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Comment by fsndz

1 month ago

the worst programmer nowadays is the vibe coder. vibe coding is so overrated imo https://www.lycee.ai/blog/why-vibe-coding-is-overrated

Vibe coding is now a skill requirement for real, actual jobs but, thankfully I guess, no place I want to work (yet). The other day I saw a YC24 company in the "financial services industry" with a "vibe coder position". A prerequisite for the position was at least 50% of your current code being generated by AI; vibe-coding experience was "non-negotiable". Traditional programmers need not apply. And you'd better be ready to grind, 12 hours a day up to 7 days a week. It pays up to $120,000 a year plus squat for equity and relocation to San Francisco is required. That's like, McDonald's money in San Francisco, so guess they figure running a vibe-coding sweatshop is a huge savings for them.

Oh, and the cherry on top? The "financial service" this startup provides? Automated robocalls demanding money from debtors on behalf of debt collectors.

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/domu-technology-inc/jo...

YC has entered its villain arc.

  • “Your onboarding will be making collection calls.”

    So, your AI debt collection startup onboards engineers by...having them work as human call-center debt collectors?

    Is there really AI at all?

    Oh, but after passing through the onboarding, your vibe-coding engineers will be be focussed on building product by vibe coding, right?

    “(what you will be doing...) Onboard customers, talk to them and travel to visit them.”

    So, a traveling sales rep. Your onboarding is pretending to be the product, and after that you are a traveling sales rep who vibe codes on the side?

  • Fortunately, vibe coding skills are easy to demonstrate through vibe statements of such; recruiters should be skilled in judging the vibe of the statement claiming vibe coding skills and accepting or rejecting it accordingly.

    If, however, you are having trouble doing that as a recruiter, I am offering professional vibe-rating services as well as a full-blown software solution, the first of its kind, Job Market Vibe-Rater™.

    • I was gonna say, the maintainer of Buttplug.io would be a perfect candidate, as he knows a lot about coding vibes...

  • it's just a marketing stunt like prompt engineer with 200K salary back in the day. And the fact that you are talking about it and sharing the link to the company's profile means the stunt is working.

  •   > +3 years of experience.
    

    Ummmm..... what?

    This seems like it was written by someone who loves Dystopian Sci-Fi. Loves in the way that it is the future they want to live in.

  • I honestly call this a scam position:

    - Vibe coding "non negotiable" - 3 years of experience (of what, exactly? if the "Vibe coding" term was coined just the other day...) - 12 to 15 hours a day

    No thanks...

I've been writing code professionally for a decade but I've never written so much code in my free time because I can just vibe code it all. I wouldn't do it at work and I probably wouldn't trust a juniors vibes as much as my own but no tools have made me feel quite so powerful.

  • I never tried vibe code as described in this article, but I could see where it breaks. Initially, code works. Eventually, there's a bug, and the LLM isn't able to fix it. At that stage, you're on your own with a potentially large codebase which is totally new to you.

    Even on small projects, sometimes I'm tired, I just try to get the LLM do some refactoring for me or write a couple of tests. First, whatever the LLM writes, it's going to code review and I'm not submitting code that I haven't read and understood just to have colleagues complaining. Second, if the code doesn't work, it gets frustrating. For LLMs to help, I like to have a pretty clear idea of what I want, how the "right" code looks like so I can give more indications.

    • The idea is "Rewriting is faster than debugging", so if something breaks, you ask LLM to rewrite it

      Not a fan of it.

    • Yeah it's totally a situation where obviously I can write it myself if I had the time so I just correct it as it goes. I also give it lots of guidelines on what I'm looking for but after some setup I can just watch TV and check on it every couple minutes.

  • Vibe coding works for experienced developers who give very detailed instructions including edge cases and potential issues or solutions. It is almost code already as it has already included all important code business logic (leaving the simple parts for Ai to fill in ). It is a maintenance disaster for junior developers or non-coders.