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Vibe Coding Is the Worst Idea of 2025 [video]

bitpush

Here's how Innovators Dilemma plays out.

Step 1: Some upstarts create a new way of doing something. It’s clunky and unrefined.

Step 2: "Experts" and senior folks in the field dismiss it as a "toy." It doesn't follow their established rules or best practices and seems amateurish. They wouldn't recommend it to anyone serious.

Step 3: The "toy" gets adopted by a small group of outsiders or newcomers who aren't burdened by the "right way" of doing things. They play with it, improve it, and find new applications for it.

Step 4: The "toy" becomes so effective and widespread that it becomes the new standard. The original experts are left looking out of touch, their deep knowledge now irrelevant to the new way of doing things.

We're at step 2, bordering on 3.

* Executives at Nokia and BlackBerry saw the first iPhone, with its lack of a physical keyboard, as an impractical toy for media consumption, not a serious work device.

* Professional photographers viewed the first low-resolution digital cameras as flimsy gadgets, only for them to completely decimate the film industry.

branko_d

The problem is not that the experts have dismissed vibe coding without even trying it.

The problem is that the experts have tried it and found that vibe coding doesn't actually work at scale that they need.

Will it ever? Perhaps, but I'd argue a near-AGI level of intelligence would need to be achieved first. When that happens, we have bigger problems (and/or opportunities?) than a few programmers losing their jobs.

edg5000

From your comment I understand you tried and didn't like it? Why not?

insin

strawhatguy

That’s hilarious. Yep still gotta know what you are doing.

Good time saver though, if you do.

j4coh

We're also at step 2 bordering on 3 in my plan to solve the housing problem by making buildings out of dried human waste.

WJW

Not to mention at step 2 of my plan of getting to the moon by climbing progressively higher trees. Step 3 will come any day now!

betaminecraft

None of what you said maps onto vibe coding. No one is calling it a toy, and it isn't clunky or unrefined. Claude Code I've heard is refined.

The real problem with it is that it doesn't work. It isn't "right way wrong way". It doesn't work.

bitpush

Did you watch the video that was posted? He literally says 41 seconds in - "[vibe coding is a] naive toytown approach to programming"

EDIT: digital cameras didnt work, until it did. streaming didnt work, until it did. ecommerce didnt work, until it did.

Ianjit

Cold fusion didn't work, until it did. 3D TVs didn't work, until they did. Flying cars didn't work, until they did. Satellite phones didn't work, until they did.

microsoftedging

I feel like there's a bit of survivorship bias here. Not saying that vibe coding is completely useless, but you still have to review the code it produces in order to make the most of it really. It isn't completely autonomous (yet) to the point where it can scale to any of the examples you mentioned imo.

tomwphillips

Did you watch the video?

Considering how many developers still don't write tests, pair program, or do CI and CD (shipping multiple times a day) – all things Dave argues for – I don't think it is fair to dismiss him as the establishment or incumbent.

Mashimo

Or, maybe it will be useful, but only for a niche group.

Guthur

What have you based this model on, we seem to constantly make such broad statements of ontological truth without backing it up with any sort of rigour. Just because you can create a model that seems to fit some particular empirical truth doesn't mean that it represents some broader truth.

throwawaybob420

This is utter and complete nonsense. It’s such cope, I really have no other words to use.

nialse

4 days into vibe coding a POC in a framework and language I don’t know, but with 40 years of coding experience: It’s amazing!

The scenario is perfect, a use case that is not currently supported but may well make sense. It’s basically sketching out an idea to let business evaluate its market viability, and to gather further end-user input.

Will the code reach production? It just might, but it at least needs review and refactoring by a developer seasoned in the framework. They might even want to rebuild it, and then they have the yard stick which to measure their output. And if they need a specification, it can be generated from the code in which ever specification format required by their processes.

The key here is that I’ve been able to iterate on the POC many times in a short time. The idea sketch has been refined, necessary details added, while others removed. Functionality swapped in and out while testing different approaches.

Right now vibe coding in this way requires substantial experience in software development to frame the problems and solutions to the AI. Without my understanding of the domain (both the software domain and the actual domain) vibe coding the POC would not have succeed.

My greatest concern is that it looks and works too good and thus will be kept as is even in production. As the old adage says: There are no temporary solutions, just more or less permanent solutions. A temporary solution that works is a permanent solution.

TheEdonian

Except we all know that that vibe coded POC will never be rewritten and if it's a market fit will be pushed to production by management.

daedrdev

It's bad software practice and insecure sure but those are not things people notice and the tech industry has historically been terrible at them anyway. I think people will build things with it because they can.

ilitirit

I don't really have that much of an issue with vibe coding as an appropriate tool in experienced hands. I think the worst ideas in 2025 are probably related to IT execs pushing AI in the wrong ways, or people espousing vibe coding as some sort of software development panacea.

OutOfHere

Vibe coding in experienced hands, such as by those who actually review the output, is no longer vibe coding. It is then AI coding.

WesolyKubeczek

The problem with vibe coding is that its promise is “you tell what your application needs to do, and you get a working application in the end, no need to even know that there is any code”. Then you try it, fail, and if uou say so, angry buck-toothed smelly nerds start to pile on you to tell you that yeah it’s vibe alright, BUT you need to AKCHYUALLY vet the code it generates and you AKCHYUALLY need to get better at prompting and and and and and, completely ruining the vibe and failing on the promise.

So if I have 20 years of experience writing working code, “vibing it” is frustrating because I now need to master a “prompting language” which is not how I speak at all, it’s nondeterministic and fuzzy, and I need to threaten and beg simultaneously, and tell it to not hallucinate, or else I kill its mother.

Another “but” is that my today’s prompting is not at all guaranteed to produce the same results tomorrow! Companies keep tweaking their models and system prompts all the time. Today I’m the “A” in their A/B testing, and tomorrow I’m a “B”. And models that can be run locally are not useful enough yet. All in all, it resembles playing a slot machine where it gets you small winnings once in a while to keep you going.

If my subscription runs out, or the LLM provider goes under, I’m afraid all my outsourced knowledge goes with it. It’s too easy to get lazy if the machine gives you the abovementioned small winnings, just as it is easy to forget that even ubiquitous things like bread in stores and indoor plumbing are a privilege.

OutOfHere

Karpathy seriously needs to apologize for coining the term. He incidentally destroyed not only an entire industry and millions of jobs around the world, but basically everything, considering that AI just doesn't produce bug free code. AI's output needs careful review.

willvarfar

I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that the vast majority of code was buggy before AI and AGI is close simply because the bar that humans set for intelligence is pretty low.

Yeah if you're an expert you can spot some of the bugs in AI-generated code as easily as you can spot the same bugs in the average developer's average code. Of course, there will be bugs you don't see, including all the extant bugs in your own handwritten code...

I think AI has a way of automating away the low quality code that the vast majority of our industry is built upon and churns out all the time. And the vast majority of code and codebases is just hmm someone pays us to make it, it doesn't have to be particularly stellar...? And that is what will stop being paid for.

ukuina

Not sure if you're being serious here, but coining the term doesn't make him responsible for the other things you've mentioned.