What is vibe coding? How creators are building software with no coding knowledge

It may not be auditable in the same was a block-based workflow, but there's nothing stopping you from saying "hey, this code doesn't do what I want, please improve it" to the LLM.

The whole point about the article is that reasoning about the code isn't always required any more, reasoning about the output is enough.

> Vibe-coders might not visit this forum for example and might not be aware of a security exploit that must be fixed asap.

This is true of "regular" coders too, i've worked with/for extremely experienced programmers who, while knowing the security risks, implemented (or even worse, asked me to implement) flakey authentication systems, exposed databases, etc. I don't think this is an AI issue, it's a "care about your users" issue.

> is only going to increase the demand for professional services

Then shouldn't we be happy that more people are embracing vibe coding?

> Accenture, IBM and other big companies have employed vibe coders for years.

Having worked in a few codebases/projects by these companies (and some other "big name" consultancy companies in this same "space"), I cannot imagine copypasta from Claude/Copilot would be anything other than a massive improvement.

What companies have paid these firms to do is nothing short of appalling, and I'm not even referring to the notorious Hertz lawsuit, just the average run of the mill junk.

Wow, what a ridiculous load of tripe.

Java classes are no more enabling of shit code than any other language. Idiots can and do “vomit” code into pre-canned structures built for them in any language.

I don’t see anyone “gatekeeping” but I do see warnings. I don’t know what you’re good at, to give a good example. But if you have a hobby or job, imagine the new guy coming in, knowing absolutely nothing and doing shit they technically can do, but shouldn’t be done. That’s what this is. Just like a new cashier can technically just not give correct change, everyone knows this will end badly; eventually, even though everything looks fine from the outside.

That’s what AI code tends to do. It looks fine to the outsiders, it might even function correctly MOST of the time. Programmers are trained, mostly through experience but also classically, to think through every exceptional case and figure out how to handle it (or return an error so a human can handle it).

That isn’t to say this is ALWAYS the case with AI code, but rather it TENDS to be the case. YMMV, which is where these warnings are coming from.

No gatekeeping. Anyone can write programs.

But to build something which could handle a customer’s credit card, password, or other PII and charge them for it, you better know what you’re doing.

It’s all fun and games until you’re the cause of someone’s identity or password getting stolen.

Anyone can use CAD software, but if you’re designing a public space, you better know something about safety.

There’s some gate keeping, but many of us are also worried about the inevitable future where we have to take over someone else’s “vibe coding” mess of code.

The vibe coding style translates to trying a lot of different prompts and small adjustments until it looks like it works. In the past these people copied from StackOverflow and poked at lines until it compiled and appeared to work, but that only gets you so far. Now those same people can bang away at an LLM assistant all day long and produce volumes of code that appear to kind of work.

I’m in another forum dedicated to programming careers. Every day there’s a new thread from someone asking how to deal with all of their junior employees spamming code review with obvious LLM generated code that they don’t even understand.

A lot of the defenses of vibe coding rely on the assumption that it’s in the hands of someone knowledgeable who only wants to save a little time for something inconsequential. That’s fine. What’s worrying is that vibe coding is being used as a replacement for understanding code for many juniors and lazy seniors across the industry as long as they think they can get away with it.

> I dont want them safety critical

Then hopefully they run on a computer without network access, otherwise everything is safety critical.

> I just want a free script or addon that will do its job instead of paying someone on upwork to do it for me. simple as.

So, you pay the billionaires to rent their graphics cards so you can avoid paying a normal person? -_-

I'm not sure it's explicitly gatekeeping, more a lack of perspective.

The benefit and excitement is most felt by people with little to no experience writing code themselves. The fear seems to come from building.. what, code for critical infrastructure? That's just not what we're talking about here.

What is important that it works for you. I think it is good that more users can solve their own problems.

The article itself doesn't have comments. On HN, there's 2 posts that are against vibe coding which could be seen as gatekeeping. What are you referring to when you say "I see many gatekeepers in the comments."?

We're not talking about building an ecom store, though, are we?

We're talking about building useful tools. Small things, that work in a way that makes sense to the individual.

Something that could be churned out in a day or two by a competent dev, but is completely out of reach for Joe public.

That's where we're at.

Non-programmers always could build functional software by hiring programmers, you know. And we all know how well that usually goes.

That's a really good idea. I have a few tool ideas for the team I work with but I never felt like I had enough time between tasks to implement them

If AI does all the coding you are customer not a programmer.

Or do you think a customer who describes his requirements to a programmer who writes the actual program is a programmer too?

And APL! It saves so much tokens :D

> evolving their skills from there

What skills? If you are just asking a computer for what you want you're not developing any skills, apart from maybe how to describe your requirements better†.

If you take the code the LLM outputs and use that as a basis to be able to write your own code I would call that "learning to program" and I applaud it whether you learn from adapting LLM code or by reading K&R cover-to-cover before you even touch a keyboard. But that's not what this article describes—what this article describes is the very deliberate act of not learning anything.

†Technically just describing your requirements in a way the particular LLM you're using responds best to, which is not necessarily "better" in an objective sense.

> get over the bump

You call learning, making mistakes and fixing them, and improving "a bump"? That's the whole point.

> That’s necessary for learning

You haven't learned anything in the end. I read a lot of programming books in the past thinking I would be a computer god at the end, and I realized I learned nothing because "I did nothing" exactly like what we have with ChatGPT.

You're 1000% underestimating the experience of learning it yourself vs just getting info shot right into your brain.

Everyone knows that copy pasting code without understanding it is exactly how you don't learn. Every programming class you're in has an underperforming student that does exactly this. Than they barely graduate, get interviewed, and they're somehow worse than the bootcamp grads.

Cursor is that, but prompted by you instead of a stackoverflow question.

I would encourage you to try Replit!

Deployment is literally a button. Granted, to a replit subdomain. But following some documentation to add your own domain is not out of reach.