The Problem with "Vibe Coding"

commandersaki · 2025-04-15T03:25:46 1744687546

One of the genuinely positive things about tools like Copilot and ChatGPT is that they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs. Little programs that do useful things - and that’s awesome. More power to the users.

I've changed my outlook on vibe coding after seeing the results of this wholesome vibe coding: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4pJUXocn7aE .

This guy didn't just make a small program, he made a product that is attuned to some very stringent requirements. If you gave this project to experienced software developers it would be heavy on process and light on impact, take forever to make, and stupid expensive.

linsomniac · 2025-04-15T01:07:07 1744679227

>they empower people with minimal development experience to create their own programs.

The author goes out of their way to play up the toy aspect of the LLMs when driven by the inexperienced. No mention is made of them being used by experienced developers, but I get the impression he feels they aren't useful to the experienced.

I'm just playing with a small client/server tool (rsync but for block devices), and vibe coding allowed me to figure out some rough edges of my design document, and experiment with "what would it look like built with threads? As async code? As procedural?) I would never have done that before because of the sheer amount of time it would take, I'd have picked what I thought was best and then lived with the sunk cost falacy until I had no other choice. It did a pretty good job of catching reasonable exceptions in the communication code which I probably would have just let throw a traceback until I got a bug report. It did a great job of adding logging and debugging options. And I had it take 4 attempts at making a "fancy" --progress display and picked the one I liked the best.

LLMs give a level of exploration to software development that we haven't seen since the good old days when HP set up several groups to each build their next generation workstation environment, and then picked the best one.

IMHO, the experienced software developers stand at a unique position to take advantage of these LLMs that far outstrip what an inexperienced developer can do.

SteveDR · 2025-04-15T03:14:59 1744686899

> vibe coding allowed me to figure out some rough edges of my design document, and experiment with "what would it look like built with threads? As async code? As procedural?”

This doesn’t fall under my understanding of the phrase “vibe coding”. In the tweet from Karpathy which many point to for coining the phrase, he says that when vibe coding you essentially “forget the code exists”. I think it’s distinct from regular ol LLM-assisted development

tjpnz · 2025-04-15T03:10:20 1744686620

How does the inexperienced developer become experienced under said circumstances?

alchemist1e9 · 2025-04-15T03:29:53 1744687793

I agree they may not and that’s very interesting. As an experienced developer myself I’m starting to think these tool’s are likely going to increase our market value not decrease it.

pfraze · 2025-04-15T03:17:29 1744687049

Honestly just good advice for engineers in general - understand the difference between programs and products

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