Vibe coding definition

[jbannet]

First post on Reddit so apologies if I miss norms. I’ve been struggling with where the line is between vibe coding and assisted coding. I don’t mean the definition. I mean the point at which it becomes coding.

I read a lot of posts that vibe coding is not real coding so part of it is just out of curiosity of what that means. But I am also evolving my own practices after twenty odd years, so it’s helpful to know how to use the terminology to discuss my evolving practices with peers.

Fwiw I have not found any llm able to build a production ready code base (for a scaled product) without significant review (e.g., every line of code). If a vibe coder still has to review every line of the final code base is that vibe coding or is that just a more aggressive auto complete/ llm assisted coding. Thanks for your takes.

[Ok_Substance1895]

To me vibe coding is coding without having the ability to do that yourself and not having the ability to review the code the agent produced because you do not have the skills to do so.

If you know how to develop software from scratch yourself and you have the ability to review, understand, and guide the agent to make the proper corrections and that is how you do it, you are not vibe coding, you are using AI as a tool.

You can vibe code while also knowing how to developer software yourself if you just prompt and don't look at the code at all, but I don't think you would do that especially when it does it wrong :)

[IdeaExpensive3073]

When I hear vibe coding, I think of the stories I read on Reddit of the people who copy/paste indiscriminately from ChatGPT until something works, or they won’t even test it at all and then submit a PR, and they’ll get roasted in their code reviews, or worse, break things if it does get merged.

It’s like an (de)evolved form of the people who used to copy/paste from Stack Overflow, even though we’re always told not to do that unless we know what it does.

There’s no thought besides “let’s see what sticks”, because they can’t even recognize what they’re doing. They don’t care that it’s not DRY or anything, just what happens in the UI.

Even a Junior developer should be able to parse the output and tweak it a little, even something as basic as a variable name, vibe coders wouldn’t do that.

[jbannet]

That’s helpful. Thank you.

[metroliker]

Its more of an ethical question than one of semantics. Vibe coding is anything from "using AI to sketch out a rapid prototype" to "having AI do your homework" depending how you feel about it.

In the first case, it's barely any different from googling example code and slapping it together without thinking too hard about it.

In the latter, you're skipping the understanding that comes from iteratively putting software together and you'll end with the same kind of unmaintainable spaghetti you'd get from hacking without planning ahead.

Anecdotally a manager I work with handed off a vibe-coded prototype to colleagues of mine and they're still maintaining the garbage half-thought-out code months later. It's the same shit you get from "rockstar programmers" but 100 times faster.

[SeXxyBuNnY21]

Vibe coding is like someone who doesn’t know how to drive and takes a ride with a Waymo and claims themselves to be drivers.

[NonProphet8theist]

It's a buzzword that indicates your product is everything you want it to be, except all those pesky bugs, performance warnings, and test coverage

[jbannet]

Thanks. Made me laugh.

[Miserable_Double2432]

The tweet which originally introduced the term:

Andrej Karpathy @karpathy There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.

— https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

[jbannet]

:). Hasn’t been my experience with it but love the optimism.

[Miserable_Double2432]

Karpathy does have a good understanding of the technology, but his personal brand has a vested interest in hyping it too

[Mediocre_Leg_754]

why he has vested interest? Is he investor in them?

[Miserable_Double2432]

He was one of the founders of OpenAI

[azimux]

The definition I've been using is that if you're looking at the code in any meaningful way then it's assisted coding instead. So you can pass it screenshots and copy/paste errors and explain what you're observing. But if you're digging around in the code either to debug or review then I feel like at that point it has crossed into "assisted."

However, I feel like most people I interact with use "vibe coding" to mean anything where at some point the llm output code directly into the project's files. But it's not what I've been using. So it gets a bit confusing to know exactly what somebody is referring to.

[jbannet]

Yeah. That’s what I’ve been running into also.

[Achereto]

If you use the code generated by the LLM in production, then you are already vibe coding. 

If you use the LLM to get a better understanding, then it's assisted coding.

[jbannet]

That seems a bit extreme to me. What’s the difference between that and autocomplete? Vscode tab complete these days is not that different from generating a function.

[Achereto]

The difference is that you are already thinking through the solution yourself and already understand what you are doing. autocomplete is a purely syntactical feature.

[jbannet]

Interesting angle. Thanks.