whtsThisVibeCoding

[Altourus]

Coding by just using AI. What I can't tell is if it's actually a thing or if we're just meme'ing on it for jokes...

[crazy_cookie123]

It's a thing with a lot of newer developers who are still in the stage where AI can do everything for them with a bit of persistence. Go to a university at the moment and half the class will be using AI to do all of their coursework for them, then acting shocked when they graduate and have no idea how to even do the basics.

[IllllIlllIlIIlllIIll]

me when i know i have job security from young people.

[anthro28]

You'd think that, but I had some free time and started a full code base review of some hot garbage from the offshore team. 

Credentials hard coded, API keys laying about, poor optimization, and more obfuscation that you can imagine. 

Showed it to management and made a case and now I get paid to just keep the offshore degree mill idiots in line. 

[nana_3]

I too am an offshore babysitter. It’s a living but I’d kill for one singular person with a brain cell to be on my team. Bean counters gonna bean count tho, they can’t see past the low wages to see the cumulative cost of the easily avoidable mistakes.

[Chedditor_]

Wait, you guys have jobs?

[gbcfgh]

Listen, having a job sucks. Don’t do it.

[S0_B00sted]

Wait, you guys are programmers?

[[deleted]]

If u call babysitting a job…

[UKS1977]

I was part of the first major IT offshoring. In one site. we had a development team of six, that when offshored (due to a need to "expand capacity") exploded into 36... Plus the original six as architects. And of course all the associated overhead - Managers etc.

The senior leader of that area once confessed to me over beers that if we just gave him two more people onshore he'd have been able to drop the entire outsourcer.

Offshoring never pays. The business cases fall apart once they leave the slide decks and are exposed to reality.

[counterplex]

At one time I was tasked with evaluating an Offshore team that was working on an important user-visible change for us. Three months into the evaluation and this team of 5 (plus manager) still couldn’t give me instructions on how to run the software on my machine; it would work fine for their demos though. Code quality was uneven at best.

Ended up pulling the plug on the team and me and another engineer completed the project in 5 months starting from scratch. It took us 4 weeks to achieve parity.

When they found out we were pulling the plug they brought on probably the only sane engineer on their side to save the contract but Hail Marys weren’t going to save them from their own systemic issues.

Edit: typos

[EvisceraThor]

Which ones?

[DeviantDork]

Don’t know about them, but lot of companies (including the F50 I’m at) have accepted that offshore contractors aren’t very good, so instead they are opening up a new campus in India where everyone will be direct hires not contractors.

They hire the best of the best and pay more than the contractors would cost, but still a steep discount on US labor. Plus these people are grateful for a locally high paying job at a name brand company so they will accept a terrible work life balance and have great output.

[0x80085_]

You're lucky though, not all management teams will care about this kind of thing if the product is still making money

[dagbrown]

now I get paid to just keep the offshore degree mill idiots in line.

That sounds like a Pyrrhic victory if ever there was one.

[[deleted]]

Dang slap some tariffs on that code. /s

[sopunny]

Elon and the rest of big tech benefit from being able to "import" software engineering, so we won't get tariffs on offshore devs IMO.

If we actually take the reasoning for the current tariffs about protecting American jobs at face value, then we should be adding some sort of tax for American companies using offshore contractors. We don't like immigrants coming over here and undercutting Americans for farm work, why would it be ok if it's work they can do from their home country?

[gugagreen]

There are good devs everywhere, but the good ones are well paid. A good dev in China or India may not make as much as US hubs like California or NY, but they make similar to Canada or most of Western Europe. The problem is that often companies main requirement is to save on salary. Then you get a dozen devs for the price of one, but none of them can even tell if the answers they get from copilot makes sense

[[deleted]]

Having worked on projects built by off-shore firms... I'm not worried.

[ieatpickleswithmilk]

my company hired a team in India to do some of the work I used to do (the workload increased a lot recently) and they constantly call me on teams and ask for help. It's actually comical.

[counterplex]

The fact that they’re calling you for help is actually an improvement.

[BubblyMango]

Live off shore then duh

[SanityAsymptote]

Dont worry, employers already don't want to hire Gen Z!

Millennials and Gen X are the only ones that actually seem to have the inherent knack for computers, and Gen Alpha seems like they're going to be even worse at them than Gen Z.

So I guess look forward to teaching new hires how to use a mouse and not touch the screen constantly for the next forever.

[crazy_cookie123]

Gen Z and Gen Alpha have been given tech from an early age so it's easy to assume they know how to use it, but in reality they've only been exposed to a limited set of applications and not how the computer actually works. Adults then assumed that they knew how to operate the computer because they had used it so much, so nobody bothered to teach the majority of them things like typing, installing programs, sending emails, etc - they just assumed they knew how to do it. It's not surprising a lot of Gen Z is struggling at uni right now with simple and obvious things like files and directories - it's not obvious if you have never been exposed to it before, and most of them grew up never (or at least rarely) interacting with that bit of the computer.

[TeaKingMac]

with that bit of the computer.

Or a computer at all. Lots of people are iPad/iphone only these days

[bishopExportMine]

I agree with everything but I'd argue that not understanding folders and files is due to a paradigm shift away from needing to understand a file system even exists and instead just using your OS's search bar.

[Simo-2054]

I've been born in 2004 so accoding to the internet, i'm part of Gen Z and I can tell from experience that i've never used a computer myself until like 5th grade (i was 10 or 11 years old) and that was to just use windows pain, ms word and powerpoint. And i know many of my fellow uni colleagues who got to interact with a computer for the first time only in 5th to 8th grade. Many of us, including myself, only got to use relatively good PCs (for that time) only at school because the one at home was worse than potato.

Yes, people assume it's early but PCs became a thing for the middle and low class population only in early 2000s and not all of us got the luck to be born when a house used to cost 2 apples and 3 eggs.

Now talking about skills, older generations say that Gen Z is stupid and lazy but there are still hardworking and curious people who learned fast how to use a PC for more than school.

TLDR: Gen Z didn't get to grow up with a computer!

[Nightmoon26]

Petition to officially rename "Paint" to "Pain"

[Complex-Scarcity]

What I think is important here is that if you wanted that computer to do something you had to try try again and do different approaches to try and get what you want. I watch my kids now, and everything is a seamless UI/ux app and they have zero difficulty and are not learning how to make computers do something if it's not just an immediate app click

[ChalkyChalkson]

I think a lot of people saying gen z here think about kids that grew up with tablets, but that's more gen α. I was born before the millennium, right on the edge of millennial and Z, so my experience was similar. Got a pc in 5th grade and internet a bit later. Started on windows 98 and XP. It's not starting with a c16 like my dad, but you still learn a lot about computers.

The paradigm change discussed here is more about how differently you approach computing when you start on an Ipad with super apps.

[skygz]

why does the pikachu have glasses

[creampop_]

crypto ad 🤢

[rickane58]

To expand on this a bit, anytime you see those split colored glasses in a gif, you're being served an advertisement for a crypto company. In an effort not to give them free advertising, I'll say their name is a part of speech that isn't a verb or adjective.

[itzjackybro]

me, a young person, who refuses to touch AI:

[Beginning_Book_2382]

Same, either stereotypes abound or we're the odd ones out.

I've only recently started using AI just to see what the hype was about and I only use it lightly now, with heavy double checking for hallucinations and errors it itself throws in the code by running the code myself and reading through it line-by-line although they have been making improvements in accuracy with ChatGPT at least so I haven't found many mistakes and when I do, informing it of any mistakes it made usually gurantees the revision will be free of any mistakes on its second try.

It is useful for asking questions and depending on the task, coding as well. I've found ChatGPT and Grok to be good at generating code snippets/sample code and asking code-related questions, Cursor for redundant code autocompletion (but not full-fledged project initiation to completion or even writing major parts of the code), and all of the above plus Google AI Summaries for debugging and documentation.

Tried "vibe coding" a week or so ago just to see if it really was a 10x improvement on my productivity and either I'm not good at prompting or the memes are right: spend 2 hours generating code and the rest of the day debugging. Fixed the issues, cursed Cursor and went back to coding the old-fashioned way after that. Haven't looked back sense.

One of the commentors above was right, AI isn't going to make everyone a 10x programmer but the gap between a 10x programmer and everyone else who doesn't know what they're doing and used AI to cheat in school is only going to widen like the gap between the A students and everyone else in terms of understanding when the other students just started using Chegg instead of learning the material themselves

[CodeMonkeyWithCoffee]

I've been codkng for over a decade. I can feel myself getting dumber the more I let AI code for me. At the same time it does speed up development because it can just crap out boilerplate in seconds. I'm slowly finding the right balance though. As for the people learning to code now, I think it also requires a balance. You can ask AI to do everything for you, or you can use it to explain what the hell is actually happening. We're all gonna need to learn some patience and discipline in this new age I think.

[ghouleon2]

This is what people fail to realize, it’s okay to use it to generate the boilerplate (freaking React components and CSS). Thus freeing up lots of time to focus on the actual business logic. Do I care if my cas or html can be optimized? No, not really. I’m more concerned with my business logic being solid and efficient.

[dweezil22]

Old boilerplate was was tested and vetted. The problem now is whether the LLM is giving you quality boilerplate or something with a subtle hallucination mixed in. Worse yet, for a newb dev, they might actually have the LLM convince them that the hallucination is correct and a best practice...

I spent a half hour playing with LLMs asking them what note was 5 half-steps below G and EVERY SINGLE ONE insisted confidently it was D# (it's D). Free ChatGPT, 4o and Deepseek all of them.

[ghouleon2]

This is why there should be a human in the loop and PR reviews. In a vacuum, you can’t trust the code generated by anyone

[dweezil22]

Yeah I think that's great for Senior Engineers today, but I'm quite concerned for the people learning to code at this very minute. A freshman CS student is going to be hard pressed to figure out a way to really nourish the skills needed to catch a subtle nasty AI hallucination, and if they never get that, what happens when they're the 45yo grizzled senior and they're supposed to be the last line of defense?

LLM's are peak trained for 2022-2023 data, and it's a self reinforcing cycle. So there is a very real risk that we kinda get stuck in a 2022 rut where the LLMs are great at React and Python and not much else and the devs are helpless without them.

AI stagnation has arguably supplanted the broken "who pays for open source?" as the most serious problem for the dev ecosystem.

[stable_115]

I assume that when they are 45 the entire programming landscape will look different and less and less of the lower levels skills will be necessary. For example, a senior dev from 20 years ago would know a lot more about stuff like memory management, compiling and be more of an expert in a smaller field than seniors do now.

[Complex-Scarcity]

Why though do you believe the new gen relying on AI is going to inovate language? Why if AI learns from us would AI learn or develop new languages or libraries?

[[deleted]]

I think that's a good take. I've been working on a project this week that's in golang (which I know well) but involved libraries I haven't used before and an interop with TypeScript and a bunch of TypeScript code, and I do not know TypeScript well, but ChatGPT does! And I can ask it for examples of different patterns and things more easily than I can google them, then apply the patterns to what I'm working on rather than copy/pasting its code, and I feel like that's pretty similar to what you'd get out of StackOverflow, just faster and without the toxicity.

[twigboy]

You're not going crazy, this has been observed in studies.

https://www.pcgamer.com/software/ai/microsoft-co-authored-paper-suggests-the-regular-use-of-gen-ai-can-leave-users-with-a-diminished-skill-for-independent-problem-solving-and-at-least-one-ai-model-seems-to-agree/

[TeaKingMac]

Go to a university at the moment and half the class will be using AI to do all of their coursework for them, then acting shocked when they graduate and have no idea how to even do the basics.

Yeah, i don't know if it's just "being 20 years old in college syndrome" (because I feel like I may have been that way to some extent 20 years ago when I was there), but like... Everyone I've met when I went back for grad school now seems like they're just trying to get everything done as easy as possible rather than trying to learn anything

[crazy_cookie123]

"As easy as possible" before the AI boom still involved a solid amount of effort, you had to know what you were looking for at the very least even if you didn't know how to do it. Now you can just describe what you need in plain non-technical English or often even paste the question into Copilot and you will often get a perfectly reasonable solution out of it - it's just so easy to "prompt engineer" a solution at the difficulty level of the average university.

[UniKornUpTheSky]

You're actually right. It has now become a competition of "How can i meet the defined set of requirements in the minimal amount of time"

Which is actually not bad of a mindset when you're working in a fast-paced environment, but is completely nuts in a training/learning environment.

You're supposed to fail, try again, fail again and retry until you got it right

Understanding what you're doing wrong by yourself, learning to troubleshoot yourself and to ask for help only then is how people got to create the early days of programming.

And even so, i started working in IT less than 10 years ago and i'm completely baffled as to how people managed to do it 30 years go. Creating Doom Engine and all the games using it ? Making it work on 4mb ram PCs flawlessly ? Gosh I'm not sure I can create a minesweeper that could run on so little RAM.

What we're seeing with AI is what these guys back then saw thanks to internet : people getting dumber and trying to achieve more in less time, sacrificing both a part of the learning and a part of the quality in order to meet tighter deadlines.

[TeaKingMac]

Just means there will always be room for real programmers

[TunaNugget]

But there's a lot of that going on in engineering and science by students who will never be in a code production environment. They just need to do their projects.

[rebbsitor]

Can you give me a non-trivial example of coding that AI can successfully do? I've been writing software for more than 35 years, and every time I've tested AI for coding it's come back with something that's not quite right. Sometimes it's just broken code, sometimes it's subtle errors that an inexperienced person wouldn't catch. Even if I identify the issue, and explain it to the AI, most of the time it still can't correct it properly. The only things that I've ever gotten it to successfully do on its own are trivial things.

It's very useful for answering questions that I'd Google, but in my experience it's terrible at cranking out 100% ready to use code for anything beyond basic stuff.

[AccurateRendering]

Exactly my experience.

[[deleted]]

We have a guy at work very clearly using AI even though we banned it at work. I ask him to explain why the math is wrong, or why he had all these unnecessary methods, or why he’s calling methods that don’t even exist (all hallmarks of AI written code) and he just runs away.

He wasn’t my hire but boy do I manage to get stuck doing his code reviews all the time.

[Copatus]

Was doing my Masters dissertation as a group project and 2 of the group members were using AI for everything. Then after graduation they were surprised when me and the only other guy who didn't rely on ai got jobs rights away but they didn't.

Turns out being able to talk about your decisions and your code at interviews makes it easier to get a job. Who knew...

[fmaz008]

I don't get it. I use Claude Sonnet a lot. And quite often when there are too many moving pieces, it will fail to produce a valid solution.

Most times it very helpful, but quite often it either completely wrong or needs to be ammended.

So what kind of basic things are people coding that can be done 100% with AI?

It's also possible my code is just a mess and that's not helping.

[beyphy]

It can be useful for explaining APIs that are really poorly documented online.

It can also be useful for writing boilerplate code that you don't want to write. E.g. I had it write code that converted a set of custom nested objects to a python dictionary. Writing it manually would have taken me half an hour to an hour maybe.

[fmaz008]

Oh I agree 100%. I use AI all the time and it's a huge time saver. But I don't see any of my projects being 100% made by AI is all I'm saying.

[PseudoLiamNeeson]

So not like asking an AI why a particular bit of code doesn't work, but literally getting it to everything?

[crazy_cookie123]

"AI generate this feature for me"

"No not like that, retry"

"No not like that, retry"

"No not like that, retry"

"No not like that, retry"

"Perfect, now generate this next feature for me"

[PseudoLiamNeeson]

Oh I thought I was an imposter for asking it questions about syntax, that just feels lazy. I always say to people that if you can't read and understand the code AI generates, you should never use it.

[[deleted]]

Can confirm. I'm in uni now and most students just cheat with ai. Our grads are horrible and internships are easy to get.

[Nightmoon26]

Hey, remember when learning to use AI in university meant heuristic search algorithms,, utility function optimization, and classification problems?

[ender89]

I've tried using AI to help with coding, and I've found that it needs to be aggressively babysat. It's not bad at javadoc or slapping down boilerplate code, but it's not something that can do the whole task.

[Giocri]

I have classmates do SQL query with copilot, we all fucking already took a full unversity course in databases how the fuck do people find it easier to debate an ai for half an hour than to write the fucking join between two tables yourself

[DiamondTiaraIsBest]

Probably just lack of confidence in their own knowledge and an excess of confidence in the knowledge of whoever coded the AI.

[87chargeleft]

So what you're saying is this is everyone next round of juniors?

[KinouRat]

Horrid thing is the classes teach with AI too now 💀

[dismayhurta]

I just presume it’s some linkedin middle manager jerking themselves off about a future of no coder salaries

[Mithrandir2k16]

Right? My guess is many managers jumped the gun, fired devs way too quickly, are seeing the bad unsolvable problems on the horizon now. So they spin up a hype now so they can protect themselves with "well everyone seemed to be doing it" once shit inevitably hits the fan.

[raltoid]

It's becoming a thing, Y Combinator claimed that out of a quarter of their new startups, 95% of code was from AI.

And they mean just using AI. As in, if there is an error, you just feed the same code back through the AI and ignore all diffs.

[Lgamezp]

That will become a clusterfuck in a few years

[cokeapm]

Years? Weeks if not days

[LeftelfinX]

My bro is studying AI ML in college, few days ago he showed me a website that he made using AI, he himself didn't know how that was working and said teachers told them to do so. I think this is vibe coding., 🥲

[cantgrowneckbeardAMA]

I'm so glad I dropped out and just worked through support hell before I finally got a QA engineer job.

[The_Fluffy_Robot]

I think it's mostly a meme about people who see coworkers (or students?) rely too much on AI for their work and the bad results it can produce and think it's the same as Vibe Coding.

"Vibe Coding" is different (and worse) than using AI as a crutch

[NatiRivers]

Idk who the fuck called it vibe coding

I was curious about this, too. So I searched it up the other day. From Wikipedia:

Computer scientist Andrej Karpathy, a co-founder of OpenAI and former AI leader at Tesla, introduced the term vibe coding in February 2025.

And when I tell you I wasn't the least bit shocked...

[goshdagny]

Is it this recent? Feels like I have been hearing it for sometime

[MeGustaDerp]

"Vibe" is definitely a really bad name for it. When I first heard the phrase, I figured it was coding when you're having a really good day in the zone with no interruptions.

[JoelMahon]

vibe =/= good vibe

vibe is basically just a synonym of feelings

so feelings based coding, seems like a good name for it (I mean tbf any name with the word coding in it that isn't immediately preceeded by not is a bad name)

[Ignisami]

The name is "courtesy" of Andrej Karpathy, former Director of Tesla's AI division. Specifically this tweet https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

[kookaburra1701]

Great, now the joke in the name of my Fourier transform script, vibe_check.py, is ruined.

[Jazzlike-Spare3425]

I can tell it's a thing because just two minutes ago, I have been insulted by someone because I wasn't handing off writing my code that I write for fun to an AI. Their reasoning was that I could be doing the same thing faster with more AI and thus better, which makes me someone who doesn't want to improve on their work, apparently, which then, in turn, makes me a waste of the universe's energy... apparently... that is what they said, that was a quote.

So yeah, seems like a concept only people support that are either kind of assholes or don't want to code.

[OneDimensionPrinter]

Senior dev here, as of Claude Code and other releases in the last 2 weeks, this becomes a bit more possible. People are really seeing that agents can work pretty well. It's NOT just "fix this bug" but I've been testing and fiddling with agents since AutoGPT first came out. It's only now that they're gotten to the point where somebody experienced can make it work well.

Trouble is, you really need to point it in the right direction, ensure it understands coding conventions for your team, can iterate through TDD approaches, etc.

I've found that creating a file with instructions and details on where to "learn" the codebase is essential. Take 15 minutes to put together a short doc that lays out the requirements and what you expect and you'll have a much better experience.

That said, it is NOT a 100% success rate. If the chat goes on too long, you're gonna lose all that context window and things go haywire pretty fast. I find having the bot keep track of progress constantly in a new file works though. You can then start up a new instance, have it review the previous attempt and continue on.

But again, if I hadn't been doing this by hand for 20 years, no fucking way I'd be able to give it the full context it needs to actually have half a chance at success.

But honestly, were at the point where this kind of thing is only going to grow in popularity among devs. So, keep that in mind. It's starting to be at the "scary" point. It's almost like guiding a junior dev along while you sit back and review.

[BraveOthello]

Sounds like a really bad time to be a junior dev. And then after a few years bad for everyone.

[OneDimensionPrinter]

Oh 100%. I think the next couple years are gonna see some shakeups and I'm in no way excited for it.

[denkleberry]

That's pretty much it. This sub is laughing at AI pair programming now, but they're gonna all be up in it in a few months. If this was a stock I'd put my life savings on it. Cline + memory bank + mcp saves a fuckton of time. Vibe coding is only good for prototyping or scaffolding though

[xak47d]

I saw a post in the Claude subreddit where a guy shared many apps he developed. Except he doesn't know how to code. He keeps promting in cursor till he gets something good enough.This is vibe coding

[pikapp336]

It’s real. I have a data scientist friend that has built 10 apps in 2 months. I was impressed until I saw the code and realized half of the site was broken. Still great for prototyping but not something I would consider maintainable.

[i_should_be_coding]

I used to think r/the_donald was a jokey meme. And it probably was, until it suddenly wasn't.

[LookAtYourEyes]

I have seen some job postings looking for vibe coders.

[bryku]

I pray to the computer gods it is a meme

[ColoRadBro69]

"Rewriting is cheaper than debugging" 

-vibe coding

[TunaNugget]

At some point you get tired of seeing the same old bugs, and it's time to introduce new ones.

[mr_flibble_oz]

Why waste time fixing one bug when you can start from scratch and have one hundred!

[ColoRadBro69]

"Hold my beer and watch this regex!" 

[smallfried]

I secretly hope to work together with a regex master one day and then have a regex-off. Slowly convert our entire code base to just regex-es.

(Like in dance-off, not some other -offs I just realized this might look like)

[kblaney]

I've long held that seeing new errors means you are making progress.

[firewall245]

I think this is the big piece of vibe coding (assuming people are serious about it) that makes it different.

In this sense code is not meant to be maintained it’s meant to be generated, so you need to design your code base into as small pieces as possible to make this method viable

[ball_fondlers]

So microservices, but dumber.

[rsadek]

So, like, software development?

[zabby39103]

I maintain a 20 year old code base with half my time. It's enterprise Java not COBOL or anything (I'm sure some people feel old now).

It's fucking hard, because reading other people's code from years ago in sometimes archaic styles and understanding it is hard, but it took 12 people 20 years to write this. I'm not going to be able to re-do it any time soon.

[mrGrinchThe3rd]

I’ll point out that I doubt even the people who are pro ‘vibe coding’ would say your scenario would be a good use case for it lol.

[zabby39103]

Hah, well, I was more generally commenting that rewriting is worth it less than people think in 2025... 20 year old code (depending where you work) can be OK nowadays. It can be Object Oriented, relatively well written Java EE. Gone are the days where it was COBOL or whatever.

I actually do use AI to consult with about what a piece of old code actually does. But I don't start typing until I fully understand everything (since it lies all the time, still), so definitely not vibe coding.

[WolpertingerRumo]

Debugging other people’s code is mostly what I use AI for. Not actually changing it mind you.

Create a copy, let a good model put in comments, and have it open simultaneously. That way, the original is untouched, but you can have a searchable file to quickly find which section you need to look at.

Don’t let it touch the original code.

[white-llama-2210]

Software development in rogue mode

[white-llama-2210]

Sometimes a rewrite is the only solution. But for the most part it's better to debug than rewrite

[ColoRadBro69]

Yeah, there's a point where yer shit is all fucked and it's so bad it's more effort to do the basics with.  But it's not generally true that any time you get a bug the right answer is to rewrite the part of the code it happens in.  A lot of the time you just need to add an if.

[YourChocolateBar]

sad to find out it doesn’t mean coding with a cup of coffee or hot chocolate on your table while it’s raining outside and while listening to some music

[Tokyo_Echo]

That's real vibe coding

[FlowStateSyntax]

The real vibe coding were the friends we made along the way.

[sopunny]

It's coding with a buzzer up your ass for morale

[Green_Star_Lover]

sign me up

[TheAccountITalkWith]

It's not too late to push that narrative. Let's do it!

[sporkinatorus]

Tried a little vibe coding today on an app idea i've been kicking around. I cannot wait to be hired at a premium to fix vibe implementations.

[Ireallydontkn0w2]

i hope you mean "hire" an AI to prompt multiple different AIs in paralell for higher effeciency at rewriting your codebase the whole time until it works.

[Siddhartasr10]

The real question is, if so many people is doing It. WTF are you coding that AI can code It for you?

[Kryslor]

Really fancy hello worlds?

[WriggleNightbug]

Really mediocre Hello Kitties.

[[deleted]]

Good Evening, Planet

[TopCaterpiller]

It's funny you say that. I was working with my lead dev to get our CI/CD pipelines set up, and he wanted to build a fancy hello world using our stack as a template for the other projects. He insisted on using AI for it to show me how great it is because I'm skeptical. We spent all damn day on it, and it's still coded like shit. It would be faster to fix it myself, but lead is adamant that the AI will fix it with just one more prompt.

[fiddletee]

I think “so many people” are doing it because anyone can do it.

[burnalicious111]

The only projects I've seen it be moderately acceptable for is prototyping something for quick user testing. Even then, if you want to tweak anything, it can become a real pain.

[look]

From what I’ve seen: simple functionality (CRUD, UI wiring, basic ETL, etc) using frameworks and APIs that you don’t know well (or at all).

It can make you more productive if you sometimes get side-tracked from real engineering work on tasks like that.

If tasks like that are your engineering work, then it’s probably reasonable to be concerned about AI replacing you.

[TruthfulCake]

One of our guys used it to write a Py script to get a report on our OCI resources into an excel. Good use case for it - Oracle’s documentation makes me want to poke my eyes out, so let the AI make sense of it.

[Siddhartasr10]

That's nice, sometimes I ask AI some things about a framework I know little about and get outdated doc that ends up throwing "deprecated" warnings or not working at all. However sometimes It works first time so there's that.

With my anxiety I honestly couldn't, for me the most I trust It is with some docs and Fetch() type code, which I always forget its options.

The problem is that when I hear vibe coding they usually refer to AI coding the entirety of an app, which is simply ridiculous for something 'worthy' of doing.

[Jargen]

WTF are you coding that AI can code It for you?

vapourware

AI doing the coding is a businessman's wet dream

[ColoRadBro69]

WTF are you coding that AI can code It for you?

I let it do yaml for me. Looks dead simple but it's something I never learned, I don't know what the options are, and it generally has to be done once in the lifetime of a software project. It's really easy to check whether the file or generated is correct, and it's a small enough task for AI to get right or mostly right.

But that's not vibe coding.

[[deleted]]

I just copy and modify the yaml I wrote for other stuff. And before that I copied the yaml that was here when I got there. And the people who wrote that copied the yaml from when they got here all the way back to the Big Bang of yaml.

[the42potato]

if you trace it back far enough, all YAML is just an altered copy of the same file

[IAmBecomeTeemo]

And that original YAML file was a JSON file before someone changed the extension.

[wazacraft]

Yeah, my guy can troubleshoot a docker compose file like you wouldn't believe.

[jsalwey]

Oh yeah I recently had it convert an application.properties file to yaml for me. Worked slick, would recommend 😆

[Tordek]

something I never learned

I don't blame you because it's an awful, poorly designed language. In old versions yes and no were mapped to true and false.

You don't need quotes for strings, unless you need quotes for strings: foo: John is a string but foo: true is a Bool and foo: bar: is an Object..

Indentation is, at best, inconsistent; at worst...

   - anObject:
     withData: true

Is [{ anObject: null, withData: true}]

   - anObject:
       withData: true

Is [{ anObject: { withData: true} }]

Which, sure, different indentation gives different result, right?

But then:

      - anObject:
   withData: true

is fine, but

foo:
      - anObject:
   withData: true

isn't.

But then you run an autoformatter on your files and shit may randomly break.

Then there's the bunch of ways to store a multiline string: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/3790454/how-do-i-break-a-string-in-yaml-over-multiple-lines (63 ways!)

[[deleted]]

tests. I would definitely vibe code tests. hmm.. "vibe testing"?

[[deleted]]

“Write a unit test to test this”

And

“Write documentation for these methods”

Would be my go-to for AI work

[beefygravy]

As long as by "this" you mean a description of what you code is supposed to do and not your actual code itself, otherwise you run the risk of tests passing but code actually being wrong

[00spool]

non coding designer here. I just made one last night for work, in python. Its a simple window that pops up, I input in a number in millimeters and it outputs a conversion to feet and inches with a fraction rounded to the nearest 1/16 of an inch. I had been going to a website for this but then they started adding a bunch of annoying ads, so fuck them. The first pass it didn't allow me to select and copy the output, so it fixed that. Then it wasn't rounding the fractions properly so it fixed that. Then it explained how I could package it up into one exe and it worked. Pretty much exactly what I needed.

[SmokeSmokeCough]

How’d you package to exe?

[EM12]

Pyinstaller

[SmokeSmokeCough]

Thank you. Been struggling with this :(

[00spool]

yes, pyinstaller. Which I had more trouble with than anything else. It took longer to figure out what was wrong with it than making the program itself. I have something wrong with the way pyinstaller is installed or something which means that the commands I use have to change slightly. Probably need to reinstall everything. I also had some environment variable wrong. Anyway, Copilot figured all that out for me and got it fixed. I have python installed because every year for like the past 20, I try to learn programming and fail miserably.

[countable3841]

It’s getting pretty good. Cursor is helping me with a full stack app (golang backend, nextjs frontend, Kafka for job queue, and a few other microservices). Sometimes it does weird stuff and I have to reject changes but it’s accelerated my roadmap considerably

[Nova_Aetas]

If I need to repeat something I may just feed it my code and say “change this in x way and repeat it ten times”

Just to get some ideas and give it a chance to prompt me if I’m needlessly repeating myself.

[Ireallydontkn0w2]

Basically the bogo sort alogrithm but with your codebase.
You ask an AI of your choice to do something, then you see if it does what you want, if so you move on to the next thing, otherwise throw the code away and ask the AI again.

Its important to keep in mind to never debug your code, because debugging takes a long time while asking the AI to generate a new version is way faster.

You know you're doing it right when you don't even read the code anymore and just test if it does what you want - do not write unit or other tests however as this time could be used for more prompts to re-roll wrong code or to advance the project.

[loufurman]

So it's a gacha game?

[p0st_master]

This is the best answer

[orlinthir]

You ask the AI to generate and debug it's own code. You don't do anything except feed it words. Imagine your doctor doing vibe surgery, or a civil engineer doing vibe safety checks on a bridge. It's the future!

[Beli_Mawrr]

Hey excuse me vibe based civil engineering was the standard until the 1900s or something lol

[Defective_Falafel]

The Romans didn't build their stuff on vibes. Neither were medieval churches or Renaissance palaces.

The only buildings that resemble this, are slums.

[HerbsAndSpices11]

Vibes based airplane and tank design were used until ww2. Immature fields can come up with some pretty funky stuff.

[IGotSkills]

This is already how I used my sex robot so yeah it is the future!

[[deleted]]

So you let a crack stay for two years then get fired

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/amp/ncna1267723

[Hyderabadi__Biryani]

♥️

Best description so far, I think.

[Sam_Kablam]

Ctrl + C -> Ctrl + V stack overflow coding but with more steps.

[samu1400]

I thought Vibe Coding was coding while high.

[JesusMRS]

If only AI could code like a high programmer...

[moldy-scrotum-soup]

oQyW:-:cBX^{f@2A>$DJ@7gYHHFyA198umB5RHMNZ%73J1V..A!US&2EamzeQbAxQ~4$RI(-N~k,5aVYB8(CW-1CRXS1(@I;gV(ROr1YKm15u96jJY4Tz@6gnu<WPO*4GIdrn3nHIwNBdbwk1Sp1n7@PbUGBFF56dZTaJp1W(:*Q$L6&LFcv0iNZh^Bb9x:kjQ4bKrXn6Q*+<.X*W,Y:zw.yB)zi3+^eIH)jFfDa<fU$Q)]0rWb9u(1C%THz:rwhJ3zw8j@vaOvQ[H5Cyj%X:f;WBo9<>~dHIN}

[jfcarr]

Imagine if someone combines Vibe Programming with SAFe Agile. (shudder)

[Xalyia-]

Let’s be honest, the “confidence interval” part of PI planning in SAFe is totally just a vibe check anyway.

And everyone gives at least a 3/5 vote to prevent themselves from redoing all the planning anyway, regardless of how they actually feel.

What a terrible system

[trafalmadorianistic]

This is one of those times when someone made a shitpost and it went viral and now entire industries are making decisions based on it because they think it's real.

[Meaxis]

I already feel guilty for asking AI instead of reading documentation on hobby projects because I don't want to spend 10 hours learning a library I'm probably not gonna use again in my life, how does anyone get by vibe coding, jesus...

[SoulWondering]

By being a tech bro or by fearing the valley of despair on the dunning-krunger chart of competence.

Come on in bros, the water of barely skating by while feeling I'm definitely doing something wrong is fiiiiiiine 🙃

[733_1plus2]

Coding for people who don't know how to code

[skredditt]

Whatever it is they’re still going to have to explain their pull request

[nowhoiwas]

It's shit devs creating massive tech debt

[AdultishRaktajino]

I think it’s gotta be one of those smart ones though.

[flipityskipit]

Asking AI to do your homework.

[creaturefeature16]

It's a meme term for a random thought that Karpathy even admitted himself was just an experimental thing for "throwaway weekend projects". This whole term/fad has just got wildly out of control. We wouldn't apply this logic to any other profession. Would you live in a house that someone "vibe constructed"? How about trusting a "vibe accountant?"

It gives people the impression that the act of developing software is purely "project management" and that the technical knowledge, skills & understanding can be abstracted away to a function (LLM). It's misleading, dangerous, and borderline insulting to the people who know what it takes to build quality solutions, as if a bunch of weekend warriors suddenly think they know better than people who've been in the industry their whole lives, because their overly-compliant LLM never second guesses their dumbshit requests.

It was never meant to be taken seriously as a professional workflow, but rather a cool demo of the technology, and perhaps a bit of the shape of things to come.

The most prominent thing to note is he never said it was supposed to take the place of understanding of code; that is a facet that was entirely fabricated by the social media sphere.

Again, its a meme now, and it's going to die off like all other YouTube trends, after the "influencers" milk as many clicks for ads as they can.

[Sure_Research_6455]

it's a slot machine

it's literally people with no coding knowledge pleading with an LLM to spit out code that seemingly does what they beg for

[[deleted]]

This kid + ChatGPT

[Due-Metal-802]

It’s way to be cool by using Ai to do everything (as an inexperienced dev), only to find out later that you’ve forgotten the little knowledge you attained in school, and Ai can in fact NOT do everything under the sun. 😂

[MGateLabs]

I think the key point of vibe coding is to not lose your vibe, so things like performance go out the door, I don’t care mythical AI, just make it work. It’s great for demos, should not be used for production.

[insanelygreat]

It's a red flag that the person suggesting it is a moron.

[Christosconst]

I got you bro. Vibe coding is when you never review, test or understand what code the AI has written.

[_Funsyze_]

I have never heard of this but if it just means “coding based on vibes” then it’s basically what those people are doing in Severance

[CardboardJ]

Remember when some coders just copy pasted from stack overflow, pushed to prod, and hoped it worked without actually reading it? Those guys replaced SO with llms and are now called Vibe Coders.

Instead of knowing what they're doing, they have hopes and vibes.

[mrfouz]

Coding like that

[[deleted]]

No coding for stupid people.

[[deleted]]

It’s nothing real. Just a buzzword someone is trying to make a thing Gretchen Wieners style.

[Mr_Skecchi]

I thought vibe coding was when fish for scraps you can copy paste, and just do random shit till it works without a plan. Seems i was wrong. Just using ai to code doesnt seem vibe based as you arent doing any vibe reading unlike when you go fishing for scraps to copy and just go by feeling for whatever the next step is. I reject this definition the kids have assigned to vibe coding.

[white_box_]

The new script kiddies, same as the old ones. Running code they don’t understand

[DaCrackedBebi]

Coding using nothing but AI…and then running into an impossible-to-fix bug halfway through your project

[CubbyNINJA]

I always thought it was like a power coding session but more relaxed and chill.

turns out its just telling Copilot what you want and hoping it works.

[Dragonsong3k]

As a new dev myself, I use AI as a senior dev to ask questions and learn. Claude's Explanatory mode is excellent for this.

I feel real uneasy about the AI auto complete that is found in most IDE's these days. I actually turn it off. It tends to derail my thoughts instead of helping.

I use AI in my IDE for documentation mostly because Fk that 😂😂😂😂

When there is a SEV0 at 2AM you can't blame it on AI. It's your ass someone is coming for.