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Google CEO Pushes 'Vibe Coding' – But Real Developers Know It's Not Magic

14 points by birdculture 11mo ago

VerifiedReports 11mo ago
Abolish this stupid, non-descriptive term.
- codyswann 11mo ago
  It's very problematic for companies, mainly because of the tooling. Large companies are equating lovable, replit, bold, V0 with Claude Code, Codex, etc all under the "Vibe Coding" banner. I try to fit the former under the banner of "Prompt-to-app Tools" and the latter as "Autonomous AI Engineering"
  - VerifiedReports 11mo ago
    Better for sure. The ascendancy of non-descriptive, jargon for everything is irritating as hell. If something is supposed to mean "AI-generated code" then it needs to contain at least the important word from that description. Sad that this has to be explained now.
more_corn 11mo ago
That seems like a very shortsighted thing to do. Does he not understand the limitations of LLM generated code?
- weikju 11mo ago
  He understands how to hype and increase the value of his shares. Everything else is insignificant
- burnt-resistor 11mo ago
  It's all about wrecking the economic futures of millions for a handful of billionaires to become trillionaires. Anyone who aids them is complicit in digging their own grave and graves for their friends and colleagues. Actions have moral and ethical consequences.
aurareturn 11mo ago
[flagged]
- EagnaIonat 11mo ago
  > Bad developers complain about LLMs, I'm finding the bad developers just do vibe coding because it is a shortcut. You look like an expert but you are not. I coded for many years before I actually did formal computer science training. At that point I understood how bad my coding actually was. It worked, but was never scalable, never maintainable and used poor design patterns. For vibe coders they can't see that and assume the AI will. Real developers can see the flaws, but if you start vibe coding without those skills then you are lost.
  - aurareturn 11mo ago
    I'm finding the bad developers just do vibe coding because it is a shortcut. You look like an expert but you are not. Ultimately, it's about business value not amazing hand written code. Let the business profit judge whether it's good or bad to use generated code. Further more, people always talk about LLM generated code but don't talk about LLM assisted testing, bug finding, automated documentation, etc. It can help increase code quality and reliability too - not just velocity. It's up to good software leaders in the company to set guidelines. Companies who can't do this also couldn't write good code before LLMs anyway.
    - EagnaIonat 11mo ago
      > Ultimately, it's about business value not amazing hand written code. You are missing my point entirely. Even if vibe coding could create perfect code, your junior prompter with little to no coding knowledge is not going to know the difference. Creating something and not knowing how it works is worse than something created that doesn't work.
      - aurareturn 11mo ago
        [flagged]
aixpert 11mo ago
i'm a real developer and it is absolutely magic! if someone showed me a demo of talking to a computer which works for one hour to find and fix my bugs all on its own five years ago I'd definitely call it magic and I still call it magic. does it make a mistakes? yes sometimes but you can verify with tests or with lean.
- aurareturn 11mo ago
  Agreed. Imagine if a developer was in a comma for 3 years, wakes up, and sees a state of the art coding agent for the first time.
  - brazukadev 11mo ago
    They'll be impressed for a few months and then start to notice where it fails.
    - aurareturn 11mo ago
      It's not perfect. When you hire a new software dev, you'll quickly notice where he/she fails too.
- jxixjxjx 11mo ago
  I experience(d) the same level of magic when I throw keywords into google and get relevant results back. LLMs are just an extension of this kind of magic. Their efficacy opens up a lot more possibility, but given they’re not AGI (without getting into a definitions debate) a lot of the magic is gone. Nothing fundamentally changed. I still use them a lot and they’re great, but it’s not a new paradigm (which I would then call magic). I think the key point here too is LLMs demo like magic. You see the happy path and you think we have AGI. You show me of 10 years ago the happy path and I’d be floored until I talked to me of now and got the whole story.
cpldcpu 11mo ago
I am not a professional software developer but instead more of multi-domain system architect and I have to say it is absolutely magical! The public discourse about LLM assisted coding is often driven by front end developers or rather non-professionals trying to build web apps, but the value it brings to prototyping system concepts across hardware/software domains can hardly be understated. Instead of trying to find suitable simulation environments and trying to couple them, I can simply whip up a gui based tool to play around with whatever signal chain/optimization problem/control I want to investigate. Usually I would have to find/hire people to do this, but using LLMs I can iterate ideas at a crazy cadence. Later, implementation does of course require proper engineering. That said, it is often confusing how different models are hyped. As mentioned, there is an overt focus on front end design etc. For the work I am doing, I found Claude 4.5 (both models) to be absolutely unchallenged. Gemini 3 Pro is also getting there, but long term agentic capability still needs to catch up. GPT 5.1/codex is excellent for brainstorming in the UX, but I found it too unresponsive and intransparent as a code assistant. It does not even matter if it can solve bugs other llms cannot find, because you should not put yourself into a situation where you don't understand the system you are building.
- snowfield 11mo ago
  Agreed, I know Networks, requests, protocols, Auth flow etc but is been years since I actually coded stuff This is magical to me. I love cursor, I use it to deploy docker packages and fix npm issues etc too :p I use some guardrails, like SonarQube as static code analyzer and of course some default linters. Checks and balances

14 points by birdculture 11mo ago

VerifiedReports 11mo ago

Abolish this stupid, non-descriptive term.

codyswann 11mo ago
It's very problematic for companies, mainly because of the tooling. Large companies are equating lovable, replit, bold, V0 with Claude Code, Codex, etc all under the "Vibe Coding" banner. I try to fit the former under the banner of "Prompt-to-app Tools" and the latter as "Autonomous AI Engineering"
- VerifiedReports 11mo ago
  Better for sure. The ascendancy of non-descriptive, jargon for everything is irritating as hell. If something is supposed to mean "AI-generated code" then it needs to contain at least the important word from that description. Sad that this has to be explained now.

more_corn 11mo ago

That seems like a very shortsighted thing to do. Does he not understand the limitations of LLM generated code?

weikju 11mo ago
He understands how to hype and increase the value of his shares. Everything else is insignificant
burnt-resistor 11mo ago
It's all about wrecking the economic futures of millions for a handful of billionaires to become trillionaires. Anyone who aids them is complicit in digging their own grave and graves for their friends and colleagues. Actions have moral and ethical consequences.

aurareturn 11mo ago

[flagged]

EagnaIonat 11mo ago
> Bad developers complain about LLMs, I'm finding the bad developers just do vibe coding because it is a shortcut. You look like an expert but you are not. I coded for many years before I actually did formal computer science training. At that point I understood how bad my coding actually was. It worked, but was never scalable, never maintainable and used poor design patterns. For vibe coders they can't see that and assume the AI will. Real developers can see the flaws, but if you start vibe coding without those skills then you are lost.
- aurareturn 11mo ago
  I'm finding the bad developers just do vibe coding because it is a shortcut. You look like an expert but you are not. Ultimately, it's about business value not amazing hand written code. Let the business profit judge whether it's good or bad to use generated code. Further more, people always talk about LLM generated code but don't talk about LLM assisted testing, bug finding, automated documentation, etc. It can help increase code quality and reliability too - not just velocity. It's up to good software leaders in the company to set guidelines. Companies who can't do this also couldn't write good code before LLMs anyway.
  - EagnaIonat 11mo ago
    > Ultimately, it's about business value not amazing hand written code. You are missing my point entirely. Even if vibe coding could create perfect code, your junior prompter with little to no coding knowledge is not going to know the difference. Creating something and not knowing how it works is worse than something created that doesn't work.
    - aurareturn 11mo ago
      [flagged]

aixpert 11mo ago

i'm a real developer and it is absolutely magic! if someone showed me a demo of talking to a computer which works for one hour to find and fix my bugs all on its own five years ago I'd definitely call it magic and I still call it magic. does it make a mistakes? yes sometimes but you can verify with tests or with lean.

aurareturn 11mo ago
Agreed. Imagine if a developer was in a comma for 3 years, wakes up, and sees a state of the art coding agent for the first time.
- brazukadev 11mo ago
  They'll be impressed for a few months and then start to notice where it fails.
  - aurareturn 11mo ago
    It's not perfect. When you hire a new software dev, you'll quickly notice where he/she fails too.
jxixjxjx 11mo ago
I experience(d) the same level of magic when I throw keywords into google and get relevant results back. LLMs are just an extension of this kind of magic. Their efficacy opens up a lot more possibility, but given they’re not AGI (without getting into a definitions debate) a lot of the magic is gone. Nothing fundamentally changed. I still use them a lot and they’re great, but it’s not a new paradigm (which I would then call magic). I think the key point here too is LLMs demo like magic. You see the happy path and you think we have AGI. You show me of 10 years ago the happy path and I’d be floored until I talked to me of now and got the whole story.

cpldcpu 11mo ago

I am not a professional software developer but instead more of multi-domain system architect and I have to say it is absolutely magical! The public discourse about LLM assisted coding is often driven by front end developers or rather non-professionals trying to build web apps, but the value it brings to prototyping system concepts across hardware/software domains can hardly be understated. Instead of trying to find suitable simulation environments and trying to couple them, I can simply whip up a gui based tool to play around with whatever signal chain/optimization problem/control I want to investigate. Usually I would have to find/hire people to do this, but using LLMs I can iterate ideas at a crazy cadence. Later, implementation does of course require proper engineering. That said, it is often confusing how different models are hyped. As mentioned, there is an overt focus on front end design etc. For the work I am doing, I found Claude 4.5 (both models) to be absolutely unchallenged. Gemini 3 Pro is also getting there, but long term agentic capability still needs to catch up. GPT 5.1/codex is excellent for brainstorming in the UX, but I found it too unresponsive and intransparent as a code assistant. It does not even matter if it can solve bugs other llms cannot find, because you should not put yourself into a situation where you don't understand the system you are building.

snowfield 11mo ago
Agreed, I know Networks, requests, protocols, Auth flow etc but is been years since I actually coded stuff This is magical to me. I love cursor, I use it to deploy docker packages and fix npm issues etc too :p I use some guardrails, like SonarQube as static code analyzer and of course some default linters. Checks and balances