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No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

kenneth.io

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Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#11

Post by 101008 »

LauraMedia wrote: post #5

The problem with this little post is, that vibe coding just is not a "better" way to code. It strips development of something from all the fun developing, from circling around an idea, from figuring out something with your own brain, from trying and testing new stuff, from actually working as a developer... If you genuinely "vibe-code 24/7", you don't develop software, you are translating business logic rules to a se…

I did this analogy in the past and I was way downvoted. Just for clarification, I use vibe-coding a lot in side projects where I don't know if I am going to release it at all, or when I know that a mistake in the code won't crash a business.

However, when I do vibe-coding, I feel like a PM asking a remote team to do code and I get back the response asap. It could be good or it could be bad, but if I don't check it, I am just a PM trusting 100% what my engineer (team) did. How did this work in reality before IA? Well, the engineers had to have some kind of responsability and testing, and assuring that what they did was OK. Now that part is completely "disabled", and the PM Is responsable for the tech aspect as well, without the knowledge (and I am avoiding all the deploy / infra perspective).

Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#13

Post by _kush »

Vibe coding looks amazing at first, especially if you don't know how to code.

You click a few things, move stuff around, and it feels like you're building something real. But then it gets messy. You try to change one thing, and ten other things break. It becomes frustrating fast.

But if you already know how to code, it's actually great. You can tell what went wrong, fix it, and keep going. It’s fun when you can fall back on your skills. Not so fun when you can’t.

Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#14

Post by lukev »

Here's the thing. What you're doing when you're vibe coding is iteratively creating specifications for software, which the LLM is capable of converting to runnable code. Insufficient specs will lead to code that doesn't do the right thing.

Chat is fundamentally the wrong interface for this. My instructions to the LLM in a chat session are effectively the software specifications, but chat encourages to treat them as ephemeral.

It's analogous to writing code in a high-level language, then deleting the code after it's compiled and keeping only the low-level bytecode.

In the case of vibe-coding, my specifications to the LLM _are_ the code, and the LLM-emitted code is a _artifact_ that can in principle be discarded and re-generated, assuming my specs are precise enough to ensure consistent outputs (the nondeterminism of LLMs is definitely a issue here.)

So I want tools that let me persist my specs, help me iterate on them, check them into version control, and help me test how the LLM interprets them. Not a chat.

Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#15

Post by sporkit150 »

Are we not seeing parallels here? No code was touted as a way to eliminate coding altogether. Loved by the business, didn't work in practice. Vibe coding; a way to eliminate (maybe reduce). I see the pitch, but the jury is out on how it will work in practice.

Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#16

Post by wavemode »

This post seems to suggest that no-code tools like Webflow and Retool are dead or dying. Nothing could be further from the truth - no-code is a booming business, moreso than many developers (who, by their nature, do not like or need such platforms) may realize.

Hearing professional developers talk about how no-code must be useless and/or dead, is kind of like hearing a professional swimmer say that floaties are dead.

Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#17

Post by _fat_santa »

Just like with no-code, vibe-coding has the same "interface problem". With no-code you were locked down to using the provided editor and had to constantly flight it to get what you wanted. Now it's no different except you are not typing natural language into a prompt and fighting it to get the correct output.

Vibe coding just like no-code will work to a degree, as you can easily build simple apps with either solution. It's just when you start building something bigger that both systems completely fall apart. While I welcome both technologies and think that it will help non-technical folks write code and build stuff. The world is still powered by "large" software and that's the stuff that you can't just vibe code your way through.

Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#18

Post by electrozav »

This was written as VC fluff. It is impossible to agree with an argument of having control over code when theres a middleman which interprets natural language.

The human won't understand how the codebase works when the codebase is developed by AI. Coupled to the fact AI misunderstands and gets things wrong, any company worth an audit needs more assurances

Re: No code is dead. Long live vibe coding

#19

Post by qsort »

jaymzcampbell wrote: post #3

I originally read this as "No, code is dead..." and thought here we go. I agree with the sentiment in this, and seems to line up with my experience with friends and colleagues of various persuasions. Certainly for anything React-like and front end heavy, people can scratch itches like never before. I still think it's heavily towards the "throwaway" and relatively small side of this, beyond that I think if you're not…

Agreed, the article's perspective is much narrower and I think it makes total sense.

Previous no-code tools could work but required total buy-in. On the other hand you can have Claude generate a small throwaway frontend that relies on Web technologies you'd be using anyway.

My mental model for this is "Excel++". It has similar strengths (very powerful, users don't need developers to write every last line) and similar weaknesses (easy to make a mess or go down blind alleys if you don't know what you're doing).

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