Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding? • Hacker News Board

Re: Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding?

#11

Post by muzani » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 5:50 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #9

I dislike the name "vibe coding". I would call it "AI programming" or "programming with natural language and an AI agent" or anything other than "vibe" anything. I'm not giving it vibes, I'm giving it specifications. So much of our culture and society seems to be aimed at appealing to 12 year olds.

Gen X calls it "in flow". The appeal with vibe coding is it's one of the few ways you can be in flow when programming.

Re: Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding?

#12

Post by butterlettuce » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 6:43 AM UTC

ilaksh wrote: post #9

I dislike the name "vibe coding". I would call it "AI programming" or "programming with natural language and an AI agent" or anything other than "vibe" anything. I'm not giving it vibes, I'm giving it specifications. So much of our culture and society seems to be aimed at appealing to 12 year olds.

> So much of our culture and society seems to be aimed at appealing to 12 year olds.

this. totally agree, no cap ong.

ohio.

Re: Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding?

#13

Post by max_ » Sun, Mar 02, 2025, 12:25 PM UTC

I think it won't be any different from how we use different software libraries we don't understand.

Re: Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding?

#14

Post by lifeformed » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 6:10 AM UTC

gregjor wrote: post #2

If you didn’t understand how the code works to begin with, what knowledge did you lose?

You lost the opportunity to learn it if you did it normally

Re: Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding?

#15

Post by kazinator » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 6:13 AM UTC

Let's back up a little. Where the hell are you working, and why are they letting you dump proprietary company code into a third-party cloud application, and paste the result into your code base? What are you putting into the copyright header at the top of the file?

AI generated code is radioactive. I cannot even upstream anything in my open source projects if it's AI generated. Licensing has to be crystal clear. The person has to have the absolute rights to the code that they're trying to contribute.

Re: Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding?

#16

Post by shevvek » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 3:31 PM UTC

Personally I think it's kind of the opposite. AI is like having a personal assistant that aced the first two years of undergrad courses in every subject under the sun, but isn't capable of original reasoning on the frontier of knowledge. AI rewards users who have a good high level map of different areas of knowledge and the verbal/analytical skills to ask good questions. It used to be that to approach an engineering problem in an unfamiliar technical domain, it might take weeks or months of background study to even know what search term to use. I've found that AI reduces that knowledge bootstrap to hours or days. I've been able to work in problem domains I never would have touched otherwise.

Re: Ask HN: Concerns around knowledge loss from vibe coding?

#17

Post by phaddius » Mon, Mar 03, 2025, 6:04 PM UTC

I would separate AI generated code into a lower layer, that you dont need to understand as much, and then you be in control of the higher level business logic that AI wouldn't be good at. Essentially treat it as a library that you've imported.