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I wonder if vibe coding is a bit like DIY plumbing. You can do it yourself a bit and then later when water starts gushing all over your bathroom you hire an emergency plumber at a high fee. You learn a little more for next time.
And on youtube, you can find many expert DIYer plumbers who go to greater lengths than pros.
If you do something for a living, you have to work faster than if you are doing it as a hobby for fun.
To be fair to him, my partner who works in Healthcare has the same concern, and for quite precisely the same reason: if the kind of work normally done by juniors who are training/building their skills is done by machines instead, where do the next generation of seniors come from?
My response to both was that I was confident the market would fix this problem itself - people will not pay for garbage. There is a reason books are still printed by established publishers. Why buy a book when you can just print a book on printer paper yourself? Because reading a book on printer paper sucks.
I cannot imagine that machines will ever replace any work where there is any meaningful threshold for "correct". I am so intrigued to see how this plays out across the broader economy.
Vibe code has a lot in common with legacy code. Low confidence to change it, low internal and external quality. Also some differences: low age-to-quantity ratio, schedule pressure, inflated expectations. It's most cost-effective to shift errors from runtime to compile time and from compile time to design time. Unfortunately, AI rushes people to runtime as fast as possible.
I agree that vibed code can often be treated like other legacy code. However is it true that people are reluctant to change vibe code?
That raises the question if LLM-generated code is going out of fashion in general. The article seems to assume it will always exist and always need clean-up. But what if it's not worth it and instead you should (mainly) return to the world where humans write code? Simply because salary < LLM-credits + cleanup costs.
> Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. That's the core of situation as described in the article. I wonder how true that is, that it's faster overall than having developers build the MVP. From what I've seen, I think developers can build just as fast, especially with AI assistance. They may not want…
For building a prototype, unless you have the discipline to not put the prototype into production and your organization has similar discipline, I wouldn't recommend vibe coding. We all know how hard it can be to convince management that he amazing thing they're using right this moment needs to be scrapped and rewritten because the insides are garbage.
No-code tools are better suited and safer to use in that respect.
> Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. That's the core of situation as described in the article. I wonder how true that is, that it's faster overall than having developers build the MVP. From what I've seen, I think developers can build just as fast, especially with AI assistance. They may not want…
>> Startups save weeks getting to MVP with Vibe Coding, then spend comparable time and budget on cleanup. But that’s still faster than traditional development. > That's the core of situation as described in the article. I wonder how true that is, that it's faster overall than having developers build the MVP. In a startup it's often very important to show traction, and thus decreasing time to market can be hugely bene…
People have to be careful not to miss their window trying to be perfect, but first and broken isn't a clear winner over second and working anymore.
A while ago, I was having an intense and heated argument with a good friend in the Finance sector about whether AI would replace jobs. I informed him that AI can only do something repeatable, "already solved problems", or what I call "shit kicking work". His response was something to the effect that I was underestimating how many people's jobs were _entirely_ shit kicking work. To be fair to him, my partner who works…
For most of human history calculations were performed by humans. Entire banking systems were 100% dependent on humans, with some helpful tools, performing accurate calculations. The idea of not performing that work with machines is laughable now. Machines have replaced humans, especially when correctness matters.
Humans are also remarkably bad at being correct and most jobs have a very low impact. I think your perspective is skewed towards the job you are doing, which is in no way representative of most office work, which is mostly tedious, low impact and low stakes.
Vibe code has a lot in common with legacy code. Low confidence to change it, low internal and external quality. Also some differences: low age-to-quantity ratio, schedule pressure, inflated expectations. It's most cost-effective to shift errors from runtime to compile time and from compile time to design time. Unfortunately, AI rushes people to runtime as fast as possible.
"Vibe code is legacy code (val.town)" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=44739556
Janitor Engineers [0] are already a thing? Damn. Also, all links in this article starting from the "Why AI code fails at scale" section are dead for some reason, even though it was written only 5 days ago. That raises some questions... EDIT: Not trying to offend anyone with this [0], I've actually had the same half-joking retirement plan since the dawn of vibe coding, to become an "all-organic-code" consultant who un…