Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?(joecmarshall.com) |
Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?(joecmarshall.com) |
>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.
Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.
As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.
Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.
AI has simply been a tool to accelerate that and I've genuinely never been happier about the value I provide to society. I find it hard to take the "respect of the craft" argument at face value - even if I enjoy knitting by hand, I can still support the existence of mechanized looms and machinery that provide affordable clothing in the millions.
My late grandmother knit 1-2 pairs of socks per day and donated them to the homeless center - absolutely amazing thing to, and it kept her motivated and sharp up to 104 years of age.
However, if her ultimate goal is providing socks to the homeless, would it not be better for her to work a library job for $15/hour, then take the $100+ a day and purchase then donate 30 pairs of socks? Even if the socks are a lower quality and wear out twice as fast, she could help 15x the people thanks to the mechanization and efficiency provided by the devision of labour.
I see this divide more and more and truthfully I wish I could understand both sides. I am encountering trouble in the startup I'm working on for exactly this reason: I feel laser focused on the attempt to create value for others, while my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.
Any help in understanding those who "love to make" (as opposed to those who "love to deliver") would be extremely useful.
My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
Thanks for the laugh, only a human could have written such a hilarious string of words. There may be hope for us after all.
What's the conversion between diarios and samas? Are the same at -40?
The craft is about creating a tool that others use not some divine code that programmers stare at and admire.
You are confused that is why you are surprised.
Working with AI tools is like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. You're so removed from the point of contact that you no longer have effective haptic feedback for the problem you're trying to solve. You're not doing the work, you're commissioning and checking someone else's work. It's an entirely different job now.
In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.
To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
Thinking this is the new reality is part of the problem.
Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.
I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.
Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.
Having a business brain is the new moat.
[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it.
Is this really the bar of aspiration we should aspire too? A known degenerate that doesn't care about humans?
before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.
Are you saying widget makers are sloppy in their craft and only in it for their money?
Why asking outside the technical domain? Code is instructions for a machine for it to do a task. All this philosophy around code as art or whatever it's in my opinion just intellectual onanism, looking at the screen and thinking "damn I'm the shit just look at that oneliner oh my gawd, look at those perfectly applied GoF patterns. Pure engineering. Poetry is code".
The craft you say. What's the intent of it? Having code that's nice to look at and/or understand or the product of such code execution? For the later coding "as craft" is irrelevant. I've seen beautiful and mind blowing software with horrendous code, an entire company working as a clock with a 4 millions LOC single php file, the most cringe inducing spaghetti code I've ever seen. Users don't care. The software works as expected, fast, almost no bugs after >10 years of development. It's purpose fulfilled. And I've seen perfect code running slow as fuck.
I've done manual and CNC machining. I forgot the last time I wrote G codes in the thousands LOC. Everything now is CAD CAM. A software wrote the code for me, I just designed the thing. Same with 3D printing. Should I write the code myself to respect the craft? Of course not, that would an incredible waste of time. I want the physical piece in my hand or an application running fast and without crashing. Why would I care for HOW the code is written?
I think folks in the craft need to mature a bit and understand this very well.
I used to enjoy it, and after many years of being asked to do nothing other than boring web applications or my work literally being thrown away (which worked perfectly) because management decided that it had to be implemented in <new language>. I worked hard to write something simple and well documented and worked as well as I could, and it was thrown away. I've had other so-called "lead developers" take credit for my ideas and then implement them so poorly; it was clear they misunderstood it entirely. I've had people straight up lie about what I would be doing in a position. I am currently trapped in a job where I was straight up lied to about what I was doing.
These sorts of experiences have left me completely jaded as a result. I know I am not alone.
I seldom have time to work on my own projects. Software is much more complicated than it used to be, and simply getting things working in a framework or scaffolding a project can take a lot of time. With the AI I can prototype software very quickly, while using my existing skills to stop it from going off the rails.
Using AI as a tool in a broader, already existing engineering process (here’s a detailed spec of the todo app; reference layouts for the UI are encoded in this folder; the data format requirements are in this file; the test suite must verify properties XXX) doesn’t have a catchy name, because it’s just software engineering, where coding is just but one part of the whole.
And I think that's one important difference: with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step.
Sure you can, why wouldn't you? Good models these days spit out architecture and code fairly indistinguishable from your average developer.
It's always hard to jump into an existing project and understand it all, but it's doable and in 2026 it's no harder to jump into a vibed project than it is to jump into any other project (with exceptions in both directions, of course).
You still have the code and can switch back to "fully human" (or any other point on the spectrum of human-ai) any time you want by just opening the same editor you would use if you cloned any other project.
dating apps suck, your UI/UX can groundbreaking but that doesn't make them any less awful to use
This "AI is inevitable" mood that people are in always seem to come from people who don't have to use the things AI is supposedly going to replace, and never consider what the actual consequences of that might be
I live in a city and I still feel like my best bet to meet someone is on the apps because they have taken out a lot of the old ways that people used to meet. How do you even approach a potential date? IDK and it sucks.
Why do you think Claude claims its work on git is co-authored, and now has started putting links to the transcript showing your working. It's about sending a message to the one paying your salary that all your real input in the creation was a few messages and you're replaceable in that equation.
or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?
again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line
for someone like me who doesn't like to write tests - I could easily have an agent write a test for me.
I could lay the bricks then also have the agent do ornamental design that I'm not good at.
How about: "Vibe coding is like genital lice"?
This is certainly the case in the field of bioinformatics right now, so I do feel it's a little apt.
(HN is a bit of a bubble - it's about the only place on the internet where you can be cautiously positive about agenting coding and not be abused.)
I so miss the days when people were given tools and made the effort to get others to know them.
1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)
2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"
Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.
I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.
I don't plan things. I braindump context to the agent let it implement something, and iterate from there (A LOT).
Planning was for an era where implementation was expensive.
I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
I would also argue that group two aren't "software engineers" anymore; what they do is less engineering and more architecture. Perhaps "agentic developer" is more appropriate.
So lots of personal one-off tools/dashbooards that I never would have made before will probably live forever on my personal git server instead of github or somewhere.
I hate reading slop as much as the next person, so I get it, but I don't try to deny it exists.
A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking.
You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say!
I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
Yeah you should provide a source for that claim. I could not find any.
Or maybe stop spreading your conspiracy stories.
That's exactly the sentiment I'm referring to.
I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc). And they're definitely making stuff (friends with kids are making games that their friends play, sharing homemade videos with each other, making bedtime stories, making websites and apps that others use, etc).
I'd also argue that theory and architecture have always been closer to "software engineering" than coding ever was, but I also acknowledge I've got a bit of a bias belonging to group 2 (otherwise: been coding for ~25 years).
This is a dangerous game people are playing. One where people trick themselves into believing that ideation == creation. Not only are they not the same, framing it as such gives people licensure to crowd out the actual creatives who spent countless hours creating the inputs to these models.
Furthermore, I disagree with the following:
>I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc).
What are these barriers people keep referring to that prevented people from creating music, art, stories pre-2022? If someone owned a phone, laptop, etc. in 2022 they already had access any number of free digital tools to assist in making music, art, stories, home made films. Hell, you can buy a pen and notebook from a store for a handful of dollars.
What you really mean is that pre-2022 nobody could produce a decent looking photo, song, or program without having to spend a lot of time learning about that craft. But that isn't a barrier--someone making a shitty song is still making music.
People just want the ability to generate content which resembles quality without having worked for it. In practice, this kind of behavior is far closer to consumption than craft/art/making/whatever.