Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Vibe Coding Is Overrated

transitions.substack.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

41–50 of 93 posts

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#41

Post by IshKebab »

hajile wrote: post #21
yoda97 wrote: post #19

I have already vibe-coded countless number of scripts and two side projects that were on my "list" for years, these projects would have never seen the light of day if not for Cursor. That's the whole point.

The fact that they could be "vibe coded" means that they (or something similar) probably already existed, but you just didn't know they did.

No, there's a very very long tail of tasks that are too niche for a proper tool to exist for but it would be annoying effort to figure out yourself.

My most recent example of this: write a script to delete all git branches that point to HEAD.

Go ahead see how long it takes you to figure out the command for that, because it took me under 60 seconds with AI.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#42

Post by hnuser123456 »

skydhash wrote: post #20
yoda97 wrote: post #19

I have already vibe-coded countless number of scripts and two side projects that were on my "list" for years, these projects would have never seen the light of day if not for Cursor. That's the whole point.

Is it. For small scripts like these you can get far with basic search and sources like docs/github/SO. Maybe cursor is more “fun”, “engaging”, and the like, but it’s not like it was a difficult job before.

If you could throw your endless todo list of side projects at an LLM, and can see at least some of them implemented overnight effortlessly, why not? You can still take credit because you had the idea in the first place and went through the effort to write it down and describe it well enough to be achievable. It's definitely more fun especially if you have limited hobby coding time.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#43

Post by olalonde »

If anything, I'd argue it's overrated by non developer and underrated by experienced developers. I just started using Claude Code 2-3 weeks ago and productivity boost has been massive, but I definitely have to stay involved.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#44

Post by hajile »

m348e912 wrote: post #3

Vibe coding is definitely problematic for someone who isn't a strong coder, aka me. Recently for fun, I used ChatGPT to code a python script to scrape another news site and render it in the style of HackerNews. It took 21 iterations of code updates to get a working version. It isn't bad but doesn't pull the latest articles (I don't know why) and hell if I could debug it.

Wordpress already killed the low-end of the market a long time ago. 15 years ago, you were setting up wordpress sites and throwing on a simple theme for $500 or so then trying to get them to write up the copy and provide images (or upcharge for those services). Most of this was generally a loss leader with the actual profits coming from charging to manage the hosting for them.

This is the market disrupted by vibe coding and AI-generated copy/images.

These Wordpress or Wix/Squarespace sites account for MOST of the web, but only a minuscule fraction of high-paid devs. For those devs, AI just doesn't change very much because it has no idea what questions need to be asked to actually deliver what management wants let alone the ability to problem solve and deliver novel solutions to issues.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#45

Post by atonse »

_bin_ wrote: post #37

Semi-controversial headline but I think the point is fair. It doesn't yet produce results that meet a spec well. It's fine for scripts because if it insists you do it the bot's way, that's fine. If it uses the wrong library, whatever. And so on. I'm going to keep shilling this until people start doing it: I'd love to see everyone who says he's vibecoded something non-trivial and posts/blogs about it start dumping and…

The one time so far that I actually implemented a full feature using only vibe coding (and it wasn't trivial), I had to be very specific about what I wanted, and it was in a very widely used stack (React/NextJS), it was a very common feature (sorting, filtering, pagination on a table) and it worked beautifully.

But it felt magical the one time it happened. Every other time, I'm mostly using tab autocomplete and that works quite well too.

And when I code in Elixir, I have a 20% success rate even with small requests.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#46

Post by ryandrake »

ramoz wrote: post #38

> Vibe coding is now a burgeoning tech movement. Will it last? Only time will tell. Was this vibe-blogged? 'Vibe coding' is here to stay and the future of software development is assistant-led interfaces. I pair program daily with Claude Code on a distributed systems & a handful of other apps as needs arise. Most of my work is puppeteering, as well as careful directing. & I can't sit blindly, but we're producing vali…

"Vibe Coding" is not pair-programming with a LLM assistant, using it an intelligent auto-complete, with a human driving the structure and design of the code. The term was original meant to describe "Doing the entire program from an empty file by prompting, accepting all the code as-given, and repeating until it works."

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#47

Post by runlaszlorun »

Has anyone honestly had good experiences vibe coding? I mean like building any kind of application above and beyond a simple shell-like script?

Honest question here. I'd be curious too what scenarios in general folks find LLMs useful re coding.

edited: typo

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#48

Post by AstroBen »

hajile wrote: post #21
yoda97 wrote: post #19

I have already vibe-coded countless number of scripts and two side projects that were on my "list" for years, these projects would have never seen the light of day if not for Cursor. That's the whole point.

The fact that they could be "vibe coded" means that they (or something similar) probably already existed, but you just didn't know they did.

What the end product is depends on the specific parts chosen and the way they're put together

Just because the parts are available doesn't mean every possible combination of them has already been made

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#49

Post by jdgoesmarching »

ramoz wrote: post #38

> Vibe coding is now a burgeoning tech movement. Will it last? Only time will tell. Was this vibe-blogged? 'Vibe coding' is here to stay and the future of software development is assistant-led interfaces. I pair program daily with Claude Code on a distributed systems & a handful of other apps as needs arise. Most of my work is puppeteering, as well as careful directing. & I can't sit blindly, but we're producing vali…

We really need to lock down semantics here, but I wouldn’t describe what you’re doing as vibe coding.

Seems like we’re need a term for something between basic tab autocomplete and purely vibing without glancing at the code. If only to have separate conferences in 2-3 years.

Re: Vibe Coding Is Overrated

#50

Post by square_usual »

I enjoy using LLMs for code assistance, but every time I've tried to vibe code, even with the newest models (including Gemini 2.5 Pro) and the latest tools (like Codex and Claude Code, which everyone raves about) the results have ranged from bad to middling. After all the raving on Gemini 2.5 Pro I tried again and it wrote horrendous code, seemed like it didn't understand the language (Lua) at all and went off on its own tangents doing things I didn't ask for. I think I'll wait until it gets much better before I try again.

Also, why is it so hard for LLMs to generate code without stupid comments everywhere? I don't want to see // frobincate followed by thing.frobnicate(). Even when I include clear, strict instructions they'll ALWAYS generate comments like that. It pisses me off.

Post reply on HN