago

I always know when we're in an interesting point of a change when people are tripping over language to describe things. It seems to me that everybody has a slightly different expectation of what vibe coding is, and what to expect from it. Same with AI generally. On the one end you get people insisting its going to change the World, and on the other you get "vibe debt" references and, well, this: https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qWJUWinWWnQ https://www.youtube.com/shorts/qWJUWinWWnQ My experience is that all AI today is good at helping experts be more productive by giving them first draft artefacts that might need editing, and sometimes that editing is extensive, sometimes maybe nothing. That's it. They are not "doing the job", they're assisting the job. People who expect AI to "do the job", are setting themselves up for failure, whether its filing paperwork in courts [0], writing book reviews [1], or writing software [2]. Sure you can use midjourney to produce some artwork for you, but if an artist used it, they'd be able to make it even better and fix it up in all sorts of ways, so maybe you will still need to pay the artist, they will just take less time and maybe lower their unit price of work. If you are an expert at software engineering, and you are using AI, your job is changing, but it's not going away. I think every mature conversation about current agentic coding practices acknowledge this. And I think people who are getting good at this will be more productive, and they will get more done, but they're not going to be getting their job done in 4 hours and taking the rest of the week off, because they're just going to try and add more value to get paid more, or even just to keep their jobs. That's the treadmill of free market capitalism. The "vibe coding" stance tries to counter this, but doesn't acknowledge the limitations of the technology. I think it can be taken in one of two ways: ignore the code and be surprised at what comes out and have fun with the results, which I think is fine for a hobby, you do you; or, ignore the code because you don't need to understand it, and let's get rid of all the expensive developers, and hey, what could possibly go wrong in this production stack, which I think is going to end very badly for all involved. While today the expectation of vibe coding with current technology is as ridiculous as me saying I'm going to replace my lawyer with a bot and YOLO it [3], I am not sure that will hold forever, or for the rest of my career, or for even the next year. The only way to find out is for experts to try it, and qualitatively and quantitatively assess the results. I'd love to see a vibe coding index which periodically tries to get apps of increasing complexity built and then assess the results, and we track this over time. At some point maybe we'll get through a tipping point, and we can have conversations about what that means. I think we might need a better term for it though, that isn't AI-assisted development (as the intention is that its not assisting you, it's doing it). Natural language programming? Entirely Generative programming? [0] https://www.independent.co.uk/news/lawyers-london-england-high-court-b2765655.html https://www.independent.co.uk/news/lawyers-london-england-hi... [1] https://chicago.suntimes.com/opinion/2025/05/29/lessons-apology-from-sun-times-ceo-ai-generated-book-list https://chicago.suntimes.com/opinion/2025/05/29/lessons-apol... [2] https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114546174330023840 https://cyberplace.social/@GossiTheDog/114546174330023840 [3] https://petapixel.com/2025/04/14/man-tries-to-use-ai-generated-lawyer-in-courtroom-judge-unhappy/ https://petapixel.com/2025/04/14/man-tries-to-use-ai-generat...

nikanj 1y ago

We didn't come up with a new word for programming when we transitioned from hand-writing assembly to instructing a compiler on how to produce said assembly. We didn't need it later either, when we got automatic parallelization and other meta-code-generation. Why would we need a term now? Our job remains the same: take ambiguous customer statements, transform them into well-defined instructions that lead the computer to do what the customer was trying to ask for

kgwxd 1y ago
exactly. where's "vibe searching", "vibe writing", "vibe drawing", etc?
- JoeyJoJoJr 1y ago
  The implicit assumption about drawing and writing is that it is vibe based. That’s why we do have terms like “technical drawing” and “technical writing”?
  - kgwxd 1y ago
    Yeah, when they're done by humans. And, when I code, it's generally more vibe based, unless I'm getting ready to publish. AI assisted writing and drawing should have a prefix too.

abhisek 1y ago

Vibe “migrated” our docs portal to another framework the other day. Looked awesome. Only when I decided to do a quick review before switchover did I found all subtle hallucinations. Not sure what would be faster. Manually reviewing and fixing the AI migrated docs or just give up and use sed or something to do it from scratch.

xiphias2 1y ago
Whenever you feel ,,not sure if fixing what a huge change did is faster'' you are asking something too big and not specific enough. It's much better to ask the specific queries that you yourself would do with sed and treat the models as smarter sed (or ask them to generate the sed statements themselves)

andyjohnson0 1y ago

I write software that controls industrial equipment that generates ionising radiation. Where can I get me some of this vibe coding?

fragmede 1y ago
by making many many small programs in your field in the language that your field uses, with libraries that are de facto standards, and documenting them, and selling it as training data or publishing it up on GitHub for everyone to train on.
- andyjohnson0 1y ago
  clearly I forgot the /s
  - fragmede 1y ago
    Poe's law strikes again!

butz 1y ago

After all this "vibe coding" thing will blow over, someone will have to clean up all the mess so called "vibe coders" made. I'm looking at it as an opportunity. And it won't be cheap.

zazazx 1y ago

Vibe coders and Trump supporters share the same space in my heart. You should all disappear before you completely destroy something beautiful.

coreypreston 1y ago
Weirdest comment I've ever seen here.
- zazazx 1y ago
  Get out more.