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The trick is that you have to be a good coder to get the most out of "vibe" coding. It works great for me, but I deploy all of the knowledge I've acquired over the decades as a professional developer. You need to know how to architect systems, what data structures and algorithms to ask for, how to design a product, many facets of graphic and user interface design, how to parcel out work, how to parallelize tasks. Even which ideas are worth pursuing is an intuition you build up over years. "Vibe" coding really is magic and I'm highly scaled, but I don't see how it could possibly work for all but the most senior developers. In some sense, it's like writing LISP macros on steroids.

I was at a coffee shop a little while ago with some friends and a stranger was sitting near us working on his laptop. Someone from our group decided to strike up a conversation with him and the stranger started telling us about how now they have these AI tools that can have you make an app in a few hours and without knowing how to code. He was not a software person but look at what he is able to do with it. The implication was that he has an idea and was going to make it a reality as quickly as possible using whatever AI tools he was using.

I am not sure what the moral of the story is but it reminds me a bit of that parable about the investor getting his shoes shined and the shoe shine kid giving him investment advice.

Partially I think the idea of an app being so valuable that it makes money without being connected to anything is just not really a thing. Some games (Flappy Bird anyone?) can be like that or some very specific type of lifestyle app, but for the most part you need a real world service connected or it will not be seen as valuable. But perhaps I am wrong.

I have been so discouraged by the way that web3 crypto hucksters pounced on vibe-coding.

I truly enjoy programming with AI, it is my favorite hobby by a mile. I'm also happy to say that, for now, I get to capture some of the productivity increase for myself while my employer catches up to how effective it is.

It is sad that there is no space to discuss these new techniques that isn't full of opportunists and clout chasers.

> at first i was very hopeful i can finally 'build' now with my minimal tech skills

This is the problem. If you couldn't have coded it slowly in the old world, you will have problems coding it in AI world.

However if you have a lot of coding experience, you can now compress the time it would have taken you be an enormous amount. My experience is that I can now make extensive changes with very little effort, and very few dead ends. I've been able to take on entire secondary projects where I was just replication existing knowledge with slightly different tools.

Just this week I had a litmus test. I had an existing database that I'm pushing huge amount of data to. I decided to try a different underlying database. This would have taken me a full week of looking at documentation and writing supporting scripts, now I've done it in the spare time I had in two days of my actual work.

And it's not like the AI just did it all unsupervised. It threatened to do down the wrong path a few times, but each time I spotted it and steered it the way I wanted. I also asked it a few questions about curiosities I discovered in the emitted code, and that led to fixes as well.

If I didn't know how to code before, I would still be coding this alternative database.

I think there is one thing that most people miss, obviously!

=> You can use AI to double-check (not single check), avoid overengineering, fill knowledge gaps, scan for inconsistencies and many more things. The main benefit it has for me is not that it codes me stuff real fast. It is that my learning curve improved, drastically, whenever I have a missunderstanding. I dive down and test it. Sometimes AI is wrong and I have to go to docs, sometimes docs are wrong and I have to test and I have to open a issue.

If you combine AI capabilities with debugging skills and testing you have a lot of power as developer nowadays. Its a lot of fun.

To me it seems like most things tend to develop to: It’s more fair. If you are lazy and try to do a shorcut you’ll be punished with wasted time and a lot of frustration. If you try to do thing conscientiousnessly and take ownership for the code you push, publish and run. You’ll learn faster, improve faster, ship faster and have way less headache.

LLM coding, if done right, is an extremely involved process, perhaps more involved than coding it yourself. The professional result is that the code can be produced with significantly higher quality than if I were to code it myself.

It takes significant human effort to thoroughly understand, define, and refine specifications to recursively satisfy all important feedback from multiple LLMs. Only then can the coding begin, and the actual coding then takes just a couple of minutes. Following this, the code has to be thoroughly reviewed, perhaps also slightly refactored. Lastly, sometimes some follow-up issues have to be created to improve the feature further before it is shippable.

As with anything else, the quality of the result is proportional to the level of effort you put in.

Most people who vibe code will never make anything meaningful.

Low effort in -> low effort out

I can actually code so no point in vibing.

To vibe means to never look at the code, where is the fun in that?

To me, vibe coding is all about "make something that kinda works, quickly, to test and play and create." It shouldn't replace the specifics of a design, a functional specification, or the thought process that creates a final product.

Perhaps that's obvious to others, but it felt worth saying from my perspective. If vibe coding tools are touting themselves as a key to easy wealth, shame on the product and marketing teams creating the messaging.

Actually, I think hand-coders will still be around in future generations. There are still people who hand sew, weave baskets, and blacksmith. You will still have people who code by hand.

Coding is at the stage of maturing from commodity to a craft. This generation will pass it on to the next generation, and so on.

As with all crafts, there will be a great demand for quality craftsmanship. And it will command a much higher price than whatever comes out of the factory.

I generally foresee most AI generated things becoming worthless. It’s basic supply and demand. When copycats and crop up overnight in droves, whats the differentiator? The value goes way down.

I believe that winning differentiator will be quality. Uniqueness. A level of craftsmanship that an LLM can’t copy without knowing the secret sauce.

> at first i was very hopeful i can finally 'build' now with my minimal tech skills

You can. You just can't do it fast.

You need to build up your tech skills first. But AI platforms are not incentivized to help you do that. So you have to be very controlled about the speed at which you code.

I learned that letting the AI drive implementation wasn't working for me. The speed is intoxicating at first, and you start trusting the output blindly. But eventually you have to face the music and fix up the mess.

So now I just use it as a glorified autocorrect and search engine, as well as a rubber duck (Ask mode in Cursor). This speed works for me. You have to find the speed that works for you.

I’ve wasted probably the entire last week of work based on rabbit holes presented to me by Claude as viable approaches. I’ve learned my lesson.

Vibe coding tools are helping non-tech users build prototype faster, and there's nothing wrong about that. The only thing that goes wrong are the "marketing" folks with a poisoned mindset. I've seen a lovable's tiktok clip said something like "She doesn't know she gonna sell her app for 20k" lol.

I made a strategic choice to focus on ‘vibe coding’ rather than using platforms like n8n, aiming to pick up something new with each project I build. From familiarity with terminal, github, heroku + postgres, etc.

I'm still vibe coding in terms of syntax and logic, but I do understand my codebase, and have made some excellent automations at work.

The momentum behind vibe coding is driven by an underestimation/misunderstanding of what it takes to build software.

I'm sure some do. But I can't imagine something like Kiro(not an endorsement) would market itself with vibe coding, since its whole point is methodical spec driven development.

Was it perhaps author's wishful thinking?

Everyone non-technical I know who vibe coded either ran into a bug they couldn't fix or abandoned their project.

I would love to see Lovable.dev's financials, I think they're running the classic low retention, high marketing dollar consumer playbook and are burning cash fast. Base44 seems to do the same thing after getting acquired by Wix, I'm seeing more and more of their ads.

As someone technical, vibe coding makes me feel disconnected from my product and feel like I don't know what's going on. I eventually just need to dive back into the code and find many things I need to change myself.

I'm glad there's vibe coding available to non-tech founders so they can build the equivalent of high-fidelity prototypes. May not be MVP worthy yet, but at least it gets them started.

Vibe code is gamified software engineering, similar to what Robinhood did with stock investing - gamified it with zero trades, instant feedback, and a fancy UI.

Or maybe they are just allowing people to create fixes in their life and the world by writing solutions to their problems

I sit on a few indie hacker rooms with folks that slurped up the vibe coding koolaid immediately and they've been posting about their 100x output for over a year now - but none of them have shipped anything remotely successful - so I think at least anecdotally I somewhat agree.

I also just overall haven't seen a huge influx of new and useful apps and websites as you'd expect based on how tech leaders are talking about the virtues of these new tools.

I don't think AI has really found it's niche yet, and I think it's going to be much subtler than most people think, it's going to be the tools that integrate features like translations and summarization and speech to text in ways that are seamless that end up sticking - all of this other noise is just marketing hype.

I wonder if Twitter is already filled with "hard-working all umerican" paid-influencers claiming Indians are so low-IQ/smelly etc. that they can't even use AI to do the jobs that they got through race/religion/caste/smell/skin-color/language/etc.-based nepotism.

They Duk-a-duk! (South Park is awesome isn't it ?)

This blog post is engagement farming clickbait. Not even saying he's wrong, but it is.

I have no idea how it's marketed - if it's as a replacement for developers then yeah it's BS.

I regularly use Claude code (and Claude) to write code for

- throwaways data processing or visualization

- connecting to an API I have some documentation for

- demoing some concept

I think it's great for data science and product stuff, and on those merits will be a multi-billion dollar industry. I would never let it near a real codebase.

…and there’s nothing wrong with that

Vibe coding is fine. It can make junior coders work like a team of junior coders, and senior coders work like they have a team. All the problems associated with having a team of juniors you didn't vet, can't trust, and must always review come with it... but that's an economic trade off. The value is real.

completely off topic but i find your blog theme thoroughly refreshing.

One should be simply amazed that amidst the AI hype most fail to realise that if it's too good to be true, it probably is! Just waiting for this bubble to pop.

edit: typo

Font crimes detected

i think a lot of social media influencers are selling a get rich quick scheme around other people's AI products.

the actual AI companies marketing hype seems to claim:

1) you can make fun non-serious toy apps

2) any day now massive productivity increases for software companies. this is different than anyone can launch a product with no software skills.

Yeah, at this point, it's certainly annoying.

But to be fair, this technology is still at an early stage, and we don't know it's limits.

It's scary to imagine a future where the development process in companies is fully handled by AI agents, which are the only ones who can read and maintain the code.

hard disagree

Meh.

The greater scam here is that rugged individualism can lead to positive societal outcomes.

Just more free market capitalism, bro! We just need more freedom for the tech bros, the finance bros, bro!

This AI shit is yet another oh look - increase in rugged individual 'productivity' is going to lead to positive societal outcomes, trust me, bro!

It's all bullshit but what else have the western retarded elite got? Or non-western elites for that matter? USA is USSR 2.0 - falling apart from the retarded short-sighted incompetence and selfishness of its sociopathic 'elites'. China will be USSR 3.0 in a generation or two.

It's all so terribly tedious, boring and cruel - the monumental amounts of wasted opportunity and resources because everyone's too busy being 'productive' to ever spend a decade or two to actually think through anything and come up with potential real solutions to real problems. The average 'elite' doesn't even know what the real problems are or how to begin finding out what they might be - they probably think it's climate change or more likely - how to make sure they retain their billions. Oh well, so it goes.