Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
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Re: Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
#2it's kind of the difference between a studio musician and a songwriter. one you're doing for a paycheck, and you may or may not enjoy the work to varying degrees. the other is your passion.
LLMs are freeing companies to produce faster, but your expertise is still needed to supervise them for now.
coding in your spare time as a passion project is likely the outcome for many engineers who like the craft.
you might go as far as separating environments, or even whole machines, for your passion. keep a machine with NO ai options available to push you to code solutions by hand, etc.
Re: Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
#3it's kind of the difference between a studio musician and a songwriter. one you're doing for a paycheck, and you may or may not enjoy the work to varying degrees. the other is your passion. LLMs are freeing companies to produce faster, but your expertise is still needed to supervise them for now. coding in your spare time as a passion project is likely the outcome for many engineers who like the craft. you might go a…
but all of that said, when is the last time you TRULY solved an entire codebase by hand? no stackoverflow, no google, no intellisense, no autocomplete (hell, no asking other engineers)?
Re: Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
#4it's kind of the difference between a studio musician and a songwriter. one you're doing for a paycheck, and you may or may not enjoy the work to varying degrees. the other is your passion. LLMs are freeing companies to produce faster, but your expertise is still needed to supervise them for now. coding in your spare time as a passion project is likely the outcome for many engineers who like the craft. you might go a…
coding as a passion project in a separate environment is an interesting idea.
almost like deliberately creating a space where the struggle is allowed to exist again.
the challenge though would be finding out time for my passion. if i'm not able to do that then only i am the one to blame
Re: Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
#5it's kind of the difference between a studio musician and a songwriter. one you're doing for a paycheck, and you may or may not enjoy the work to varying degrees. the other is your passion. LLMs are freeing companies to produce faster, but your expertise is still needed to supervise them for now. coding in your spare time as a passion project is likely the outcome for many engineers who like the craft. you might go a…
but all of that said, when is the last time you TRULY solved an entire codebase by hand? no stackoverflow, no google, no intellisense, no autocomplete (hell, no asking other engineers)?
long time man. i think around a year. i don't really remember tbh. but it has been a really really long time
Re: Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
#6Earlier quoted context omitted.
but all of that said, when is the last time you TRULY solved an entire codebase by hand? no stackoverflow, no google, no intellisense, no autocomplete (hell, no asking other engineers)?
long time man. i think around a year. i don't really remember tbh. but it has been a really really long time
same here, of course. so in a sense, LLMs are just the next phase of a gradual erosion, not a total sea change.
Re: Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
#7Earlier quoted context omitted.
long time man. i think around a year. i don't really remember tbh. but it has been a really really long time
same here, of course. so in a sense, LLMs are just the next phase of a gradual erosion, not a total sea change.
and it is upto us to resist the erosion
Re: Vibe Coding and the Death of Craftsmanship (Personal Essay)
#8The craftsmanship question is real, but I think the more pressing issue is what replaces it. Craft wasn't just about aesthetics — it was about understanding the system deeply enough to make good architectural decisions, trace bugs, and reason about failure modes.
When that depth erodes, you don't just lose "nice" code. You lose the ability to maintain it, extend it, or even know when something has gone wrong.
A few of us have been thinking about this and put together the Agile Vibe Coding Manifesto (https://agilevibecoding.org) — an attempt to extend the original Agile Manifesto for environments where AI is doing significant amounts of the generating. One of its core principles: "Generated systems remain understandable and maintainable by humans, regardless of how they were produced."
The manifesto isn't a rejection of AI tools — it's an argument that the disciplines of craftsmanship (traceability, domain clarity, human accountability) matter even more in an AI-assisted world, not less. Worth a read if this resonates.