Comment by the_af
1 day ago
> 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"?
> 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.
Could an experienced person/dev vibe code?
> "Obviously working" how? Do you mean prototypes and toy examples? How will these people put something robust and reliable in production, ever?
You really don't think AI could generate a working CRUD app which is the financial backbone of the web right now?
> 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"?
I think you're purposefully reducing the scope of what vibe coding means to imply it's a fire and forget system.
> Could an experienced person/dev vibe code?
Sure, but why? They already paid the price in time/effort of becoming experienced, why throw it all away?
> You really don't think AI could generate a working CRUD app which is the financial backbone of the web right now?
A CRUD? Maybe. With bugs and corner cases and scalability problems. A robust system in other conditions? Nope.
> I think you're purposefully reducing the scope of what vibe coding means to imply it's a fire and forget system.
It's been pretty much described like that. I'm using the standard definition. I'm not arguing against LLM-assisted coding, which is a different thing. The "vibe" of vibe coding is the key criticism.
> Sure, but why? They already paid the price in time/effort of becoming experienced, why throw it all away?
You spend 1/10 amount of time doing something, you have 9/10 of that time to yourself.
> A CRUD? Maybe. With bugs and corner cases and scalability problems. A robust system in other conditions? Nope.
Now you're just inventing stuff. "scalability problems" for a CRUD app. You obviously haven't used it. If you know how to prompt the AI it's very good at building basic stuff, and more advanced stuff with a few back and forth messages.
> It's been pretty much described like that. I'm using the standard definition. I'm not arguing against LLM-assisted coding, which is a different thing. The "vibe" of vibe coding is the key criticism.
By whom? Wikipedia says
> Vibe coding (or vibecoding) is an approach to producing software by depending on artificial intelligence (AI), where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding. The LLM generates software based on the description, shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code.[1][2][3] Vibe coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills required for software engineering.[4] The term was introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025[5][2][4][1] and listed in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the following month as a "slang & trending" noun.[6]
Emphasis on "shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code" which means you don't blindly dump code into the world.
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