Just to clarify, I google a lot while coding, but one thing I learnt from my engineering degree is that is there is no ‘best’ solution.
Not funny
I saw that my Jetbrains All Product Pack subscription also includes their AI assistant and in Go it’s really able to write and refactor things in a useful manner. But I think a large part is that I’ve been programming for 30 years and I am able to tell the thing exactly what I want and can mention things I do not want and also spot issues. Right now I don’t see how they can manage a complete codebase, which I understand vibe coding to be. There are just so many things than can (subtly) go wrong and AI at the moment is not able to help with that. But they also keep getting better, so who knows where we’ll be in a year or two.
We will always have the same problem with computers doing what we tell them, but also not doing what we are not smart enough to tell them.
“Googling a lot while coding” is not even remotely close to vibe coding, please don’t gaslight yourself into that.
When you read up on things, you know what you’re looking for. You read a potential solution (e.g. part of a documentation, an example, someone else’s solution, a solution to a similar problem), you think about it and transfer that to your own problem, with your own code, with your own thoughts.
Using AI support is totally fine too - it’s a smarter code completion, nothing more. It might spit out something wrong, something partial, something good. You might ignore it as with the regular completion. In the end, it’s still you thinking about it, modifying it until it works, and doing your thing.
“Vibe coding” is basically saying tech jesus take the wheel. And it might go well for someone who cannot code, who managed to create their small game or some website. It will go horribly wrong for any project handling user data, sensitive data, or something that needs to be maintained after. We’ve had more than enough examples of that.
That is why I cannot take vibe coders seriously. There is a fundamental disconnect between what they are trying to achieve and how they are trying to achieve it.
Mark my words, a decade from now vibe coding won’t be a thing because it will literally be calked regular coding and there will like “coding experts” or some shit that would basically be normal programmers that are good at it. And they will be tge only ones that can really solve novel problems.
Or, AI will actually get to a point of being a real programmer and not a (very cool but still just a) tool.
But just to cover my bases, it might also be neither.
Welcome to my TED talk on how to never be wrong!
I like to think this whole thing will collapse and there’ll be a massive demand for real programmers to clean up/rewrite all the AI slop.
But your thing seems more likely.
Would you visit a house built by vibe architecting? Me neither.
And as soon as the vibe software goes online, your users will not be the only victims anymore.
And who will? You are crediting too much on the idiotic trend. Nobody has successfully used it
“Coding” vs “programming” is such a great litmus test for whether someone actually knows what they’re doing
I usually use the term coding to avoid the whole “html isn’t a programming langauge” stuff.
By definition, it is a markup language, but I have seen recently that it has a few elements that kinda feel like programming.
Though you do tend to require some JS to complete the logic.
On the other hand, just because someone uses a non-programming language, does not surely make them not a programmer
html+css is turing complete. No javascript required.
It’s nice to be the case.
But doing all the programming in CSS is too hard for a on-shot hobby-site maker like me.
Writing html is absolute programming in 99% of the cases. You program the structure of a web page, even more so if you use templating or integrate structure with js functionality.
program the structure of a web page
In a loose sense, yes.
But then someone could also say that when making LATEX templates is programming the structure of the documents.
I prefer calling it markup, because, even though people might prefer calling it ‘programming’, due to people’s high esteem perception of the word, if you look at it from a neutral standpoint, markup is a word that represents the actual work, much more closely.
e.g. I use Qt Designer[1] to create UI stuff, and in some cases QML[2] and if I were to only be defining placements, shapes, sizes and colours of elements, I would like to call that part as marking-up the UI [3], while the part where I define functions, timers and connections would be the programming part.
tbh I see a philosophical problem of separating markup from programming. Creating object structures be it in Latex or html is essentially the same thing as creating code objects. Most high level programming is more about structures and “placing things around” than people like to admit and that’s 90% of all programming today.
Most high level programming is more about structures and “placing things around” than people like to admit and that’s 90% of all programming today.
Although I’d like to say, “it’s not”, that definitely is what takes up most of my time, even though it ends up being lesser part of the code (thankfully). But a lot of that is UI designing and deciding what might give a better UX, rather than programming.
Of course, if I were not using a framework, which does all the painting for me, I would always be programming the UI and that would be 90% of my code and 99% of my coding time.
Also, I would probably take a year to complete a weekly project.
In my dictionary, programming for the UI elements has been done by those, that created the library that parses the markup language and does the paint events. They also have to manage number of separate draw calls and other GPU efficiency stuff, making it easy to just define most of he placements using markup.
The only people saying that are pedants who maybe passed a python crash course. In industry no one gives a shit.
Edit: except that engineer is a protected term in some countries
In industry no one gives a shit.
Not “no one”, but most, yeah.
Also, most around me don’t care at all about absolutely anything as long as they get the $$$.
And why should they? It’s not like they are going to use the software. It will probably be replaced again, by the next big thing, 5 years down the line.
I use AI for work and personal projects, sometimes even letting it generate file structures for me but damn does it ever need a lot of tweaking after generation to both work and be maintainable.
I don’t know how anything it spits out even works for those who just purely vibe code since it’s usually either wrong or broken.
Because you understand that there is more to code than getting it to do what needs to be done, you can objectively judge code on more than one criteria. Meanwhile, vibe coders think that the concerns about structure and maintainability can be short circuited. No wonder, managers and vibe coders think alike.
legitimate question.
how do you expect humans to maintain a project that didn’t base its patterns and organization on human thought patterns and organizational strategies?
I don’t. Like I said, it needs a lot of tweaking and the only time I have it do more than laying down the base for a function is at the beginning of a new project that’s not too important (like personal projects). I end up rewriting nearly everything anyway but it helps with getting over that initial overwhelmed feeling when staring in a blank file
different strokes for different folks. I enjoy a fresh clean project that I can start with. I hate picking up someone else’s mess so using AI in that manner completely goes against what I enjoy as a dev.
it originally sounded to me like you were having AI generate the hierarchy and project structure, but it sounds like you’re just using it to generate file templates.
Thanks for the insight.
Same, writing from scratch is so much easier than trying to parse soup code that I or someone else made a while ago.
Is “vibe coding” a real thing? I thought it was a meme.
Wtf, his first step for vibe coding is to turn on a purple light, put on blue blocking glasses and headphones?
If you’re referencing the video, I didn’t watch it. It was a serious question because I don’t know whether using LLMs for any large scale coding task is a (terrible but real) thing or an elaborate joke. It’s hard to tell with some of the hideously stupid bullshit that has been happening in the last few years (e.g. NFTs).
Lol I didn’t watch it at first either. I was gonna ask you “wtf is vibe coding?” but then figured I should watch the video first.
Best I can tell is you put on some mood lighting, glasses, and music. Then have AI build a program for you. The guy in the video legitimately thinks this is a solution for getting rid of 80% of your software development team.
My LinkedIn has recently become flooded with Suggested Posts from 3rd degree connections who have “Vibe Coding Guru” listed as their job and post lots of stuff saying “people who mock Vibe Coding just don’t get it, and you too will be left behind if you don’t subscribe to my newsletter (which ChatGPT writes for me)”
Yeah, I also thought it was a meme and used purely in derogatory form, until I learned that the term was actually coined by a co-founder of OpenAI…
Yes.
I “vibe code” anything that is throwaway. If it’s throwaway code I don’t care about the quality, I just want the end result.
For everything else, I don’t vibe code.
There are definitely people who use AI as a crutch for their lack of technical skills. It’s the same folks who used to try to get coworkers to “help” and slowly built their tickets by cycling through teammates.
But like, does that happen often for you, that you need a piece of code that’s gonna be thrown away?
I always feel like if code exists, it’s not gonna be thrown away, so it’s a good idea to make it maintainable. But I do probably have somewhat of a bias…
Yes, because of the stuff I’m currently working on.
I’m trying to improve the Devex at the place I’m working, and there is a lot of need to change stuff on 10000+ repos or pipelines in order to standardize things…
I “vibe code” anything that is throwaway.
Same here. It’s surprisingly easy to get quick results with a few prompts for one-time scripts without putting any effort in.
Yup. It is real. There are people who genuinely believe, it is the future of coding. That is why I posted the tutorial. /s
And a glorified auto-complete might be part of a solution, but it isn’t the solution itself. And definitely not the best one.
Exactly. It’s like vibe coders are not interested in writing the best code possible. They just want to write the code and not understand what goes on when a program is run.
I find this statement to be a bit contradictory to your point of ‘there is no “best” solution’
I don’t think vibe-coding is particularly good thing, but I find it completely normal for someone to just want to vibe something up and not want to understand. It’s not always a useful approach, but sometimes it might be a ‘best’ strategy, too
I’d guess most of them aren’t even capable of actually writing functional and good code themselves. And never will be.
I can write bad and unfunctional code all by myself thank you very much.
Vibe coders wishfully think AI could be the end product. AI is a tool, it should never be the final product nor exposed to the user.
It’s a fancy autocomplete to throw ideas against, you still need to know what the fuck you’re doing, and vibe coders have no clue. This means we’re now concerned about a rise in vulnerable code.
As well as unmaintainable code, and in countries with good employment laws and/or employers, extremely unproductive employees. And a whole new generation split between skillful and LLM users.
That’s right. My concern is also that LLM users may shadow skilled programmers in the short term, potentially devaluing their skills or putting some of them out of a job, at least until the LLM-built code starts shitting itself and they crawl back to actual programmers for help.
Look at it positively: Even if many skilled programmers get fired, it’s not like most of us won’t survive. And once the bubble pops, we’re the ones needed the most. Including getting headhunted and good salaries.
Exactly! auto complete is helpful, but it can cause problems and can’t be relied on.
How are any of the produced “apps” actually useful and not just buggy copies of better things that exist?
Am I missing something or is this just for generic, low tech “I need a website” use cases?
Am I missing something or is this just for generic, low tech “I need a website” use cases?
We already have tons of prebuilt websites available to slot someone’s shitty home business into too. AI slop is just a worse version of the things we already had.
I did use AI for my first project to automate my coworkers job. But that was me learning how to set these things up with C#. I did the coding. ChatGpt told me if it was possible or not and how. Something someone with knowledge could make in a week I build in 3 months and refined into a very usable app.
But I didn’t just let the AI do the thinking of what I should have the app do.
Edit: we did replace that guy with a person. But in the mean time that software I wrote helped my non technical boss work with us in the meantime. It does have its merrits.
Bro is so committed to the
repobit that he made me cryOh gawds, I thouht the vid was a takedown, based on the initial ridiculous clip. but no he’s actually serious.
I didn’t watch any of it, but clicked a few points in time to see if there was some kind of reveal and came across this gem at 1:52:52
That’s pretty accurate.
I’ll bet our vibe coder even thought that “spaghetti” meant a fully baked app.
I can write good spaghetti without an LLM though, just it probably works the first time. And I hope to god that I don’t use that spaghetti for any real world use.
“Spaghetti is a great dish so why would spaghetti code be bad?” - Vibe Coder
Has anyone else noticed a sudden surge of ads for AI-powered website building tools?
For the past whole year, yes. Hacker News is now 1/3 technology, 1/3 politics, 1/3 AI. It’s annoying.
No. Adblocking helps tremendously with that.
They’re hard to get for anything besides the internet.
There is an IRL adblock. It’s called being a recluse. /s
Blue light glasses? Lol, what a giant douche
Of course there’s a best solution… it’s whatever you end up with
Not for the users. Do your software right or don’t do software, please.
Capitalism has entered the chat.
I go for a good enough solution. I know better solutions exist but I’m limited by time and empathy.
Better a good enough solution now that the best solution few weeks later.
