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It is not useless. You should absolutely continue to vibes code. Don’t let a professional get involved at the ground floor. Don’t inhouse a professional staff.
Please continue paying me $200/hr for months on end debugging your Baby’s First Web App tier coding project long after anyone else can salvage it.
And don’t forget to tell your investors how smart you are by Vibes Coding! That’s the most important part. Secure! That! Series! B! Go public! Get yourself a billion dollar valuation on these projects!
Keep me in the good wine and the nice car! I love vibes coding.
Not me, I’d rather work on a clean code base without any slop, even if it pays a little less. QoL > TC
I don’t really care about vibe coders but as a dev with just under 2 decades in the field:
- Your vibe coding shit will not go to prod until humans fully review it
- You better review it yourself first before offloading that massive mental drain to someone else (which means you still need to have some semblance of programming skills). Don’t open a PR with 250 files in it and then tell someone else to validate it.
- Use more context. Don’t give it vague ass prompts.
- Don’t use auto-accept. That’s just lazy asshole shit.
I can’t stress this enough: if you give me a PR with tons of new files and expect me to review it when you didn’t even review it yourself, I will 100% reject it and make you do it. If it’s all dumped into a single commit, I will whip your computer into the nearest body of water and tell you to go fish it out.
I don’t care what AI tool wrote your code. You’re still responsible for it and I will blame you.
I have never used an AI to code and don’t care about being able to do it to the point that I have disabled the buttons that Microsoft crammed into VS Code.
That said, I do think a better use of AI might be to prepare PRs in logical and reasonable sizes for submission that have coherent contextualization and scope. That way when some dingbat vibe codes their way into a circle jerk that simultaneously crashes from dual memory access and doxxes the entire user base, finding issues is easier to spread out and easier to educate them on why vibe coding is boneheaded.
I developed for the VFX industry and I see the whole vibe coding thing as akin to storyboards or previs. Those are fast and (often) sloppy representations of the final production which can be used to quickly communicate a concept without massive investment. I see the similarities in this, a vibe code job is sloppy, sometimes incomprehensible, but the finished product could give someone who knew what the fuck they are doing a springboard to write it correctly. So do what the film industry does: keep your previs guys in the basement, feed them occasionally, and tell them to go home when the real work starts. (No shade to previs/SB artists, it is a real craft and vital for the film industry as a whole. I am being flippant about you for commedic effect. Love you guys.)
I think this is great. I like hearing about your experience in the VFX industry since it’s unfamiliar to me as a web dev. The storyboard comparison is spot on. I like that people can drum up a “what if” at such a fast pace, but vibe coders need to be aware that it’s not a final product. You can spin it up, gauge what works and what doesn’t, and now you have feasibility with low overhead. There’s real value to that.
Edit: forgot to touch on your PR comment.
At work, we have an optional GitHub workflow that lets you call Claude in a PR and it will do its own assessment based on the instructions file we wrote for it. We stress that it’s not a final say and will make mistakes, but it’s been good in a pinch. I think if it misses 5 things but uncovers 1 bug, that’s still a win. I’ve definitely had “a-ha” moments with it where my dumb brain failed to properly handle a condition or something. Our company is good about using it responsibly and supplying as much context as we possibly can.
When I see a sloppy PR I remind people “AI didn’t write that. You wrote it. Your name is on the git blame.”
Love it, I have a vibe coding colleague I will use this with.
I like this mentality. I might start telling people the same thing
If it’s all dumped into a single commit, I will whip your computer into the nearest body of water and tell you to go fish it out.
I’m going to steal this for an update to an internal guidance document for my dev team. Thank you.
Lmao glad I could help! I hate those big commits. They’re so much harder to traverse and know what’s going on. Developer experience has been big on my mind lately. Working 5 days a week is already hard, but there are moments when we can make tiny bits easier for each other.
Obviously fake. Still funny though.
Are you saying the comment is fake, or the sentiment? This was actually posted to reddit: https://archive.is/U9ntj
Fake in that it’s almost assuredly written and posted by someone who is actively anti-vibe coding and this is a troll on the true believers.
I love the one guy on that thread who is defending vibe coding, and is “about to launch his first application,” and anyone who tells him how dumb he is is only doing so because they feel threatened.
Nah I’m on that guy’s side. His experience lines up with my own, namely that vibe coding is not useful for people who don’t know how to program, but it can be useful for people who do know how to program, and simply aren’t familiar with the specific syntax used in a language they’re not an expert in.
In that case, the queries to the AI model aren’t, “write me a program that can do X”, it’s more like “write me a function in this language that can take A, B, and C as inputs, do operation Y with them, and return Z”, or “what’s the best way to find all of the unique elements in an array and sort it alphabetically in this language”. Then the programmer can take those pieces and build up a proper application with them. The AI isn’t actually writing the program for you, it’s more like a customized Stack Overflow generator, without having to wade through a decade of people arguing back and forth in the comments about inane bullshit.
Does it save a ton of time? No, but it’s still helpful, and can get you up and running in a new language much faster than the alternative.
My company is doing a big push for LLM/codegen/“everyday ‘AI’”
Sorry - threw up in my mouth a little bit there
And pretty much the only thing I acquiesce to using is the “better autocomplete” feature. Most of the other stuff it seems to offer is essentially useless on a day-to-day basis for me.
And moreover, it’s actively harmful to the entire practice of engineering, because management and execs see it as this magical oracle/panopticon that can magically make people more productive and churn out 10x more bullshit products that they didn’t consult with engineers on than before. It can’t and it doesn’t. But that doesn’t stop them from thinking it can.
And then they stop hiring junior levels because “codegen can do that”. And then you have a generational gap in the entire fucking discipline of coding as an art, because the entire fucking tech industry is doing this. And we haven’t even touched on the ecological and infrastructural (as in: water and power, not “which cloud or bare metal do we put this on”) implications and how they’re being blatantly ignored and hand-waved away, or the comical license and usage violations that are perfectly fine when large companies do but you’ve been a naughty boy if you torrent a fucking movie. But I digress.
As a software developer, I’ve found some free LLMs to provide productivity boosts. It is a fairly hairpulling experience to not try too hard to get a bad LLM to correct itself, and learning to switch quickly from bad LLMs is a key skill in using them. A good model is still one that you can fix their broken code, and ask them to understand why what you provided them fixes it. They need a long context window to not repeat their mistakes. Qwen 3 is very good at this. Open source also means a future of customizing to domain, ie. language specific, optimizations, and privacy trust/unlimited use with enough local RAM, with some confidence that AI is working for you rather than data collecting for others. Claude Sonnet 4 is stronger, but limited free access.
The permanent side of high market cap US AI industry is that it will always be a vector for NSA/fascism empire supremacy, and Skynet goal, in addition to potentially stealing your input/output streams. The future for users who need to opt out of these threats, is local inference, and open source that can be customized to domains important to users/organizations. Open models are already at close parity, IMO from my investigations, and, relatively low hanging fruit, customization a certain path to exceeding parity for most applications.
No LLM can be trusted to allow you do to something you have no expertise in. This state will remain an optimistic future for longer than you hope.
I think the key to good LLM usage is a light touch. Let the LLM know what you want, maybe refine it if you see where the result went wrong. But if you find yourself deep in conversation trying to explain to the LLM why it’s not getting your idea, you’re going to wind up with a bad product. Just abandon it and try to do the thing yourself or get someone who knows what you want.
They get confused easily, and despite what is being pitched, they don’t really learn very well. So if they get something wrong the first time they aren’t going to figure it out after another hour or two.
