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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

#81

Post by diggan »

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…

I don't know if it's you and I (and some others) who are just uptight sticklers or something, but it bothers me a ton too. Same thing happening with "open source" in connection to LLMs, where suddenly some companies have decided to try to redefine the meaning, people lack the care to make the distinction.

In a dream world, each new terminology goes through an RFC to figure out a meaning we all (some of us) can agree to, so at least we can link to an angry RFC when people continue to misuse the term anyways.

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

#82

Post by 3dsnano »

A4ET8a8uTh0_v2 wrote: post #44
eastbound wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Oh yes[1] Then remember when we said tests should be the specs? Then we said the end users are the specs? All of them can be construed as a joke in our erratic search for the correct way to write software without those $150k developers that seem to be the only ones getting the job done, assuming they have a competent management hierarchy and stock options incentives. [1] We have a waterfall software and I wonder whet…

I think this erratic manner of trying to find the correct way is the issue. I am currently nearing my 2nd year at a company A in my industry, and while I did know they all kinda suck in their own special way, I honestly had no idea it was this bad until I had to try to make this craziness somehow work for us. Even if there are standards, I do not see people following them. Last year, the one girl, who did seem to try…

Agree it is a mess. I wonder if we would all be better off accepting this and learning to laugh out loud more often.

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

#83

Post by codingdave »

senko wrote: post #66
simonw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...)

I think the term for this is: "coding".

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

#85

Post by simonw »

diggan wrote: post #81
simonw wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

I don't know if it's you and I (and some others) who are just uptight sticklers or something, but it bothers me a ton too. Same thing happening with "open source" in connection to LLMs, where suddenly some companies have decided to try to redefine the meaning, people lack the care to make the distinction. In a dream world, each new terminology goes through an RFC to figure out a meaning we all (some of us) can agree…

Yeah that "open source" thing is SO frustrating. We have a very well established definition for what "open source" means: https://opensource.org/osd

I have a suspicion that Facebook insist on calling their open weights models "open source" because the EU AI act says "This Regulation does not apply to AI systems released under free and open-source licences" but doesn't do a good job of defining what "open-source" means! Bottom of this page: https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/article/2/

Correction: the closest it gets to defining open source is in https://artificialintelligenceact.eu/recital/102/

> The licence should be considered to be free and open-source also when it allows users to run, copy, distribute, study, change and improve software and data, including models under the condition that the original provider of the model is credited, the identical or comparable terms of distribution are respected.

(I found that by piping the entire EU AI act through Gemini 2.5 Flash - https://gist.github.com/simonw/f2e341a2e8ea9ca75c6426fa85bc2...)

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

#86

Post by jjmarr »

smcg wrote: post #72
Buttons840 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Theoretically a PM could say "the code is disposable and obsoleted by the next deployment. let's just document our prompts." I don't know if that's a good idea but a lot of people are going to try it.

It's like NixOS but instead of the much-maligned Nix language, you can use the English language!

What could go wrong?

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

#87

Post by __loam »

smcg wrote: post #72
Buttons840 wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Theoretically a PM could say "the code is disposable and obsoleted by the next deployment. let's just document our prompts." I don't know if that's a good idea but a lot of people are going to try it.

This is an obviously terrible idea that will lead to regressions on every deployment.

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

#88

Post by skydhash »

spamizbad wrote: post #55
alphazard wrote: post #6

Different people clearly mean different things when they talk about software quality. There is quality as perceived by the user: few bugs, accurately models the problem they have, no more complicated than necessary, etc. Then there is this other notion of quality as something to do with how the software is built. How neat and clear it is. How easy it is to extend or change. The first kind of quality is the only kind…

The second type of quality is necessary to achieve the first type of quality for systems with nontrivial levels of complexity. It doesn’t need to be perfect, or even close to perfect, but it does need to be “good enough” - Your end users will eventually notice how long bugs take to get fixed, how long and how often outages occur, and how long it takes to get new functionality into your software. But beyond your end-u…

Software architecture was never about code elegance, it’s about making it easier to get reliable results. And that’s mostly about using automated tooling to check correctness and easy to understand and to modify modules.

That’s the easiest way to get both definitions of quality as it’s way esier to test isolated modules and their integration than testing the whole system as a whole. And way easier to correct wrong code.

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

#89

Post by headsupernova »

tysonworks wrote: post #67
geor9e wrote: post #47

This is common sense. The whole article read like they asked ChatGPT to fluff one sentence "review vibe code with a human before pushing to prod" into an entire article.

Vibe blogging.

So much of this now and so much more coming.

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

#90

Post by fragmede »

jjmarr wrote: post #86
smcg wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically a PM could say "the code is disposable and obsoleted by the next deployment. let's just document our prompts." I don't know if that's a good idea but a lot of people are going to try it.

It's like NixOS but instead of the much-maligned Nix language, you can use the English language! What could go wrong?

Wait shit brb, getting millions in VC funding.
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