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PSA: Do not use term "vibe coding"

1 points by Rabbit504030201 ↗ HN
... because it is hopelessly vague and useless.

What does it mean? "Forget that the code even exists AND fully give in to the vibes"? What vibes? How are vibes defined? Are one supposed to dance freestyle on a flat plain? This ain't agentic engineering, that's for sure.

It seems the original coinage was connected to a thought of an AI-led WYSIWYG environment; perhaps connected to a new type of library repository, and managed under a novel source code control system that may or may not be a hard fork of Git. This is much closer to agentic management and graph engineering, but that was not the road the other term took later.

And it certainly doesn't matter now. The best models now are good at doing everything from scratch, uncannily and frighteningly good. So good that there is now a risk of corporate AI budgets no longer growing simply because there won't be anything left to automate in a year or two, tanking the valuation of many decacorn startups and setting up very precarious times ahead.

---

Just my thoughts.

I needed to publish myself.

10 comments

[ 0.29 ms ] story [ 17.7 ms ] thread
prologic
+1 -- It's also become insulting and a bit of a slur. We need to stop doing this. It's disrepsectful.
Finnucane
Doesn't deserve respect.
rationalist
I imagine that's what the horse riders said about "driving" for the people using horseless carriages.

Please don't let this become an "us versus them" ideology.

Progress is always uncomfortable for some people. Jobs and skills have always been displaced by advancements in technology.

tstrimple
Nothing about your post indicates you deserve any respect. Slop comment which adds nothing to the conversation. Probably AI.
danstefancu
if we keep it new products should be coined "corporate vibes"
Rabbit504030201
I hate the term "vibe" anyway. Only appropriate for epilepsy-filled, crowded electronic music dance parties. Using it anything else gives me regurgitation tingling.
spacedcowboy
I think the best description of modern AI-driven coding is "thinking things into existence".

All the vision, direction, yea-or-nay answers to LLM suggestions comes from the human, all the coding, testing, bug-hunting is done by the LLM.

An LLM is excellent at pulling together paths between nodes in its weights database and providing solutions to link these two hitherto disparate states, but it lacks the creativity of the human, the desire to make something, the passion of creation, admittedly at a slightly farther distance than has been the case to date.

"Vibe coding" and "AI Slop" are terms coined by the threatened and the scared, IM(NSH)O. They denigrate unfairly, and while they may have been appropriate for early-stage LLMs, todays systems are different constructs entirely.

In a decade, you'll be the uncommon software engineer if you're doing things all on your own, a curiosity, akin to the Amish. Life is change, and embracing the change is the only way to succeed in an ever-changing world. Yes, there will be fallout; yes there will be consequences, and yes there will be opportunity.

Rabbit504030201
"Vibe coding" was originally coined by Andrej Karpathy.

I didn't wrote so because it would made me perceive the flow of my prose "clunky". In other words, i didn't want acclaimed scientist's name in my argument as it would made it too complex to me.

micahdeath
I "vibe code" but to me, it's a random thought and test to see what I can produce quickly. It doesn't have to be AI assisted/generated either. Maybe more ADHD, ooh, Ball! Or epiphanies where I have to try something out right away.

Could be trash or could be gold.

krapp
But it accurately describes how most people use AI for code generation. For every person doing careful, meticulous testing and only using AI to incrementally generate code they personally understand and that they personally test and validate - to automate the "boring parts" - there are ten thousand "lol model go brrr" coders who don't care, and don't want to care. Who just let Claude chew on their prompt and burn tokens for a couple of days then push straight to Github.

When AI coders in general care about anything more than the "vibe" and no longer consider touching the code to be beneath their contempt, we can stop calling it what it is.