GitHub's CEO says startups can only get so far with vibe coding

GitHub's CEO says startups can only get so far with vibe coding(msn.com)

19 points by kmdupree 340 days ago | 12 comments

fnordpiglet 340 days ago |

I generally found with vibe coding I can only get so far in general before it mires in some local minimum and I need to take over and substantially drive development. I find it profoundly useful for the initial phase of work which in many ways is good. I find the initial decisions to often bog me down and it just runs through a lot of menial design decisions that ultimately don’t matter as much as I like to think at the beginning. Generally SoTA coding LLMs tend to be pretty well versed in minutia of libraries and tooling as well. It feels a lot like working with a 4 years experience engineer - they know a lot about the tools they know, and can get things to a point, but they hit a wall that only experience can surmount. Once things get complex enough they bounce around on the edges of the problem and need a more senior engineer to lead.

duxup 340 days ago |

I don't even know what people mean by vibe coding ... I see it mentioned but it is always like something someone says so they can get their name in a news article.

anon373839 340 days ago | |

The term was coined by Andrej Karpathy on Twitter:

> 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.

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang...

duxup 340 days ago | | |

There must be some magic because I can't make that process work.

nico 340 days ago | |

The closest there is to a definition is the original Tweet by Karpathy[1]

However, if you go to /r/vibecoding (which has grown from 14k to 22k members in the last 3 weeks), it seems like any coding/programming you do, with assistance of AI, can be considered vibecoding there

Apparently, most people doing AI-assisted coding are developers, but there is also a rapidly-growing group of people that don't have a background in coding and are getting into it using AI

[1] https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_webp,q_...

bluefirebrand 340 days ago | |

From what I can tell, Vibe Coding is basically prompting an LLM to give you some code and doing a low effort "LGTM" style skimming review on it

Just trying to grasp whether the "vibes" of the code seem right, instead of being meticulous and precise about the review

procinct 340 days ago | |

I generally view at people interacting with AI agents to build a product and then interacting with the product to give feedback to the agent. I.e. not much actual code review going on.

baobun 340 days ago | |

If you're noticing that the database backend in your Spring app changed from sqlite to embedded redis, you're not vibing hard enough to qualify. Obviously this doesn't get you to production.

sherdil2022 340 days ago |

At least someone is talking some sense!

nico 340 days ago |

> Startups would struggle to attract investors without developers building complex systems, he said

As long as the startups can get traction, grow quickly and/or generate money, it doesn't matter if they used AI to build it. That might attract investors even more... a super lean company that can go to market faster and gain a lot of ground, before needing big bucks for hiring a heavier development team... that sounds pretty good

pyman 340 days ago | |

The Github paradox: GitHub's whole platform is built around developers. But if GitHub Copilot becomes the only developer a company needs, then developers no longer need GitHub.

jamesgill 340 days ago |

Oh? Is that why Microsoft (Github's owner) is spending $80B on AI this fiscal year?