Today I learned the term Vibe Coding. I love it.
Edit: This article is a treasure.
The concept of vibe coding elaborates on Karpathy’s claim from 2023 that “the hottest new programming language is English”,
Claim from 2023?! Lol. I’ve heard (BASIC) that (COBOL) before (Ruby).
A key part of the definition of vibe coding is that the user accepts code without full understanding.[1] AI researcher Simon Willison said: “If an LLM wrote every line of your code, but you’ve reviewed, tested, and understood it all, that’s not vibe coding in my book—that’s using an LLM as a typing assistant.”[1]
Did we make it from AI hype to AI dunk in the space of a single Wikipedia article? Lol.
Interesting that the term was coined by someone who presumably intended it to mean a good thing. I assumed it to be an entirely derogatory term…
Well, lots of words are sort of derogatory in programming right? Hackers hacking things together, rubber duck debugging (you have a bug? Go talk to a toy!), git blame and probably more
Edit: forget git blame, git itself is already slang for idiot. As Linus Torvalds once said, he created two successful projects, both named after himself
Vibe Coding essentially automates copy-and-pasting the answers from StackOverflow.com.
But sometimes it pastes in the code from the questions.
Now… Now… Wait until they have to debug it
Or fix a simple syntax error. I’ve seen that a few times from juniors who thought they were too smart to learn, and it’s painful to watch.
LLMs excel at fixing typos. That’s honestly the most useful aspect of them.
Which is also not a real use-case. Like, just check your work, you don’t need a tool for that.
Hell I don’t even use spell-check because it’s just distracting, and it’s a fundamentally wrong way to think about language.
You don’t want to. Fine. Other people do. Fine.
People are being miseducated about what they can achieve by charlatans looking to make a quick buck before the hype bubble implodes, and the tech is helping cook the planet.
It’s not “fine”.
that’s a separate argument from “it’s not useful”.
