7 ms·
Two kinds of vibe coding
- wrs 10mo agoAaargh, I hate it when useful terms get diffused to meaninglessness. No, there’s one kind of vibe coding. The definition of vibe coding is letting the LLM write the code and not looking at it. That’s what the word “vibe” is there for.
- platevoltage 10mo agoI have no idea why an experienced developer who uses LLM's to make them more productive would want to degrade their workflow by calling it "vibe coding".
- ares623 10mo agoIt’s a chance to become the next Uncle Bob in a new era of software
- exe34 10mo agoyou're still allowed to alternate between letting it do and consolidating, no?
- acedTrex 10mo agono, vibe coding is explicitly NOT looking at the output.
- MisterTea 10mo agoFrom my understanding, the vibe part means you go along with the vibe of the LLM meaning you don't question the design choices the LLM makes and you just go with the output it hands you.
- exe34 10mo agookay so I'm not vibe coding, I'm just writing shittier code than before.
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- hackable_sand 10mo agoI'm ngl, when I first heard "vibe coding" I immediately imagined programming from memory.
- parpfish 10mo agoMy mind went… elsewhere. Specifically, the gutter. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teledildonics
- bitwize 10mo agoUnsurprisingly, the Rust community has you covered there also: https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug https://github.com/buttplugio/buttplug https://github.com/Gankra/cargo-mommy https://github.com/Gankra/cargo-mommy (has integration with the former)
- hackable_sand 10mo agoOoooh very interesting
- pessimizer 10mo ago> Aaargh, I hate it when useful terms get diffused to meaninglessness. I think that when you say this, you have an obligation to explain how the term "vibe coding" is useful, and is only useful by the definition that you've become attached to. I think that the author is accepting that there's no such thing as the vibe coding that you've defined (except for very short and very simple scripts), and that in all other cases of "vibe coding" there will be a back and forth between you and the machine where you decide whether what it has done has satisfied your requirements. Then they arbitrarily distinguish between two levels of doing that: one where you never let the LLM out of the yard, and the other where you let the LLM run around the neighborhood until it gets tired and comes back. I think that's a useful distinction, and I think that the blog makes a good case for it being a useful distinction. I don't find your comment useful, or the strictness of definition that it demands. It's unrealistic. Nobody is asking an LLM to do something, and shipping whatever it brings back without any follow-up. If nobody is doing that, a term restricted to only that is useless.
- wrs 10mo agoPeople definitely are doing that. Anyone who is not a programmer and asks the LLM to write a program is doing exactly that. The LLM will do that itself behind the scenes nowadays (yesterday Claude wrote a Python program when I simply asked it to give me the document it wrote in Word format!). References: This is the original definition ("forget that the code even exists"). [0] Simon Willison wrote a much longer version of my comment. [1] He also suggested the term "vibe engineering" for the case where you are reviewing the LLM output. [2] [0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383 [1] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ [2] https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/ https://simonwillison.net/2025/Oct/7/vibe-engineering/
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- doctoboggan 10mo agoI agree with you that there is one original definition, but I feel like we've lost this one and the current accepted definition of vibe coding is any code is majority or exclusively produced by an LLM. I think I've seen people use the "vibe engineering" to differentiate whether the human has viewed/comprehended/approved the code, but I am not sure if that's taken off.
- dbtc 10mo agoIn that case, "blind" would be more accurate.
- francisofascii 10mo agoAt this point I think it is no longer a binary yes/no but rather a nebulous percentage. For example, this codebase was 90% vibe coded, leaving 10% that was edited manually or reviewed.
- brikym 10mo agoIt needs a short concise name. Vibe-cod-ing is catchy. Ell-Ell-Em-Cod-ing isn't.
- christophilus 10mo agoYeah. I agree the distinction is important, but it’s already been lost. Maybe, we need a new phrase to describe “a product you absolutely cannot trust because I blindly followed a non-deterministic word generator.” Maybe, “dingus coding”?
- WhyOhWhyQ 10mo ago"the last couple weeks" When I ran this experiment it was pretty exhilarating for a while. Eventually it turned into QA testing the work of a bad engineer and became exhausting. Since I had sunken so much time into it I felt pretty bad afterwards that not only did the thing it made not end up being shippable, but I hadn't benefitted as a human being while working on it. I had no new skills to show. It was just a big waste of time. So I think the "second way" is good for demos now. It's good for getting an idea of what something can look like. However, in the future I'll be extremely careful about not letting that go on for more than a day or two.
- stantonius 10mo agoThis happened to me too in an experimental project where I was testing how far the model could go on its own. Despite making progress, I can't bare to look at the thing now. I don't even know what questions to ask the AI to get back into it, I'm so disconnected from it. Its exhausting to think about getting back into it; id rather just start from scratch. The fascinating thing was how easy it was to lose control. I would set up the project with strict rules, md files and tell myself to stay fully engaged, but out of nowhere I slid into compulsive accept mode, or worse told the model to blatantly ignore my own rules I set out. I knew better, but yet it happened over and over. Ironically, it was as if my context window was so full of "successes" I forgot my own rules; I reward-hacked myself. Maybe it just takes practice and better tooling and guardrails. And maybe this is the growing pains of a new programmers mindset. But left me a little shy to try full delegation any time soon, certainly not without a complete reset on how to approach it.
- parpfish 10mo agoI’ll chime in to say that this happened to me as well. My project would start good, but eventually end up in a state where nothing could be fixed and the agent would burn tokens going in circles to fix little bugs. So I’d tell the agent to come up with a comprehensive refactoring plan that would allow the issues to be recast in more favorable terms. I’d burn a ton of tokens to refactor, little bugs would get fixed, but it’d inevitably end up going in circles on something new.
- bloppe 10mo agoSomeone should start an anthology of posts claiming "I vibe-coded this toy project. Software Engineering is dead."
- ubertaco 10mo agoI bet we could vibe-post a bunch of them, even! Blogging is dead!
- deleted 10mo ago[deleted]
- predkambrij 10mo agoThings about those approaches did and will change more when LLMs are getting better. I got some unbelievable good results back in March, then I was tasking LLMs too hard problems and got bunch of frustrations, then learned to prompt better (to give LLMs methods to test their own work). It's an art to do good balance of spending time writing prompts that will work. A prompt could be "fix all the issues on Github", but maybe it going to fail :)
- Dr_Birdbrain 10mo agoI’m unclear what has been gained here. - Is the work easier to do? I feel like the work is harder. - Is the work faster? It sounds like it’s not faster. - Is the resulting code more reliable? This seems plausible given the extensive testing, but it’s unclear if that testing is actually making the code more reliable than human-written code, or simply ruling out bugs an LLM makes but a human would never make. I feel like this does not look like a viable path forward. I’m not saying LLMs can’t be used for coding, but I suspect that either they will get better, to the point that this extensive harness is unnecessary, or they will not be commonly used in this way.
- peacebeard 10mo agoI have a feeling that the real work of writing a complex application is in fully understanding the domain logic in all its gory details and creating a complete description of your domain logic in code. This process that OP is going through seems to be "what if I materialize the domain logic in tests instead of in code." Well, at first blush, it seems like maybe this is better because writing tests is "easier" than writing code. However, I imagine the biggest problem is that sometimes it takes the unyielding concreteness of code to expose the faults in your description of the domain problem. You'd end up interacting with an intermediary, using the tests as a sort of interpreter as you indirectly collaborate with the agent on defining your application. The cost of this indirection may be the price to pay for specifying your application in a simpler, abstracted form. All this being said, I would expect the answers to "is it easier? is it faster?" would be: well, it depends. If it can be better, it's certainly not always better.
- joshribakoff 10mo agoIts not mutually exclusive. We write test precisely because expressing a complex application is hard without them. But to your point, we should not wave away applications that cannot be understood with extra tests. I agree.
- stephendause 10mo ago> - Is the work faster? It sounds like it’s not faster. The author didn't discuss the speed of the work very much. It is certainly true that LLMs can write code faster than humans, and sometimes that works well. What would be nice is an analysis of the productivity gains from LLM-assisted coding in terms of how long it took to do an entire project, start to finish.
- agumonkey 10mo agoI asked absurd question to chatgpt 4o when it came out, by mixing haskell and lisp books terminology (say design an isomorphic contravariant base class so that every class fills <constraint>). The result was somehow consistent and it suddenly opened my brain to what kind of stupid things i could explore. Felt like I became a phd wannabe in 5 minutes
- epgui 10mo agoAm I the only one who, rather than being impressed, is recoiling in horror?
- gaigalas 10mo agoThere's something wrong with this vibe coded stuff, any kind of it. _It limps faster than you can walk_, in simple terms. At each model release, it limps faster, but still can't walk. That is not a good sign. > Do we want this? No. However, there's a deeper question: do people even recognize they don't want this?
- pessimizer 10mo agoI'm only doing the first kind right now - I'm not really letting the thing loose ever, even when I'm not great at the language it's writing in. I'm constantly making it refactor and simplify things. But I'm optimistic about the second way. I'm starting to think that TDD is going to be the new way we specify problems i.e by writing constraints, LLMs are going to keep hacking at those constraints until they're all satisfied, and periodically the temperature will have to be jiggled to knock the thing out of a loop. The big back and forth between human and machine would be in the process of writing the constraints, which they will be bad at if you're doing anything interesting, and good at if you're doing something routine. The big question for me is "Is there a way to write complete enough tests that any LLM would generate nearly the same piece of software?" And to follow up, can the test suite be the spec? Would that be an improvement on the current situation, or just as much work? Would that mean that all capable platforms would be abstracted? Does this mean the software improves on its own when the LLM improves, or when you switch to a better LLM, without any changes to the tests? If the future is just writing tests, is there a better way to do it than we currently do? Are tests the highest-level language? Is this all just Prolog?
- ofconsequence 10mo ago> I dislike the term "vibe coding". It means nothing and it's vague. It has a clear and specific definition. People just misuse and abuse the term. Karpathy coined it to describe when you put a prompt into an LLM and then either run it or continue to develop on top of it without ever reviewing the output code. I am unable to tell from TFA if the author has any knowledge or skills in programming and looked at the code or if they did in fact "vibe code".
- keyle 10mo agoI find it's ok to vibe code something digestible like a ZSH function to do X or Y. An image converter, or something along those lines. Anything that involves multiple days of work, or that you plan on working on it further, should absolutely not be vibe coded. A) you'll have learnt pretty much nothing, or will retain nothing. Writing stuff by hand is a great way to remember. A painful experience worthwhile of having is one you've learnt from. B) you'll find yourself distanced from the project and the lack personal involvement of 'being in the trenches' means you'll stop progressing on the software and move on back to something that makes you feel something. Humans are by nature social creatures, but alone they want to feel worthwhile too. Vibe coding takes away from this positive reinforcement loop that is necessary for sticking with long running projects to achievement. Emotions drive needs, which drives change and results. By vibe coding a significant piece of work, you'll blow away your emotions towards it and that'll be the end of it. For 'projects' and things running where you want to be involved, you should be in charge, and only use LLMs for deterministic auto-completion, or research, outside of the IDE. Just like managing state in complex software, you need to manage LLMs' input to be 'boxed in' and not let it contaminate your work. My 5c. Understanding the human's response to interactions with the machines is important in understanding our relationship with LLMs.
- newspaper1 10mo agoI get a huge emotional reward by conjuring up something that I dreamed of but wouldn't have had time to build otherwise. The best description I can give is back in the day when you would beat a video game to see the ending.
- deegles 10mo agonot to be antagonistic but are we paid to learn stuff or to build stuff? I think it's the latter. if we have to learn something it's only so that we can build something in the end.
- keyle 10mo agoThat's just Stockholm syndrome. Your mind went straight to the job being soulless and coping with it.
- rrix2 10mo agoI've been asking for little tutorials or implementation plans for things, and demanding that the model not write any code itself. Following the advice of Geoffrey Litt.[1] I find reviewing code written by my coworkers to be difficult when i'm being paid for it, surely i'm not gonna review thousands of lines of auto-generated code and the comprehensive tests required to trust them in my free time...! So I've been learning kotlin & android development in the evenings and i find this style of thing to be so much more effective as a dev practice than claude code and a better learning practice than following dev.to tutorials. I've been coding for almost 20 years and find most tutorial or documentation stuff either targeted to someone who has hardly programmed at all, or just plain old API docs. Asking the langlemangler to generate a dev plan, focusing on idiomatic implementation details and design questions rather than lines of code, and to let me fill in the algorithm implementations, it's been nice. I'll use the jetbrains AI autocomplete stuff for little things or ask it to refactor a stinky function but mostly I just follow the implementation plan so that the shape of the whole system is in my head. Here's an example: > i have scaffolded out a new project, an implementation of a library i've written multiple times in the last decade in multiple languages, but with a language i haven't written and with new design requirements specified in the documentation. i want you to write up an implementation plan, an in-depth tutorial for implementing the requirements in a Kotlin Multi Platform library. > i am still learning kotlin but have been programming for 20 years. you don't need to baby me, but don't assume i know best practices and proper idioms for kotlin. make sure to include background context, best practices, idioms, and rationale for the design choices and separation of concerns. This produced a 3kb markdown file that i've been following while I develop this project. [1]: https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/1991909304085987366 https://x.com/geoffreylitt/status/1991909304085987366
- 3vidence 10mo agoThis is a really great idea going to try this out. I similarly just cannot mentally stand reviewing vibe coding PRs all day, but this sounds genuinely useful.
- satisfice 10mo agoThis article is premised on a shallow notion of testing. Because of this, the author lacks a conceptual toolkit to discuss product risk. He speaks of the most important part of the testing process (human thinking and judgment) as if it were “the most boring job in the world” and then later contradicts that by speaking of “testing the tests” as if that were a qualitatively different process (it’s not, it’s exactly the same cognitive process as what he called boring). The overall effect is to use the word “test” as if it were a magical concept that you plaster onto your work to give it unearned prestige. What the article demonstrates is that vibe coding is a way to generate orders of magnitude of complexity that no one in the world can understand and no one can take real responsibility for, even in principle. I call it slop-coding, and I am happy to slop-code throwaway tools. I instruct Claude never to “test” anything I ask it to create, because I need to test it myself in order to apply it responsibly and feel close to it. If I want automated output checking (a waste of time with most tools I create), I can slop-code a framework for that, a la carte. This way it burns fewer tokens of silly shallow testing.
- davidbau 10mo agoFair. Let me be more precise. The distinction is between two ways of deploying human thinking. In the first, you are the test oracle: think about every test, repeat every five minutes, or every 30. In the second, you design the evaluation infrastructure: what to measure, what's untested, what hypotheses to prioritize. Both require judgment. But the first scatters your attention; the second concentrates it. I disagree that an LLM cannot be used to write tests, but as with any battery of tests, you cannot trust it blindly. You need to think about how to test the tests. As for product risk: I do not know what is hiding in 13,000 lines I haven't read; there are certainly bugs to be found. But that is just as true when you manage a big team. The solution has never been to read every line your collaborators write. You need to invest in (technical and human) systems that give you confidence without requiring you to personally verify everything. The question is how to build systems that are good enough.
- alyxya 10mo agoI don’t think the two kinds of vibe coding are entirely separate. There’s a spectrum of how much context you care to understand yourself, and it’s feasible to ask a lot of questions to gain more understanding or let loose and give more discretion to the LLM.
- dash2 10mo agoI tried the new vibe-coded Mandelbrot viewer and it didn't seem to work well on Safari. I could only get it to zoom in once, and most of the keys didn't work. Maybe the author hasn't done enough manual testing?
- davidbau 10mo agoRight. Just saw this thread. Yesterday asked claude+codex to add a fallback to WebGL support (another 5000 LoC!). So now it works a bit better on Linux, Safari, though the WebGL impl is not as smooth as WebGPU.
- charcircuit 10mo ago>keeping yourself as the human "real programmer" fully informed and in control. That's not vibe coding. That is just AI assisted coding.
- zkmon 10mo agoI became a big fan of David Bau about 10 years back, when I came across his conformal mapping page. My understanding of complex numbers changed forever. There is an amusing parallel with his views on vibe coding. Back in the 90's and 2000's I noticed a pattern with the code developed by the huge influx of inexperienced programmers jumping on the dotcom bandwagon. The code can only be maintained by the same people who wrote it. There was no documentation, no intuition, no best practices and other wouldn't know where to fix if there is any issue. Probably the code aligned with the programmer's cultural habits and values (what's ok, what's not ok), which others might lack. Ironically, this has kind of provided job security for them, as it is difficult for others, to deal with that code. I guess the LLMs are also into this "job-security" trick, by ensuring only LLMs can manage the LLMs generated code.
- jackfranklyn 10mo ago[flagged]
- darkstar_16 10mo agoI do the same. Directed tasks with smaller context and start a new "chat" when it's done what I want.
- anthk 10mo agoLLM's forget the context fast. Better if you learn programming the hard way. With books, either physical or PDF/EPUB's.
- arkensaw 10mo ago> As AI edges humans out of the business of thinking, I think we need to be wary of losing something essential about being human If AI edges humans out of the business of thinking, then we're all in deep shit, because it doesn't think, it just regurgitates previous human thinking. With no humans thinking, no advances in code will be possible. It will only be possible to write things which are derivatives of prior work (cue someone arguing with me that everything humans do is a derivative of prior work)
- adlpz 10mo agoAgreed, conceptually. BUT. For 99% of tasks I'm totally certain there's people out there that are orders of magnitude better at them than me. If the AI can regurgitate their thinking, my output is better. Humans may need to think to advance the state of the art. Humans may not need to think to just... do stuff.
- latexr 10mo ago> For 99% of tasks I'm totally certain there's people out there that are orders of magnitude better at them than me. And LLMs slurped some of those together with the output of thousands of people who’d do the task worse, and you have no way of forcing it to be the good one every time. > If the AI can regurgitate their thinking, my output is better. But it can’t. Not definitively and consistently, so that hypothetical is about as meaningful as “if I had a magic wand to end world hunger, I’d use it”. > Humans may not need to think to just... do stuff. If you don’t think to do regular things, you won’t be able to think to do advanced things. It’s akin to any muscle; you don’t use it, it atrophies.
- latexr 10mo ago> The second type of vibe coding is what I am interested in. It is when you use a coding agent to build towers of complexity that go beyond what you have time to understand in any detail. I am interested in what it means to cede cognitive control to an AI. What an absolutely abhorrent way of thinking. “I am interested in turning off my brain to create unstable Jenga towers of complexity that I’ll have no ability to fix when they inevitably fail”. As if software in general isn’t a big enough pile of garbage already. One day, every single one of us will be seriously bitten by bugs created by this irresponsible approach. Being able to understand what you build is a feature, not a bug.
- busfahrer 10mo agoAs someone new to this topic, I'd find it interesting to see the actual chat/cli log of a successful LLM-created project like this one, especially when it comes to the meta-layers of tests and testing the tests, etc. Can someone recommend any good resources on this? Google wasn't too helpful, or my google-fu is lacking.
- TYPE_FASTER 10mo ago> It is when you use a coding agent to build towers of complexity that go beyond what you have time to understand in any detail. I think the quality of the product depends on the person (or people) responsible for it understanding the details.
- cornhole 10mo agoit took me a bit to figure out my aversion to ai usage in programming, but it comes down to the fact that i like building the thing instead of telling the computer to do it in detailed ways. if i wanted to tell people what to do, I would’ve become a manager
- geldedus 10mo agoNeither is vibe coding. Both are AI-assisted programming, a different species. Classical mislabelling.
- joshuasarah 10mo ago[dead]