Comment by lnenad

I've been asking myself this since AI started to become useful.

Most people would guess it threatens their identity. Sensitive intellectuals who found a way to feel safe by acquiring deep domain-specific expertise suddenly feel vulnerable.

In addition, a programmer's job, on the whole, has always been something like modelling the world in a predictable way so as to minimise surprise.

When things change at this rate/scale, it also goes against deep rooted feelings about the way things should work (they shouldn't change!)

Change forces all of us to continually adapt and to not rest on our laurels. Laziness is totally understandable, as is the resulting anger, but there's no running away from entropy :}

It's not obvious that it's "working" for a "very large" percentage of people. Probably because this very large group of people keep refusing to provide metrics.

I've vibe-coded completely functional mobile apps, and used a handful LLMs to augment my development process in desktop applications.

From that experience, I understand why parsing metrics from this practice is difficult. Really, all I can say is that codegen LLMs are too slow and inefficient for my workflow.

Because the large percentage of people is a few people doing hello words or things of similar difficulty.

Not every software developer is hired to do trivial frontend work.

> Why do people keep thinking they're intellectually superior when negatively evaluating something that is OBVIOUSLY working for a very large percentage of people?

I'm not talking about LLMs, which I use and consider useful, I'm specifically talking about vibe coding, which involves purposefully not understanding any of it, just copying and pasting LLM responses and error codes back at it, without inspecting them. That's the description of vibe coding.

The analogy with "monkeys with knives" is apt. A sharp knife is a useful tool, but you wouldn't hand it to an unexperienced person (a monkey) incapable of understanding the implications of how knives cut.

Likewise, LLMs are useful tools, but "vibe coding" is the dumbest thing ever to be invented in tech.

> OBVIOUSLY working

"Obviously working" how? Do you mean prototypes and toy examples? How will these people put something robust and reliable in production, ever?

If you meant for fun & experimentation, I can agree. Though I'd say vibe coding is not even good for learning because it actively encourages you not to understand any of it (or it stops being vibe coding, and turns into something else). It's that what you're advocating as "obviously working"?