Comment by tovej
6 hours ago
You're repeating the broader definition, great. But your post leaves me with the same question about degrees.
You say there's two cases: no review and full review, "deep sense of the code", and that one is vibe coding and one is not.
What about the degrees in between? At what point does vibe coding become something else?
For example, I would not say "looking at the diffs" to ever be enough review to get a deep sense of what's been done. You need to look at diagrams and systematically presented output to understand any complex system.
Is one person's vibe coding then another persons deep understanding non-vine coding?
If you can answer this question you may be able to convince me.
You're right that it's a spectrum. Just like anything else, you can be 'mostly' vibe coding or 'somewhat' vibe coding. But the threshold where it stops being vibe coding isn't entirely subjective.
If you are trusting the AI's logic and primarily verifying the output (the app runs, the button works), you are vibe coding. If you are reading the diffs, verifying the architecture, you are transitioning back toward engineering. Any sincere developer knows where they are sitting on that spectrum.
You say the threshold is not entirely subjective, but then you describe a subjective (you just know it) and ambiguous (transitioning back toward engineering) threshold.
Sure seems to me like it's subjective.
Also, I've nedlver ever heard so much talk about "verifying architecture" as when people talk about vibe coding.
That's not something you usually do. The architecture is the overall structure of a design, and has to be elaborated into functional designs and interface contracts before you have something you can verify in actual code. The architecture itself is very much an intangible thing. "Verifying architecture" in diffs is nonsense, and is definitely not engineering.