Vibe coding has a niche, which is people who can read, understand, and debug code, but can’t remember the syntax or can’t be arsed to write everything manually. It’s good for blocking in right now, basically, and that’s an entirely valid use of the technology
Yeah, vibe coding is fantastic for “I want to give this input {a}, have it do {function}, and return result {z}” types of code.
The issue is that being able to articulate that to an AI already basically requires you to think like a programmer. And many of the people getting into vibe coding don’t have that kind of mindset. They want to just go “give me a program that does {z}” and expect it to work.
Yes! You’ve nailed what I’ve been thinking about. The valuable parts of my work are on a whiteboard with boxes and arrows, not typing code. LLMs are great to use like an interactive reference.
I’ve found ai useful as a tool especially when switching context to a different language or framework, as a quicker way to get the syntax and features, to generate a first approximation. It works and saves time
vibe coding is a horrendous waste of my time doing code reviews. Don’t people look at the slop their tool generates and try to refine it? Why is it ok to waste my time like this?
Edit: just did yet another code review generated with “vibe coding” and there is so much slop that will create maintainability issues in the future - did everyone forget the truism that code is much more expensive to maintain than to create? So much duplicated code, misleading names, useless and excessive tests, hard-coded strings duplicated, etc. …… and I found an entire generated function very close to identical to one the same guy already created
The parallels with the Dotcom bust continue. Dreamweaver would barf up copious amounts of horrendous HTML that we would get paid decent amounts to clean up. A huge waste, really, but we have forgotten the lesson.
Vibe coding has a niche, which is people who can read, understand, and debug code, but can’t remember the syntax or can’t be arsed to write everything manually. It’s good for blocking in right now, basically, and that’s an entirely valid use of the technology
Yeah, vibe coding is fantastic for “I want to give this input {a}, have it do {function}, and return result {z}” types of code.
The issue is that being able to articulate that to an AI already basically requires you to think like a programmer. And many of the people getting into vibe coding don’t have that kind of mindset. They want to just go “give me a program that does {z}” and expect it to work.
Yes! You’ve nailed what I’ve been thinking about. The valuable parts of my work are on a whiteboard with boxes and arrows, not typing code. LLMs are great to use like an interactive reference.
Yes please.
Edit: just did yet another code review generated with “vibe coding” and there is so much slop that will create maintainability issues in the future - did everyone forget the truism that code is much more expensive to maintain than to create? So much duplicated code, misleading names, useless and excessive tests, hard-coded strings duplicated, etc. …… and I found an entire generated function very close to identical to one the same guy already created
The parallels with the Dotcom bust continue. Dreamweaver would barf up copious amounts of horrendous HTML that we would get paid decent amounts to clean up. A huge waste, really, but we have forgotten the lesson.