Andrew Ng says vibe coding is a bad name for a real and exhausting job

Andrew Ng is an expert in ML. I'm not sure why you generalise this as he represents everyone on the whole planet.

And you continue doing so with every other point you are making.

Just because some random people think they can vibecode real products, doesn't mean that this didn't happen before just slower.

A company i worked for, had their MySql server unprotected on the internet for no reason at all. They still used MD5 too.

Another company saved credit card information in their DB with a simple generic key in code accessable by everyone.

I can imagine also a government agency asking OpenAI to have ChatGPT very subtly align people to the official discourse, whatever it would be. With its access to previous conversations and memories, it's a child's game to slowly nudge people's opinions in the "right" direction. Because something that LLMs excel at is being convincing.

We use the term as an ironic and silly thing here in the UK, at least amongst my friends, also somewhat in the pejorative. People who have no concept of what they are doing are a joke.

I have a Vibecoding sticker in the SUPREME style on my work laptop, which I think accurately summarises my opinion towards it.

Yeah - being open to surprises (code has tons of broken corner cases, security vulnerabilities, missing error handling, etc, etc) isn't exactly what comes to mind when writing real software.

I'm not even sure in what use cases, even toy ones, vibe coding works. It's been a few months since I tried using Claude to even do simple things like generate a React-based prototype for part of a web page (the sort of use case I would expect it to do well on), and even there it wasn't a "haha isn't this cool" hands-off "vibe coding" experience - I had to intervene and to do my own google research to find out why it was failing and then tell it explicity what to do.

I also have to wonder how many of these AI researchers fully realize the massive gap in complexity between what they are writing (typical ML model or prototype) and what real software development looks like. Let's see Karpathy "vibe code" a 100L-1M LOC system that needs to interact with a dozen undocumented legacy systems via proprietary interfaces, then come back and tell us how that went.

Has anyone proposed "yolo coding"?

I thought it was a joke when I first saw it.

This is such a BS response, first just because a job isn’t physically exhausting doesn’t mean it’s not challenging and mentally exhausting.

Second, our job in technology is to make ALL jobs easier, that’s what technology is for, not for bullshit manipulative, addictive and extractive consumer crap. The reason any of it even exists is to improve the productivity of humans.

There will always be demanding jobs, they may be demanding physically, or mentally or both, your god damn job is to figure out how to make every one of those jobs easier and LESS physically and mentally challenging.

Pointing out the obvious fact that using different metrics other jobs are harder is neither helpful, valuable nor unique.

I will however agree with you last statement, technologies abuse of people in the consumer app space is anti-social and destructive to the world, those are “jobs” we created with technology. In a sense you might say we are responsible for creating the worst jobs in the world, because as easy and valueless as being an influencer is, it destroys people mentally and turns people into shells of human beings.

So instead of trying to imply that all your fellow engineers are a bunch of whiny soft and weak complainers, you should be both simultaneously grateful that there are jobs that are physically easy and obligated to help those whose jobs still aren’t easy make as much of their jobs as easy as possible.

We live in a society we are ALL dependent on each other, specialization is what allows us to have large complex societies, without it we would all be trying to find food and build shelter. We can ONLY have our jobs because others do theirs, never forget that, that fact creates an OBLIGATION not a comparison.

> Next people will be claiming that "influencer" or "twitter shit poster" is a real and exhausting job.

Manager who sits upvoting and saying "great post" on LinkedIn all day, seems to be most middle management right now.

have you seen how hard influencers work? we're talking 100 hour weeks with no weekends. yeah there's no traditional boss and no office to report to, instead there's a influencer house that they go live in, have a bunch of drama at. yeah it's a lot of time spent sitting on the couch poking at a phone. yeah, that's not physically lifting anything but how many jobs do, after sending all the manufacturing jobs to China? One of the most demanding jobs in the world, the President, doesn't lift any rocks or break any backs. It's a job that is just talking with people. That's a job? Just yap and sign papers? I could do that way faster and cheaper.

There's a different question to be made as to whether or not influencer is a good direction for society to strive for as a career, but that's a whole other matter.

This. One summer I worked 80 hour weeks doing construction. I did restaurants when I was young and in university. Coding is a walk in the park compared to actual exhausting work.

I haven’t met (IRL) a programmer who has a strong opinion on the term one way or the other. It just seems like internet outrage to me.

hi, lets meet. imo this is bad for the whole community to bad mouth vibe coding with such negative connotations, effectively gate keeping. vibe coding is like a car for people in the age of walking. sure you like to walk, want to keep walking, even enjoy walking, but there is no comparison with how far you will get if you start using a car. you still need to walk to your car and all effectively holds.

Whenever you feel ,,not sure if fixing what a huge change did is faster'' you are asking something too big and not specific enough.

It's much better to ask the specific queries that you yourself would do with sed and treat the models as smarter sed (or ask them to generate the sed statements themselves)

>It there _any_ empirical evidence for this, at all? Like, beyond the _perception_ of the users.

Someone managed to write a standards-compliant HTTP 2.0 server in just two weeks, 40k+ lines of code (including tests) with almost all of the coding done by Gemini Pro: https://outervationai.substack.com/p/building-a-100-llm-writ... . No unassisted programmer could do that so fast (except maybe Fabrice Bellard).

How would that evidence exist? Aider writes how much code was generated in each release, and it's in the 80%s, but what you're asking for is for someone to do a timed trial on writing a bit of code unassisted, then for that same person to write the same bit of code with LLM assistance and also with forgetting the first version they wrote. Are we so caught up in proving they're not idk that we're stuck with the parachute engineering/science problem? Because, scientifically, the only way we can know parachutes are any good is to test the hypothesis by throwing the control group out of the plane without parachutes and comparing them to a group of people who jumped out of the plane with parachutes.

Yes none. However, one cannot discredit lived experience... and for many the lived experience of vibe coding is transformative and democratizing. Dare I say thats only fare given all the unwarranted "democratizing" the tech industry thought was helpful over the last 30 years...

No

> Vibe coding is NOT "AI-assisted coding"

That was the original intent, but now vibe coding is exactly synonymous with AI-assisted coding with the public at large. That's probably irreversible, and it's what Ng is highlighting.

by making many many small programs in your field in the language that your field uses, with libraries that are de facto standards, and documenting them, and selling it as training data or publishing it up on GitHub for everyone to train on.

I think that is just "coding" now. Most people will make use of some form of AI-assistance to the degree it is perceived useful and permissable in the context. So the thing in between vibe coding and say artisanal coding where everything is crafted by hand.

I'll set aside my objection to calling software development "coding" (10% of the job at best) ...

I guess AI-assisted coding (sounds like assisted living for the elderly) is replacing Stack Overflow "cut n paste" coding, where there was similar lack of attention to what people were copying. In the case of AI what is being generated/pasted comes from the training data, so perhaps "statistical paste coding" ? "hive mind coding" ?

"Hive mind coding" almost sounds like a good thing (leaning on the collective experience of the global software community - what could be better ?!), until you realize (e.g. as Fred Brooks describes in "Mythical Man Month") that any software project large enough to need multiple developers (or AI equivalent) needs a clear vision and an architect, lead, etc. 1M uncoordinated coding monkeys isn't going to cut it, even if they are all guided by a "hive mind" cookbook of what to write.

Maybe this is the real disconnect, or a large part of it, between benchmarks indicating super-human leetcode and competitive coding AI capability, and Google reporting 30% of software AI developed (= test cases?), and not hearing of much utility outside of these one-man projects or narrow "write me a test function" type things.

Just call it coding? Like how we don't have a particular word for using stack overflow while coding.

Assuming you didn't mean this in jest, I strongly disagree with your suggestion of "pro-coding".

The thing we're talking about is most of the time pretty much the opposite of "professional", which your term alludes to.

UIs, e.g., are not my field of expertise, but I can use AIs to help me produce UI code that is useful to me. It's still a hassle as described by Ng and I'm certainly not flying by the seat of my pants.

The term for someone who dabbles in a field without being an expert in it is not "professional" but "dilettante". I therefore propose the term

Dilletante-coding or short Dilletanting

It is many, many times more apt than "pro-coding".

Pro-coding XL 13 with co-processor.

Metacoding? Managed coding?

Programming.

Let's bring back no-coding /s

In the world permeated by computing devices, a lot of people could benefit from being computer-literate in the sense that they have a passing familiarity of what a program is made of (at least that conditionals and loops exist, and by having flawed logic in them you get bugs), and that they could whip up a scrappy spreadsheet with a couple of formulae using a computer or even their phone.

It's more or less like with reading and writing ("I can write" doesn't mean "I'm a writer"), or driving, or other artifacts of modern life.

> in a sense that they need to instruct them for automation.

So basically everyone?

If software is eating the World, what does it mean when only a small self-selected group of people understand that software?

Do we gain more by having more people understand software? Do some risks get mitigated? I'd argue yes on both counts. And that's why I encourage people to get their kids to poke around with Scratch and maybe some Python. It's why smart people doing liberal arts degrees at Harvard still want to go and do CS50.

By that reasoning most people would not have to learn how to read or write, or do basic arithmetic.

Not everyone should hold a PhD in compiler design, but simply being able to write some BASIC commands might be hugely beneficial to society.

exactly. where's "vibe searching", "vibe writing", "vibe drawing", etc?

Weirdest comment I've ever seen here.