Comment by itunpredictable
13 hours ago
The author of this article gives a more balanced POV than mine. I think most (maybe overwhelming majority) of publicized vibe coding projects are complete technical virtue signaling.
13 hours ago
The author of this article gives a more balanced POV than mine. I think most (maybe overwhelming majority) of publicized vibe coding projects are complete technical virtue signaling.
There's definitely a trend towards flashy projects prioritizing style over substance, which can overshadow more practical applications. It's easy to get caught up in the hype and overlook the real problems that need solving.
With agentic loops, you specify what you want and it continues to do stuff until ‘it works’. Then publish. Its takes less time and attention. So projects are less thought out and less tested as well.
In the end, I think it’s not about how a project was created. But how much passion and dedication went into it. It’s just that the bar got lowered.
Every market on some level can be analogized to a common and simple market.
One of the common examples in management books is the signage industry. You can have custom logos custom molded, extruded, embossed, carved, or at least printed onto a large, professional-looking billboard or marquee size sign. You can have a video billboard. You can have a vacuum formed plastic sign rotating on top of a pole. At the end of the day, though, your barrier to entry is a teenager with a piece of posterboard and some felt-tipped markers.
What has happened is that as the coding part has become easier, the barrier to entry has lowered. There are still parts of the market for the bespoke code running in as little memory and as few CPU cycles as possible, with the QA needed for life-critical reliability. There’s business-critical code. There’s code reliable enough for amusement. But the bottom of the market keeps moving lower. As that happens, people with less skill and less dedication can make something temporary or utilitarian, but it’s not going to compete where people have the budget to do it the higher-quality way.
How much an LLM or any other sort of agent helps at the higher ends of the market is the only open question. The bottom of the market will almost certainly be coded with very little skilled human input.
I think it's often genuine excitement to share a thing - without quite processing that anybody with the same idea can now build it (for simple- to mid-complexity projects).
I also think it is often momentum from “do you have a GitHub” questions you see in hiring.
There are many people who code to make cool stuff and enjoy sharing, but there is even more people who code to look good on CV.
I’m not trying to be mean, this is just an anecdote I had from my time hiring.
KG: Anybody coulda wrote it, anybody coulda done that, one song, just one note
JB: Yeah but guess who did write it, me!
KG: Yeah but did you write this?
JB: Dude, I did, I told you to do the bendy every once in a while!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TLvOLjHt4S0
I win. 1 to nothing!
This is the part I don't understand. It's like sharing a finger painting half the time. Yes, cool, but so what?
[Edit: no need for the downvote, folks, it was an honest question although it seemed otherwise. I think the answers below make sense.]
The novelty of "new thing! That would have been incredibly hard a decade ago!" hasn't worn off yet.
This isn't the first time something like this has happened.
I would imagine that people had similar thoughts about the first photographs, when previously the only way to capture an image of something was via painting or woodcutting.
14 replies →
I have a similar feeling to people who upload their AI art to sites like danbooru. Like I guess I can understand making it for yourself but why do you think others want to see it
Because these people aren't excited about the actual building part, they crave the attention, the github stars, the views, &c. It's painfully obvious
xkcd turned stick figure drawings into an art form. sometimes it is not about how something was created, but about the story being told.
some people build apps to solve a problem. why should they not share how they solved that problem?
i have written a blog post about a one line command that solves an interesting problem for me. for any experienced sysadmin that's just like a finger painting.
do we really need to argue if i should have written that post or not?
Even if status-signaling through this vector loses it's lustre, AI slop (agentic or otherwise) will not, and some of that slop will take on the guise of "vibe-coding" projects.
I’m no fan of vibe coding but I usually find that people who use the term virtue signaling have none and hate those that do.
It's not virtous to make a show of one's virtue, virtue signaling is a baplutely a real thing, and a defect.
Sure, you are correct, but most times the accusation is a bullshit rhetorical move to not have to deal with an ugly truth.
I hope the irony of your comment isn't lost on you
Vice signaling.
Not to mention they're probably thinking of motivations more along the lines of "brand-burnishing."