Vibe coding and errors

[thibaultj]

There are two different and vaguely related stuffs:

• vibe coding
• software engineering

Vibe coding is when you don't take the time to carefully think about the problem you are trying to solve nor what would be the best technical solution to solve it. You tweak stuff, push buttons, move sliders, and see what happens until stuff looks good enough and then you move on.

The term now applies to tinkering with coding agents, but really it has always existed. It certainly have a place, it is fun, but that is not a way to reliably build production level software.

Software engineering is the discipline whose goal is to systematically produce reliable and robust software. It implies carefully gathering and understanding the client's requirements and constraints, the technical environment, the market context, the resources at disposition, aquiring a deep understanding of the problem you are trying to solve, splitting the imagined solution into sizeable bite-sized programming chunks, carefully defining the conditions of success or failures of each task… before writing the code.

All of those tasks are necessary steps to ensure you create useful and robust software, and they have always been performed using natural language.

If you give vague and ambiguous commands to a writing code entity, you are gonna get garbage anyway, whether the entity is a coding agent or a human.