I so hate the phrase "vibe coding"

> What is vibe coding then? Let me share my own, personal definition…

> Getting LLMs, who have learnt from people who have generously shared their code online, to write code for you, often poor quality, with no accountability and often with no understanding from the person doing it, of what could be wrong with it, and hence unsupportable as a result. At best, the requester does code but is so uninterested in the art of coding that they’d rather debug poor quality AI results rather than write it themselves.

Savage, but absolutely on point. I chuckle when I read linkedinlunatic CEOs talking about vibe coding features into their product as if that's some kind of badge of honor. Major yikes vibes on all levels.

Calling whoever - this surely shouldn't be flagged. What rule is being broke? The comments are lots of people agreeing in civil tones and sharing their stories. Seems legit

Just use it prejoratively like I do.

Why is there a loading spinner but nothing loading? It was probably vibe coded.

I wish we would stop calling it “vibe coding” and would start calling it incompetency, because I don’t see people call themselves “vibe mechanics” if they take their cars to a repair shop over an issue they have no expertise to fix.

Ugh, I do love clear terminology. But “vibe coding” is so bad it sounds like something a “vibe coder” would come up with!

(Joking really. It’s was a funny inventive and evocative term. The sadness is that it is getting traction as a serious phrase.)

Still get fingernails on a chalkboard cringe every time I come across a language model’s “confabulation” (conscious or subconscious filling in of unknown details or facts) being called “hallucinations” (false experiences in sensory systems as they iterate partially or completely unmoored from their normally grounding flow of external information).

There are real questions about when anthropomorphizing is appropriate directly or by analogy. But inconsistently applied anthropomorphization is grotesquely unnecessary confusion. As someone who has spent a career being careful with terms, it hurts. Bad terminology and notation create subtle but often permanent drags on clarity.

Even poor emphasis does real damage. Tell a three year old a standard circle’s radius is 1 and circumference is called tau. Cool! Tell another 3 year old a standard circumference is 2*pi, perhaps also noting that a half standard sized circle has a radius of 1/2, a diameter of 1, and a circumference of pi to “simplify” things, and see which child more readily takes a conceptual step forward. Because even an extra 2 creates real (transcendental!) conceptual drag.

I used the phrase recently when my coworker asked me what metrics I use to guide my code decisions, and he gave me the options of sonarqube issues, test coverage (which I found to be configured to exclude huge feature directories of this legacy app), or efficiency metrics. All this after 6 major prod bugs were introduced over 6 months.

My response was that I code by vibe, and really I meant that I was improving the nightmare of working in our backend code while trying to learn the business logic, restructuring our backend code structure, hardening our unit tests, and adding swagger documentation. While doing so, I uncovered tons of bugs.

All in all, “vibe coding” to me is similar to “smelly code”, where the intuition depends on the implementor, but with the latter, “bad” coders can be silent and aren’t forced to make change smells. Good coders, however, prove their intuition skills when identifying and fixing code smells, even though today we have automated tools to tell us why our code smells feel or look bad

I don't mind "vibe coding" once there is no "vibe push-to-production".

I understand it as playing around, POC, MVP stuff. Which lots of people were doing before AI came around.

If people are "vibe coding" for mission critical applications then that is a problem.

Isn't "vibe coding" a natural progression from https://github.com/mattdiamond/fuckitjs ?

  Through a process known as Eval-Rinse-Reload-And-Repeat, FuckItJS repeatedly compiles your code, detecting errors and slicing those lines out of the script. To survive such a violent process, FuckItJS reloads itself after each iteration, allowing the onerror handler to catch every single error in your terribly written code.

"Vibe Coding" sounds like a phrase that was coined in a Barstool podcast, or any of the lowbrow, hustle-culture heavy Gen Z-targeting "new media" outlets.

Very sad to see the same people who railed against bootcamp grads and Fiverr devs for lowering the bar, legitimizing this. As the article states, "vibe code" is essentially scraped OSS code that reduces the human programmer to become a janitor for sloppy code -- exactly the criticism they had for bootcamp grads.

Full disclosure: I help manage AI products for my company, which also involves helping engineers use AI tools more effectively.

I think of the act of using an LLM's assistance to produce code as two distinct actions, depending on who's doing it:

* Amateurish efforts, by someone who doesn't really understand or care about code quality. This is "vibe coding," where the LLM is doing maybe 95% of the work. Back in the day, the pejorative term "script kiddies" was used to describe would-be hackers who basically just ran scripts written by others, rather than developing their own skills. And those are the sorts of people I would describe nowadays as vibe coders.

* Judicious use by someone who knows what they're doing and just wants to move faster. Rather than letting the LLM do 95% of the work, it's more like a pair programming session, where the "senior" developer remains in the driver's seat but lets the "junior" LLM handle smaller, well-defined tasks that can be easily reviewed for quality.

I think most people do. Not clicking.

Since vibecoding is meant to bring the results of programming to the masses and not meant to replace good programmers I don’t feel threatened by it. It’s for quick prototyping and throwaway ideas and allows Jack the carpenter to spin up an app for “free” which might work. As a basis for communicating ideas and quick prototyping it will find its place.

Do people really use this term unironically?

I thought vibe coding means you end up with the vibe of an app, not an actual app.

Blog basically says 'I'm an artisan and mass production makes for shit code', yeah I agree, but it's cheap and it's the worst it'll ever be... XIX century called, want their industrial revolution back!

> So, if you “vice code” something for WordPress, how do you think it knows all the tricks of WordPress?

“Vice code” - Was that an intentional typo? Made me laugh.

> If we were referring to writing a recipe book or creating a novel it doesn’t have its own “hip” phrase to go with it. Many people would simply call it “stealing”.

> LLMs don’t miraculously know how to create code – it’s learning from what’s available to it online already. Do you think it’s learnt from closed code such as Microsoft software, or anything from Apple? No. It’s taking advantage of the generosity and sharing spirit of the open-source community.

So if I learn from open source community, pick up good coding habits, patterns etc., and then apply what I've learned to write new code - does this also constitute stealing? While IP laws are without doubt not without fault, I'm rather more used to people claiming that they are too strict, if anything. Now, the author essentially claims that we need to introduce on top of copyright also "trainingright" (or "learningright"?), essentially extending the definition of "derivative works" to plus infinity. This doesn't sit right with me.

I'm kind of wondering where this sentiment is coming from that LLMs are stealing open-source code. Isn't it just the same as someone learning programming by reading and working on open-source code and then writing closed software with that knowledge, where is the difference? Or is it just closed models that are problematic and would open models like Llama/DeepSeek be acceptable?

I like it because it makes people seethe

Should be called "slop coding" or maybe "code slopping"

I hate it too, but for a different reason: I don't care what tools you used to write your code. Why should I? Might as well start worrying about whether you used vim or emacs.

I'm still searching for successful vibe coding examples.

Each time I tried it, with custom rules, git, and all the best practices I found, it went amazingly well initially, and garbage afterward.

Using the same technique, after a while, it generates a lot more shitty code than helpful.

> So, it’s shit and you’ll spend a long time fixing it.

It just takes more time overall to make it functional. Fixing, debugging and improving vibed code takes more mental resources and time than just writing it from scratch.

Also, there's the flow aspect. Each time you let it "vibe", you're losing the flow state that is important while creating and thinking about complex work.

One tiny thing that I think OP is missing is the fact that the phrase can also perfectly double as mockery (even if the wider industry hasn't picked up on that yet). Seriously, the fact that the vibe coder literally isn't relying on anything practical whatsoever is right there in the name.

It's like how "crypto bro" used to be a badge of honor but is now usually considered an insult. No change to the term was necessary thanks to how dumb it already sounded.

My suspicion is that "vibe coding" will eventually become an insult, too, thanks to the nature of the phrase.

And you all can help me start this trend!

AI development is shit, but I think we all know that already.

How are you going to debug your already poor implementation if you can't read the language?

Expand it with a newer feature?

Maintain it in the future and close bugs/vulnerabilities?

I like it. It's expectation-free exploration and learning that can yield useful results and be fun.

I had an idea for a little app I wanted to build at work, and while the result seemed like it would be neat and useful, the amount of effort required never seemed worth it, so it sat unbuilt for years. So to test out Cursor, I wrote a ~2 page doc with detailed requirements on what the app should do and how it should do it, then made a mock in lucid chart and gave these two things to Cursor and Claude. It was almost able to single-shot the app, it was up and running in about 30 mins, then I spent a few hours fiddling with the UI and getting just right.

I did not read a single line of code, I have no clue what's in there, but the app works, does what I want it to do, and actually exists unlike before.

I don't hate it but man is it oversold. A lot of times I think it would just have been faster to write it manually.

I love the term. But it can be used wider. Vibe coding is what I would call; making a program without any coding knowledge. You stay in a good vibe because you don't know how much you don't know.

Soon we'll just call it software engineering, which is the art of finding ways to create software at scale.

me too

Following in the footsteps of Joe Slater, "Vibe Coding" is just marketing terminology for "Bullshit coding" https://www.psypost.org/scholars-ai-isnt-hallucinating-its-b...

I despise the term. This is the first time I've ever upvoted a story on HN with that term in the title.

Yes. But I hate it less than the phrase "code smell." Which psychopath came up with that one?