Comment by simonw
18 hours ago
Your Karpathy quote there is out of context. It starts with: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe
coding", where you fully give in to the
vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget
that the code even exists.
Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding. If you're paying attention to the code that's being produced you can guide it towards being just as high quality (or even higher quality) than code you would have written by hand.
It's appropriate for the commenter I was replying to, who asked how they can understand things, "while having never even read most of their code."
I like AI-assisted programming, but if I fail to even read the code produced, then I might as well treat it like a no-code system. I can understand the high-levels of how no-code works, but as soon as it breaks, it might as well be a black box. And this only gets worse as the codebase spans into the tens of thousands of lines without me having read any of it.
The (imperfect) analogy I'm working on is a baker who bakes cakes. A nearby grocery store starts making any cake they want, on demand, so the baker decides to quit baking cakes and buy them from the store. The baker calls the store anytime they want a new cake, and just tells them exactly what they want. How long can that baker call themself a "baker"? How long before they forget how to even bake a cake, and all they can do is get cakes from the grocer?