"Overrated" is one way to call it.
Giving sharp knives to monkeys would be another.
Why do people keep thinking they're intellectually superior when negatively evaluating something that is OBVIOUSLY working for a very large percentage of people?
I've been asking myself this since AI started to become useful.
Most people would guess it threatens their identity. Sensitive intellectuals who found a way to feel safe by acquiring deep domain-specific expertise suddenly feel vulnerable.
In addition, a programmer's job, on the whole, has always been something like modelling the world in a predictable way so as to minimise surprise.
When things change at this rate/scale, it also goes against deep rooted feelings about the way things should work (they shouldn't change!)
Change forces all of us to continually adapt and to not rest on our laurels. Laziness is totally understandable, as is the resulting anger, but there's no running away from entropy :}
> I've been asking myself this since AI started to become useful.
For context: we're specifically discussing vibe coding, not AI or LLMs.
With that in mind, do you think any of the rest of your comment is on-topic?
It's not obvious that it's "working" for a "very large" percentage of people. Probably because this very large group of people keep refusing to provide metrics.
I've vibe-coded completely functional mobile apps, and used a handful LLMs to augment my development process in desktop applications.
From that experience, I understand why parsing metrics from this practice is difficult. Really, all I can say is that codegen LLMs are too slow and inefficient for my workflow.
Because the large percentage of people is a few people doing hello words or things of similar difficulty.
Not every software developer is hired to do trivial frontend work.
The large percentage of software development is people doing hello world or similar difficulty. "CRUD apps," remember?
Hopefully they are not live-coding that crap though. Do you want to make those apps even more unreliable than they already are, and encourage devs not to learn any lessons (as vibe coding prescribes)?
> Why do people keep thinking they're intellectually superior when negatively evaluating something that is OBVIOUSLY working for a very large percentage of people?
I'm not talking about LLMs, which I use and consider useful, I'm specifically talking about vibe coding, which involves purposefully not understanding any of it, just copying and pasting LLM responses and error codes back at it, without inspecting them. That's the description of vibe coding.
The analogy with "monkeys with knives" is apt. A sharp knife is a useful tool, but you wouldn't hand it to an unexperienced person (a monkey) incapable of understanding the implications of how knives cut.
Likewise, LLMs are useful tools, but "vibe coding" is the dumbest thing ever to be invented in tech.
> OBVIOUSLY working
"Obviously working" how? Do you mean prototypes and toy examples? How will these people put something robust and reliable in production, ever?
If you meant for fun & experimentation, I can agree. Though I'd say vibe coding is not even good for learning because it actively encourages you not to understand any of it (or it stops being vibe coding, and turns into something else). It's that what you're advocating as "obviously working"?
> The analogy with "monkeys with knives" is apt. A sharp knife is a useful tool, but you wouldn't hand it to an unexperienced person (a monkey) incapable of understanding the implications of how knives cut.
Could an experienced person/dev vibe code?
> "Obviously working" how? Do you mean prototypes and toy examples? How will these people put something robust and reliable in production, ever?
You really don't think AI could generate a working CRUD app which is the financial backbone of the web right now?
> If you meant for fun & experimentation, I can agree. Though I'd say vibe coding is not even good for learning because it actively encourages you not to understand any of it (or it stops being vibe coding, and turns into something else). It's that what you're advocating as "obviously working"?
I think you're purposefully reducing the scope of what vibe coding means to imply it's a fire and forget system.
> Could an experienced person/dev vibe code?
Sure, but why? They already paid the price in time/effort of becoming experienced, why throw it all away?
> You really don't think AI could generate a working CRUD app which is the financial backbone of the web right now?
A CRUD? Maybe. With bugs and corner cases and scalability problems. A robust system in other conditions? Nope.
> I think you're purposefully reducing the scope of what vibe coding means to imply it's a fire and forget system.
It's been pretty much described like that. I'm using the standard definition. I'm not arguing against LLM-assisted coding, which is a different thing. The "vibe" of vibe coding is the key criticism.
> Sure, but why? They already paid the price in time/effort of becoming experienced, why throw it all away?
You spend 1/10 amount of time doing something, you have 9/10 of that time to yourself.
> A CRUD? Maybe. With bugs and corner cases and scalability problems. A robust system in other conditions? Nope.
Now you're just inventing stuff. "scalability problems" for a CRUD app. You obviously haven't used it. If you know how to prompt the AI it's very good at building basic stuff, and more advanced stuff with a few back and forth messages.
> It's been pretty much described like that. I'm using the standard definition. I'm not arguing against LLM-assisted coding, which is a different thing. The "vibe" of vibe coding is the key criticism.
By whom? Wikipedia says
> Vibe coding (or vibecoding) is an approach to producing software by depending on artificial intelligence (AI), where a person describes a problem in a few sentences as a prompt to a large language model (LLM) tuned for coding. The LLM generates software based on the description, shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code.[1][2][3] Vibe coding is claimed by its advocates to allow even amateur programmers to produce software without the extensive training and skills required for software engineering.[4] The term was introduced by Andrej Karpathy in February 2025[5][2][4][1] and listed in the Merriam-Webster Dictionary the following month as a "slang & trending" noun.[6]
Emphasis on "shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code" which means you don't blindly dump code into the world.
Doing something badly in 1/10 of the time isn't going to save you that much time, unless it's something you don't truly care about.
I have used AI/LLMs; in fact I use them daily and they've proven helpful. I'm talking specifically about vibe coding, which is dumb.
> By whom? [...] Emphasis on "shifting the programmer's role from manual coding to guiding, testing, and refining the AI-generated source code" which means you don't blindly dump code into the world.
By Andrej Karpathy, who popularized the term and describes it as mostly blindly dumping code into the world:
> There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. Also I just talk to Composer with SuperWhisper so I barely even touch the keyboard. I ask for the dumbest things like "decrease the padding on the sidebar by half" because I'm too lazy to find it. I "Accept All" always, I don't read the diffs anymore. When I get error messages I just copy paste them in with no comment, usually that fixes it. The code grows beyond my usual comprehension, I'd have to really read through it for a while. Sometimes the LLMs can't fix a bug so I just work around it or ask for random changes until it goes away. It's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects, but still quite amusing. I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
He even claims "it's not too bad for throwaway weekend projects", not for actual production-ready and robust software... which was my point!
Also see Merriam-Webster's definition, mentioned in the same Wikipedia article you quoted: https://www.merriam-webster.com/slang/vibe-coding
> Writing computer code in a somewhat careless fashion, with AI assistance
and
> In vibe coding the coder does not need to understand how or why the code works, and often will have to accept that a certain number of bugs and glitches will be present.
and, M-W quoting the NYT:
> You don’t have to know how to code to vibecode — just having an idea, and a little patience, is usually enough.
and, quoting from Ars Technica
> Even so, the risk-reward calculation for vibe coding becomes far more complex in professional settings. While a solo developer might accept the trade-offs of vibe coding for personal projects, enterprise environments typically require code maintainability and reliability standards that vibe-coded solutions may struggle to meet.
I must point out this is more or less the claim I made and which you mocked with your CRUD remarks.
Vibe coding has a vibe component and a coding component. Take away the coding and you’re only left with vibe. Don’t confuse the two.
Saying that as I’ve got vibe coded react internal tooling used in production without issues, saved days of work easily.
> Don’t confuse the two.
Vibe coding as was explained by the popularizer of the term involves no coding. You just paste error messages, paste the response of the LLM, paste the error messages back, paste the response, and pray that after several iterations the thing converges to a result.
It involves NOT looking at either the LLM output or the error messages.
Maybe you're using a different definition?
A case can be made that it involves an experienced coder to be vibe coding, as the author of the term most definitely is and I feel this context is at the very least being conveniently omitted at times. Whether he was truly not doing anything at all or glanced at 1% of generated code to check if the model isn't getting lost is important, as is being able to know what to ask the model for.
Horror stories from newbies launching businesses and getting their data stolen because they trust models are to be expected, but I would not call them vibe coding horror stories, since there is no coding involved even by proxy, it's copy pasting on steroids. Blind copy pasting from stack overflow was not coding for me back then either. (A minute of silence for SO here. RIP.)
The problem with this discussion is that different interlocutors have different opinions of what vibe coding really means.
For example, another person in this thread argues:
> I'd rather give my green or clueless or junior or inexperienced devs said knives than having them throw spaghetti on a wall for days on end, only to have them still ask a senior to help or do the work for them anyways.
So they are clearly not talking about experienced coders. They are also completely disregarding the learning experience any junior coder must go through in order to become an experienced coder.
This is clearly not what you're arguing though. So which "vibe coding" are we discussing? I know which one I meant when I spoke of monkeys and sharp knives...
I mean it very literally, taking the what he said together with who is the person who said it - an experienced professional sculpting a solution using a very complex set of tools, with a clear idea in his head, but with unusual and slightly uncomfortable disinterest in the exact details of how the final product looks from the inside.
I'm mostly going by what he said: https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
He seems to think it barely involves coding ("I don't read the diffs anymore, I Accept All [...] It's not really coding"), and that it's only good for goofing and throwaway code...
I'd rather give my green or clueless or junior or inexperienced devs said knives than having them throw spaghetti on a wall for days on end, only to have them still ask a senior to help or do the work for them anyways.
It's somewhere in between. Said struggle is where they learn. Guidance from seniors is important, but they need to figure it out to grow.
How will they ever learn if all the do is copy-paste things without any real understanding, as prescribed by vibe coding?
I'm not advocating for vibe coding, that's new-age hipster talk. But just using the AI for help, assistance, and doing grunt work is where we have to go as an industry.