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Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

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Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#61

Post by texuf »

ndepoel wrote: post #18

This all reminds me a lot of the early 2000's, when big corporations thought they could save a lot of money by outsourcing development work to low-income countries and have their expensive in-house engineers only write specifications. Turns out most of those outsourcing parties won't truly understand the core ideas behind the system you're trying to build, won't think outside the box and make corrections where necess…

Do any of these vibe coding tools write out the prompts as specs and then keep the specs up to date as you continue prompting? Seems like specs == formal prompts.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#63

Post by viraptor »

texuf wrote: post #61
ndepoel wrote: post #18

This all reminds me a lot of the early 2000's, when big corporations thought they could save a lot of money by outsourcing development work to low-income countries and have their expensive in-house engineers only write specifications. Turns out most of those outsourcing parties won't truly understand the core ideas behind the system you're trying to build, won't think outside the box and make corrections where necess…

Do any of these vibe coding tools write out the prompts as specs and then keep the specs up to date as you continue prompting? Seems like specs == formal prompts.

You don't need a tool for that. "You're going to assist me in writing a detailed software spec in markdown. At each step adjust the document to incorporate new information. Suggest improvements and highlight areas which have been ignored so far. Initial description: ..."

If you have multiple of those, you can tell it about required sections / format, or provide a good past example.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#64

Post by cybertheory »

fma wrote: post #40
mr_mitm wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Also from the tweet; > It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing You were never supposed to vibe code on serious projects.

It's fine for tooling or weekend project. I did it on an internal tool. It's got so much functionality now though, that Cursor struggles. It was great when I had a blank project, needed x, y, z and it went off and did It's thing. The moment the project got bug and need modifications, it is better that I do it myself. Also I am a backend engineer. I don't know what kind of code it's producing for my front end. I just…

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Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#65

Post by nyarlathotep_ »

znpy wrote: post #54
ndepoel wrote: post #18

This all reminds me a lot of the early 2000's, when big corporations thought they could save a lot of money by outsourcing development work to low-income countries and have their expensive in-house engineers only write specifications. Turns out most of those outsourcing parties won't truly understand the core ideas behind the system you're trying to build, won't think outside the box and make corrections where necess…

Have we stopped, really? Last time i was at a faang my org also had offices in one of those “low-income countries”. So in a way we haven’t stopped. Also, depending on how you define “low-income” then up to two thirds of the organisation i worked in was in a low-income country.

> Have we stopped, really?

No, when I was at a large, well-known company a year ago, job listings were 2:1 off-shore (India, South America) vs on-shore. There was also an increasing amount of contractors used, even for public-facing stuff you wouldn't expect.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#66

Post by senko »

simonw wrote: post #51
SCdF wrote: post #5

So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?la…

I wrote about this last month: "Not all AI-assisted programming is vibe coding" - https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ Vibe coding is when you don't review the code at all. If you're using LLMs to help you write code but you're actually reviewing what they produce (and iterating on it) that's not vibe coding any more. This battle is almost certainly lost already, but dammit I'm gonna keep fighting anywa…

We do need a simple term for "used AI to write code (semi)autonomously, but checked and/or tweaked the result and I care about the quality".

Vibe-but-verify? Faux-Vibe? AiPair? (... I'll see myself out...)

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#68

Post by bigstrat2003 »

dheera wrote: post #31
SCdF wrote: post #5

So what have we redefined vibe coding to mean exactly? The original tweet[1] talked very specifically about not caring about quality, just accepting whatever code the AI produces blindly, as long as you get the black box output you're looking for, and just randomly try again if you didn't. Are people now using this term to mean "giving an AI agent broad tasks"? [1] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?la…

I absolutely hate the polarization around "vibe coding". The whole point of AI agents is to eventually get good enough to do this stuff better than humans do. It's okay to dogfood and test them now and see how well they do, and improve them over time. Software engineers will eventually become managers of AI agents. Vibe coding is just version 0.1 pre-alpha of that future.

> The whole point of AI agents is to eventually get good enough to do this stuff better than humans do. It's okay to dogfood and test them now and see how well they do, and improve them over time.

I agree with that. The problem I have is that people are getting sucked into the hype and evaluating the results of those tests with major rose-colored glasses. They glaze over all the issues and fool themselves into thinking that the overall result is favorable.

Re: Vibe Coding is not an excuse for low-quality work

#69

Post by Buttons840 »

ndepoel wrote: post #18

This all reminds me a lot of the early 2000's, when big corporations thought they could save a lot of money by outsourcing development work to low-income countries and have their expensive in-house engineers only write specifications. Turns out most of those outsourcing parties won't truly understand the core ideas behind the system you're trying to build, won't think outside the box and make corrections where necess…

More than one project manager has insisted that everything about the system must be documented--that's called the source code.

As you say, by the time you specify everything, you've written the code.

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