Comment by chaboud
4 days ago
I recently exclaimed that “vibe coding is BS” to one of my coworkers before explaining that I’ve actually been using GPT, Claude, llama (for airplanes), Cline, Cursor, Windsurf, and more for coding for as long as they’ve been available (more recently playing with Gemini). Cline + Sonnet 3.7 has been giving me great results on smaller projects with popular languages, and I feel truly fortunate to have AWS Bedrock on tap to drive this stuff (no effective throttling/availability limits for an individual dev). Even llama + Continue has proven workable (though it will absolutely hallucinate language features and APIs).
That said, 100% pure vibe coding is, as far as I can tell, still very much BS. The subtle ugliness that can come out of purely prompt-coded projects is truly a rat hole of hate, and results can get truly explosive when context windows saturate. Thoughtful, well-crafted architectural boundaries and protocols call for forethought and presence of mind that isn’t yet emerging from generative systems. So spend your time on that stuff and let the robots fill in the boilerplate. The edges of capability are going to keep moving/growing, but it’s already a force multiplier if you can figure out ways to operate.
For reference, I’ve used various degrees of assistance for color transforms, computer vision, CNN network training for novel data, and several hundred smaller problems. Even if I know how to solve a problem, I generally run it through 2-3 models to see how they’ll perform. Sometimes they teach me something. Sometimes they violently implode, which teaches me something else.
> That said, 100% pure vibe coding is, as far as I can tell, still very much BS.
I don't really agree. There's certainly a showboating factor, not to mention there is currently a goldrush to tap this movement to capitalize from it. However, I personally managed to create a fully functioning web app from scratch with Copilot+vs code using a mix of GPT4 and o1-mini. I'm talking about both backend and frontend, with basic auth in place. I am by no means a expert, but I did it in an afternoon. Call it BS, the the truth of the matter is that the app exists.
People were making a front and backend web app in half a day using Ruby on Rails way before LLMs were ever a thing, and their code quality was still much better than yours!
So vibe coding, sure you can create some shitty thing which WORKS, but once it becomes bigger than a small shitty thing, it becomes harder and harder to work with because the code is so terrible when you're pure vibe coding.
> People were making a front and backend web app in half a day using Ruby on Rails way before LLMs were ever a thing, and their code quality was still much better than yours!
A few people were doing that.
With LLMs, anyone can do that. And more.
It's important to frame the scenario correctly. I repeat: I created everything in an afternoon just for giggles, and I challenged myself to write zero lines of code.
> So vibe coding, sure you can create some shitty thing which WORKS (...)
You're somehow blindly labelling a hypothetical output as "shitty", which only serves to show your bias. In the meantime, anyone who is able to churn out a half-functioning MVP in an afternoon is praised as a 10x developer. There's a contrast in there, where the same output is described as shitty or outstanding depending on who does it.