Current Events > Have you heard the term "vibe coding" yet

(+) Yeah! (+)

This is the terrifying concept of someone not actually doing any coding or understanding anything about software or how it works under the hood and instead just becoming a prompt master and letting AI make it all.

It's wild to me that people really want to use apps designed by people that have literally no idea how they work. Like, imagine a car that was built entirely based on vibes, because someone gave some prompts, homer simpson style. That episode was really funny and yet here we are, seriously considering if apps that handle personal data should be done based on vibes.

As far as AI as a tool, I'm in favour of using it to supplement your job with your existing skillset. It makes sense to use a tool that makes life easier. Just not sure the speed at which vibe coding is replacing real coding is at all safe.

Imagine you are a CEO and you want someone to program something, but they say you should probably hire an IT department, and programmers earn more than minimum wage? so fuck that

instead what you do is hire the cheapest person possible to copy and paste from chatgpt until something works. It doesnt matter if it works well, is reliable, or will even work next week

and re safety, its definitely dangerous. See the recent Tea Dating app or whatever, with incompetent developers making data publicly accessible etc. the hackers definitely should be punished, but its an injustice if the companies management/owners arent also held liable and face prison. The company isnt a victim of hacking, the users are. The company is the perpetrator of negligence

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_2C2CNmK7dQ

I don't know if my company is doing this, but it's definitely using AI to design store promotional materials so they don't have pay real artists to help with marketing.

you need to actually know how to code to "AI code" effectively.

Fuckin zoomers, man.

621 posted...

you need to actually know how to code to "AI code" effectively.

AI is at a level where you can generate code with it, run the code and see the errors, paste the errors back into the AI asking for fixed code, and keep doing that on repeat until you get something that runs. this works for small blocks of code and simple tasks

"effectively" is in the eye of the beholder. if the company can get an intern to do the above for free over a weekend, they will see that as "effective" and then suffer the consequences of the trash code later

I've heard it, and while I think there's potential in agentic coding methods, the way it's being used as a silver bullet/people don't even know what's being coded is A Problem

Vibe choding can be done by a senior dev too I think it just means AI-first coding right?

The one thing thats killing our adoption rate at our company is legacy code. Cursor and copilot cant seem to understand the architecture. So while Id love to vibe chode with the cool kids were stuck in the past

Rika_Furude posted...

AI is at a level where you can generate code with it, run the code and see the errors, paste the errors back into the AI asking for fixed code, and keep doing that on repeat until you get something that runs. this works for small blocks of code and simple tasks

"effectively" is in the eye of the beholder. if the company can get an intern to do the above for free over a weekend, they will see that as "effective" and then suffer the consequences of the trash code later

a company with any reasonable business sense that works with customers worth millions dollars and a lot of moving parts is unlikely to do what you're saying. that's why we have teams dedicated to keeping things afloat. we won't even trust our own code, we sure as heck won't trust code written by "intern doing the above for free".

621 posted...

a company with any reasonable business sense that works with customers worth millions dollars and a lot of moving parts is unlikely to do what you're saying. that's why we have teams dedicated to keeping things afloat. we won't even trust our own code, we sure as heck won't trust code written by "intern doing the above for free".

not every business with million-dollar customers has good IT sense. most businesses see IT as a cost center. Internal IT, if they have one, will already be overwhelmed and under-resourced, and the company will happily outsource to the lowest bidder. the ones that wouldnt are ones that care about things like compliance and insurance requirements but a business has to mature to a stage where those are things they care for

Rika_Furude posted...

not every business with million-dollar customers has good IT sense. most businesses see IT as a cost center. Internal IT, if they have one, will already be overwhelmed and under-resourced, and the company will happily outsource to the lowest bidder. the ones that wouldnt are ones that care about things like compliance and insurance requirements but a business has to mature to a stage where those are things they care for

we're not talking about the same things. you're talking about companies where software isn't their product, or super early stage startups. I'm talking about companies where downtime could legit end a company. you're not gonna see vibe coded software seep into production. way too many (legally mandated) guardrails for that.

Rika_Furude posted...

AI is at a level where you can generate code with it, run the code and see the errors, paste the errors back into the AI asking for fixed code, and keep doing that on repeat until you get something that runs. this works for small blocks of code and simple tasks

"effectively" is in the eye of the beholder. if the company can get an intern to do the above for free over a weekend, they will see that as "effective" and then suffer the consequences of the trash code later

Unless you actually know specific and real questions, you are still going to fuck things up. What about security? Authentication? Database structure and security involving that? API security?

If you are just copy pasting code back and forth you are still not understanding WHAT you are doing and WHY. People can easily make stuff with code, sure, but you will still need people to actually interpret it and understand everything around it. Every company going with "vibe AI coding" is going to end up in a horrible spot when all the seniors that know how to code are gone and replaced with people that just know how to ask an AI questions.

I've heard of it. I pay it no mind

Kaldrenthebold posted...

Unless you actually know specific and real questions, you are still going to fuck things up. What about security? Authentication? Database structure and security involving that? API security?

If you are just copy pasting code back and forth you are still not understanding WHAT you are doing and WHY. People can easily make stuff with code, sure, but you will still need people to actually interpret it and understand everything around it. Every company going with "vibe AI coding" is going to end up in a horrible spot when all the seniors that know how to code are gone and replaced with people that just know how to ask an AI questions.

Pretty sure he agrees with you.

DrizztLink posted...

Pretty sure he agrees with you.

Oops you're right, I misread that last line completely.

Yeah I don't think vibe coding is going to do anything meaningful. Any company that goes into it hard is going to have issues down the line for sure.

https://www.pcmag.com/news/vibe-coding-fiasco-replite-ai-agent-goes-rogue-deletes-company-database

An old coworker reached out recently and told me about it. Apparently he's made several companies that he uses for vibe coding different projects and has made some money from it. I don't think it's sustainable.

I've done it a few times prior to knowing what it's called. Basically trying to do relatively simple things in Excel or the command prompt and finding old codes other people provided that don't work in current versions of Office so I have AI update it for me or explain what each line does so I can find the current commands or tweak to my specific needs. Coding is something I'd like to learn, I just have no drive at all right now.

I've been programming for 30 years with a degree (and I started learning as a hobbyist nearly 45 years ago). Here are my thoughts:
* First, it doesn't matter if vibe coding "actually" works. All that matters is that the people selling it are good at selling it. Many of the stories we are reading about it, even those that make it sound bad or scary, are actually advertisements.
* I've vibe coded a relatively simple problem (a command-line utility that did one well-defined-but-uncommon thing). I couldn't use it as-is, but it would have worked and definitely saved me the trouble of looking up a lot of stuff. At the same time, it was only my experience and familiarity with the larger concepts (Windows UI events) that allowed me to see that it was doing the right thing.
* Most of what I develop involves solving problems that nobody has solved before. Not because they are super hard math, but because they involve unique and subtle workflows and constraints. So much time spent merely hammering out the definitions of the words we are even using to describe the problem. Coding is already much faster than analysis and requirements gathering. Vibe coding would not help me with that.
* I keep hearing about AI replacing "grunt coders". I have decades of experience and have never seen a "grunt coder". I honestly have no idea what this refers to. Wouldn't such repetitive tasks already be automated by code generators or declarative programming practices?
* I expect the next big thing to be the realization that English is an inefficient and ambiguous way to communicate with an LLM, and that we should instead use a specialized vocabulary and/or notation. At that point, congratulations, you have invented a new computer language. The history of computer language development is the story of trying to clearly tell computers exactly what we want them to do. In fact, this seems so obvious, that I believe it is being intentionally held back until the current revenue sources dry up and a new-new-thing is needed.

* I keep hearing about AI replacing "grunt coders". I have decades of experience and have never seen a "grunt coder". I honestly have no idea what this refers to. Wouldn't such repetitive tasks already be automated by code generators or declarative programming practices?

I know quite a few at my company. They pick up a simple ticket, they do the work, they move on to the next one. No long term projects, no desire to really rise above. Just pick up a ticket, do it, and move on. Typically they are on a bug / support team and just churn through tickets that can't be automated out with fixes.

Kaldrenthebold posted...

* I keep hearing about AI replacing "grunt coders". I have decades of experience and have never seen a "grunt coder". I honestly have no idea what this refers to. Wouldn't such repetitive tasks already be automated by code generators or declarative programming practices?

I know quite a few at my company. They pick up a simple ticket, they do the work, they move on to the next one. No long term projects, no desire to really rise above. Just pick up a ticket, do it, and move on. Typically they are on a bug / support team and just churn through tickets that can't be automated out with fixes.

Nothing wrong with that in my opinion, companies need maintenance on their code base, that may be the number problem area I see in companies the lack of maintenance on their code base in terms of bugs and even updating dependencies to avoid falling behind on vulnerabilities

2Pacavelli posted...

Nothing wrong with that in my opinion, companies need maintenance on their code base, that may be the number problem area I see in companies the lack of maintenance on their code base in terms of bugs and even updating dependencies to avoid falling behind on vulnerabilities

Yeah I was on a bug team for a bit and it was soul crushing to me. Felt like I had no meaning, it was not for me. But some people just want to do the work with minimal effort and move along. I would consider that to be a grunt coder, and a bit crazy someone with 40 years hasn't met one.

Well, there are lots of reasons I don't like this, but presumably you still test the code before deploying it.

nope