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All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

varunraghu.com

41–50 of 104 posts

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Absolutely. It's augmentation not automation, it does what I want or it gets the hose again. You make the framework and it colours in the lines. If you don't draw the pattern first you're going to get a kindergarten mess. There are times I'm amazed by its suggestions but it will also cheat and "lie" and if you're not paying attention, you'll miss it. But these days many tasks for me consist of: I need this, look how…

It’ll cheat a lot when writing unit tests. Particularly “agentic” tools like cursor. It’ll get a test to pass, even if it’s against a laughably incorrect implementation. I’ve ended up with tests called stuff like “foobar successfully returns impossible value that suggests programmer error” lmao

My favorite thing Claude code has been doing recently is adding second totally separate implementation of whatever I asked it to write tests for, and writing the tests against that.

Conveniently, when it then changes the original implementation, the tests don’t fail!

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#42

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

I 100% agree that this is how the experience is right now. I don't necessarily think it will stay this way, though. The tools are so new, we shouldn't be so sure that the future versions won't allow non-coders to code successfully.

Isn't it a subset of "understanding".. AI as we have them currently emulates something that understands us. If you ask it to write a program, how would a non-coder know if the output of the emulated understanding is accurate enough as code, or a miss?

Reminds me of the joke:

int getRandom() {

  return 4; // chosen by a dice, guaranteed to be random

}

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#43

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

I 100% agree that this is how the experience is right now. I don't necessarily think it will stay this way, though. The tools are so new, we shouldn't be so sure that the future versions won't allow non-coders to code successfully.

> we shouldn't be so sure that the future versions won't allow non-coders to code successfully

Care to put some money behind this fantastical claim, in a bet?

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I 100% agree that this is how the experience is right now. I don't necessarily think it will stay this way, though. The tools are so new, we shouldn't be so sure that the future versions won't allow non-coders to code successfully.

> we shouldn't be so sure that the future versions won't allow non-coders to code successfully Care to put some money behind this fantastical claim, in a bet?

Sure, if you granted me odds commiserate with my statement that "you can't be so sure", meaning I would get like 99-1 odds.

I wasn't saying it will certainly reach the point where non-coders can code, I am saying we can't be certain it won't just because it can't yet

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#45
I wonder if Twitter is already filled with "hard-working all umerican" paid-influencers claiming Indians are so low-IQ/smelly etc. that they can't even use AI to do the jobs that they got through race/religion/caste/smell/skin-color/language/etc.-based nepotism.

They Duk-a-duk! (South Park is awesome isn't it ?)

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#46
post #3

Most people who vibe code will never make anything meaningful. Low effort in -> low effort out I can actually code so no point in vibing. To vibe means to never look at the code, where is the fun in that?

Not all coding is interesting, I would say the majority of it is a chore. One shotting small utilities that I have no interest in writing (for me, front-end JS, chrome extensions, web scraping selectors) is wonderful. I just vibe coded a "crop a pdf" web UI and it worked with no intervention. It doesn't have to be meaningful, just useful.

Yeah, it's very convenient to ask an LLM to generate e.g. a "Hello World" browser extension and then to gradually fill it with logic. Searching for tutorials gets you outdated resources, poorly written ones and obscure failures.

Then again, I asked ChatGPT moons ago to generate a Filebeat config file, and its output contained syntax errors...

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#47
post #16

I think there is one thing that most people miss, obviously! => You can use AI to double-check (not single check), avoid overengineering, fill knowledge gaps, scan for inconsistencies and many more things. The main benefit it has for me is not that it codes me stuff real fast. It is that my learning curve improved, drastically, whenever I have a missunderstanding. I dive down and test it. Sometimes AI is wrong and I…

AI can let you build crappier code more quickly. I find this useful for throwaway code and unit tests. But more importantly, it lets me write better code with a significant but small time penalty. I can try multiple approaches, do experiments, bounce ideas off the AI, et cetera.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#48
post #31

I'm glad there's vibe coding available to non-tech founders so they can build the equivalent of high-fidelity prototypes. May not be MVP worthy yet, but at least it gets them started.

In reality what it will more likely result in is for them to get a false feeling of competence and they'll start to think that they don't need those tech folks anymore, even more than they already do.

They'll put even less value in the people doing the implementation and double down on them being the person with the vision and that's what makes them so great.

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#49

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

I 100% agree that this is how the experience is right now. I don't necessarily think it will stay this way, though. The tools are so new, we shouldn't be so sure that the future versions won't allow non-coders to code successfully.

Reality is often disappointing. The reality is that this is sold to people who don't know how to code as a way to code. Even if the theory is that an engineer can make the best use of it (whether or not it helps is another debate).

Re: All vibe coding tools are selling a get rich quick scheme

#50

The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Eve…

What you're describing is not vibe coding. I realize some people call anything with an LLM generating code "vibe coding" but it's not and I'm going to die on this hill.

1 it's not the meaning Karpathy used originally, which was for creating software through prompts WITHOUT looking at the source code

2 it's not the meaning people outside programming circles mean, either, which is identical to Karpathy's original definition

the title of the article is talking about 2 and is completely correct.

YOU, on the other hand, are talking about an upgrade to IntelliSense. Use a different term. You're describing regular programming, with a new IDE tool.

If it's not going to replace programmers and allow regular people to create software without looking at the code, it's not vibe coding. Full stop.

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