I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed. It now means to build software exclusively using AI/LLM.
It's similar to the whole hacker/cracker debate. Words become defined by the one that has the most influence over the community and sometimes evolve on their own through places like social media.
at this point, those that use algorithm deserve the negative connotation. just like those that use synergy deserved to be mocked. when words are used just for the sake of using the word in word salad text, they quickly lose meaningful intent as the listeners hear them as shibboleths that the speaker is talking out of their arse.
They did. But that was back in the 2000s, when nobody really understood the nuance. Today, calling someone a “hacker” to mean “computer criminal” almost feels like a boomer move. We’ve got way better language now: white hat, black hat, script kiddie, scammer (and all its lovely subgenres—pig butchering, refund scammers), phisher, etc. Not to mention whatever we’re calling the folks running dark net markets these days.
And while the general public might not know the fine distinctions between these, I think society does get that there’s a whole spectrum of actors now. That wasn’t true in 2000—the landscape of online crime (and white hat work) hadn’t evolved yet.
Honestly, I’m just glad the debate’s over. “Cracker” always sounded goofy, and RMS pushing it felt like peak pedantry… par for course.
That said, this whole “vibe coding” thing feels like we’re at the beginning of a similar arc. It’s a broad, fuzzy label right now, and the LLM landscape hasn’t had time to split and specialize yet. Eventually I predict we’ll get more precise terms for all the ways people build software with LLM’s. Not just describing the process but the people behind the scenes too.
I mean, perhaps the term “script kiddie” will get a second life?
This is the same as saying that words have no meaning! Under this mental framework why would it be wrong to say that every living human can speak fluent french?
How would you even know which language anyone is speaking?
Counterproposal: words are a tool for communication and meaning is something we gather from the communication. In this words are no different than hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language.
The parties to a communication can only communicate effectively if they agree enough on the meaning of words/gestures/expressions/actions (which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know)
> which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know
You can, however, speak a language you do know even when the listener doesn't know said language. Thus proving that the words spoken are defined by the speaker. It must be that way, fundamentally – as you suggest, you can only speak the language you know. If that tells that words have no meaning, sure. That assertion means nothing anyway.
Words are defined by consensus of the community using them. That's the primary source of semantic meaning.
Next one down is dictionary definition (or claim to authority, for example a tweet where the term was first used). But community meaning takes precedence.
Authors are free to use a nonstandard meaning but should provide readers with their definition if they want to be understood.
> Words are defined by consensus of the community using them.
No. That would make it impossible for someone new to a community to communicate with a community, all while at the same time a community isn't going to accept someone new who isn't communicating. Yet clearly people do join communities.
What happens in reality is that everyone accepts that the speaker's definition reigns supreme, and if there is suspicion – absent of a definition – that there is a discrepancy between the speaker's definition and own's own definition, the speaker will be asked to clarify.
A speaker may eventually adopt a community's definition, but that doesn't always happen either. Look at the Rust users here. They hang desperately onto words like enum that do not match the community definition. But it doesn't really matter, does it? We remember that when they say enums they really mean sum types and move on with life.
1. All speakers of a language
2. Speakers in a region (dialect)
3. Subgroups like teenagers, engineers, gamers, redditors
4. Sub-sub groups like teenagers from a specific school, engineers of a specific discipline, gamers of a certain game
x. Personal dialect (idiolect), which is a sub group that exists separately to all of these and is most closely related to family and the friend group you had as a child and teenager.
We are all members of many different groups which intermesh, and we seemlessly switch meaning and pronunciation as we do that (code switching).
When joining a community, people start at the top (learn French) then move through subgroups. Dictionaries and textbooks are designed to match as closely as possible to the top level community's consensus of word meaning, which, being large, is also the most static. But any language learner will know that textbooks can only get you so far in learning how language is actually spoken day to day. You have to join the community to learn that.
The same applies as you go down to dialects and other sub groups. You can learn a bit before you join, but becoming a part of the community, linguistically, can only happen after joining.
No. A speaker can only speak with words as he understands them. It is impossible to know what other people are thinking.
A good speaker will define the words as he speaks (still relying on some baseline shared understanding of the most common words, of course; there is only so much time in the day...) so there is no room for confusion, but in absence of that it is expected that the listener will question any words that show an apparent disconnect in meaning, allowing the speaker to clear up what was meant, to ensure both parties can land on the same page.
In theory, but in practice the audience understanding is important, and communication doesn't always end up with both sides on the same page.
Even more so when it's an author/reader relationship. The reader is free to interpret the book/article/etc. how they want, and if enough agree, it becomes the consensus.
> but in practice the audience understanding is important
Where audience understanding is important than you will definitely go out of your way to ensure that definitions are made abundantly clear and that the audience agrees that they understand.
But, in actual practice, most of the time the audience understanding really doesn't matter. Most people speak for the sake of themselves and themselves alone. If the audience doesn't get it, that's their problem. Like here, it means nothing to me if you can't understand what I'm writing.
That is always the case. It may turn out that others opt to also become the audience after something is written, but that can only be determined in hindsight. Even when someone says "Oh yeah, I'll totally read what you have to write if you write it for me. Promise!", there is no guarantee they will actually follow through. More often than not they don't.
While the work is being written, the author is the only known audience. In practice, if an author cannot find enough motivation to write something for himself, it simply won't get written. Anyone else who happens to become the audience is gravy, but the work cannot be written for them as they only become known as an audience later.
Probably from listening to another speaker who defined it, adopting their definition. Possibly from making it up on the spot. After all, someone has to create the first definition! Words weren't handed down to us by some magical deity.
But that doesn't mean the audience came from the same place. It is very possible, and often happens, that they heard/created an entirely different definition for the same word. The speaker cannot possibly use their definition before even knowing of it.
I live by the rule: If something seems a little off, question the speaker about what they mean. It is likely they are using a different definition than you are familiar with. Accept what they tell you. Their definition is what matters.
I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully.
To each their own. However, we're all in this together.
Absolutely agree with you on this. I've lost count of the number of times a conversation has been put back on track by realizing that the participants hate working from subtly (or wildly) different definitions of some key term without realizing it.
In my first engineering job, we had one lead that always seemed to repeat things the engineers said. As a team, we started to make up some words and use them only when he was around just to see if he'd start using them. We succeeded.
Do you enjoy working for a manager whose opinions change every time they read something? Do they sound like an effective manager? Have you ever had a boss that needed to think the ideas were theirs before they'd sign off, even normal, everyday process stuff? It heavily implies they don't know anything at all about what they're doing or talking about.
When I first heard vibe coding, it sounded like a meme, a joke. But people took it seriously. Andrej Karpathy was still in the process of defining it when the phrase took a life of its own. I'm surprised it's making it into a book barely two months after it was coined.
If vibe coding somehow becomes the method of programming, then code will become obsolete. Hear me out:
Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results. The coding part is abstracted deep in the background where no human needs venture.
When vibe coding dominates, It's not that people won’t know how to code anymore, it's that coding becomes irrelevant. The same way that there are people who still know how to ride horses, but it's irrelevant to transportation. When vibe coding reaches its peak, programming languages will evolve into something unrecognizable. Why do we need a human readable programming language when no human needs to read it? I picture a protocol agreed upon by two computers, never released to us humans.
> Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results.
Because then you won't know the design of the code or how it even works.
The hard part of coding isn't writing the code itself. It's the design of the code that takes skill, and if you leave that part completely up to AI, you are taking your life in your hands. Bad idea.
Not saying it's a good idea. In fact, I watched someone on twitter debugging code. When the application errored out, he regenerated the code, including the issue in the prompt. Something else failed, the prompt was updated, and code regenerated. Now that of course was for visible errors.
When the person building the application doesn't know or care, the application will still be deployed.
I recently had the pleasure of reviewing AI-generated Ruby code at work. It was so nonsensical and couldn't manage to get basic map and reduce right. I didn't initially know it was AI generated, and I was at a loss of words regarding what I should write as feedback.
Something needs to be done. It should be uncontroversial to require solid understanding of fundamentals from software professionals, yet here we are discrediting knowledge by calling such things "gatekeeping." It's reckless behavior as the industry is hellbent on hoarding as much personal information as it possibly can. Information that any responsible professional should be working to keep secure at the very least.
This is especially true when you start vibe coding critical systems that human life depends on.
Emergency services, hospital infrastructure, financial systems (like Social Security, where a missed check may actually mean people starve) are all places where you don't want to fail because of a weird edge case. It also feeds into fixing those edge cases requiring some understanding of design in general and also the design implemented.
Then there's the question of liability when something goes wrong. LLMs are still computers right now: they do exactly, and only what you tell them to do.
> Because then you won't know the design of the code or how it even works.
I would argue that this is already true for people who practice vibe coding, because otherwise they'd spend less time just banging it out themselves instead of twisting prompts to get something that mostly works and needs hours of debugging.
> Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results. The coding part is abstracted deep in the background where no human needs venture.
Even Star Trek has engineers with programming experience who can dig in when the voice-controlled computer goes awry.
That's why I'm keen on keeping vibe coding to it's original definition as a fun way to prototype some ideas if you don't care at all if the code is robust, secure, maintainable etc.
If you're writing code for production, even if you get an LLM to put together bits of it for you, that's programming. It's pretty much copy-and-paste-for-stackoverflow if StackOverflow had a massively larger library of snippets that almost always included the thing you needed at that exact moment.
Professional programmers still need to take responsibility for making sure the code they are producing actually works!
Now imagine it's not professional programmers writing this code. The same way it's not professional film makers making Mr Beast videos. The quality is not even part of the equation.
To spell out the obvious, the most subscribed channel on Youtube belongs to an 'amateur' -- that's what people are choosing. People don't care. But that's because that's what Youtube incentivizes; Mr.Beast just optimized his content for the medium.
Of course, what you're describing is just machine language, but at a different level of abstraction. How many C++ coders these days can read x86 or ARM assembly? Not many, because they almost never need to.
It's well past time for traditional "high level" programming languages to meet the same fate.
Formal language to formal language provides a level of determinism. I know what kind of code gcc will generate for a loop, generally. But if I care about vectorization or whatever, I will need to inspect the assembly to ensure it is generating it correctly (or write it myself).
Natural language to formal language does not provide that. How the hell would I debug or operate a system by just looking at a prompt? I can't intuit which way the LLM generated anything. I will always have to be able to read the output.
AFAICT, the only people who say you can remove code are people who don't code. I never hear this from actual devs, even if they are bullish on AI.
Yeeeeah, determinism... going to have to leave that behind, I'm afraid. Otherwise you will be outcompeted by people who do. If you thought test-driven development was important before, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
SIMD optimization is already handled well by the current generation of models [1]. There will be no point in doing that by hand before too long. An exercise for antiquarians, like building radios from vacuum tubes.
I never hear this from actual devs, even if they are bullish on AI.
You're hearing it from one now. Five years from now the practice of programming will look quite different. In ten to fifteen years it will be unrecognizable.
> How many C++ coders these days can read x86 or ARM assembly? Not many, because they almost never need to.
It's well past time for traditional "high level" programming languages to meet the same fate.
There is a misunderstanding, let me rephrase. How will I operate and maintain that software without a high level language to understand it? Or do you think we will all just be debugging asm? The same language you just said people don't bother to learn? Or am I supposed to debug the prompt, which will nondeterministically change the asm, which I can't verify because I can't read it?
Doesn't matter how it evolves, some easy to read for humans high level language that deterministically generates instructions will always be needed. To try and replace that is kind of counter productive, imo. LLMs are good at generating high level language. Leave the compilers to do what they are good at.
Can anyone recommend a video that's a good representation of "vibe coding"? I'd like to get a better sense of what the actual moment-to-moment of it looks like.
LLMs have been so spectacularly useless the couple of times that I've tried to use them for programming, that I can't really wrap my head around what this must be.
I'm really struggling to understand it as well. I mean, sure if what you're doing is a website, then maybe you can get something that functions out of an LLM. I don't really do web development, so maybe they're better for that specific niche.
However, for most cases I've tried, I get wildly incorrect and completely non-functional results. When they do "function", the code uses dangerously incorrect techniques and gives the wrong answer in ways you wouldn't notice unless you were familiar with the problem.
Maybe it's because I work in scientific computing, and there just aren't as many examples of our typical day to day problems out there, but I'm struggling to see how this is possible today...
This is absolutely FASCINATING to me. This man is learning so much about "coding" implicitly without learning any Python syntax. How to iterate in smaller steps when a big step fails. What's an API? How to massage data from one source into a format usable by the next stage in the pipeline. Adding things you forgot on the first iteration. How to use the command line (type "python3" instead of python, using the up arrow to run the same thing over again).
My favorite comment so far (I haven't gotten to the end) paraphrased:
"I don't know what Swagger is, but let's just paste it in here."
Somehow he figured out that Swagger docs tell Cursor enough to figure out how to talk to this API. Which is exactly what Swagger is for!
Seems like the odd, formal syntax of programming languages is the major block for many people from doing software development. Because he is doing every other step a professional developer does when building an application.
Yep, I enjoyed all the aspects you mentioned from the video as well. It was quite satisfying and fun to watch. And he's also obviously a very smart and competent guy who seems to know how to just pick things up quickly and "figure stuff out," and those qualities definitely don't hurt in a vibe coding scenario.
“I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it. You have to let it all go.“
Not a dev but been “vibe coding” since chatgpt came out. The llms can write a book… if you try to accomplish it with a single prompt it’s trash. If you construct the book chapter by chapter it’s a lot better and more cohesive.
You don’t build the app with a single prompt - you build a function or file at a time in a modular, expandable format.
Hackers are comfortable working in the dark— navigate with a flashlight (some background knowledge, understanding on syntax, data structures, secure coding practices etc) and you can get where your going a lot quicker and can try out a lot of different routes you may not have seen or had an opportunity to explore otherwise- maybe stumble upon an Easter egg along the way.
You don’t necessarily need to spend hours reading the documentation on an unfamiliar library if you know how to get the AI to understand it, reinforce it with some examples and and use it- maybe in that process it expands your perspective or gives you an idea to incorporate into your production grade environment.
With how quickly things advance- it seems rapid prototyping would allow you to qualify what’s worth investing time in vs what’s not.
If you know about DAST, SAST and containers you can probably create a non total trash workflow for prototype qualifications and then pass to a more technically savvy specialized team member if warranted?
Exploratory data analysis doesn’t seem wholly dissimilar in value- never know when you’ll stumble across a good nugget to feature engineer if you aren’t actively mining and exploring.
“Vibe coding”==you’re getting the model to do what YOU want. Craft some nefarious things to understand how to hold the reins on the beast and that’s a decent starting point.
If the LLM is useless- learn up on NLP, word embeddings and BERT and fine tune one to your specific use case. Don’t use the same chat session to make every file- manage the memory and tokens strategically and use few-multi shot reinforcement learning to specialize the sessions knowledge.
Maybe things become a lot more bespoke and require less dependencies- less susceptible to supply chain attack. More variety could make your system less susceptible to automated attacks and make the pyramid of pain stronger.
If everyone reverse engineers the dependencies and builds most things in house with their own twist, maybe that enables more flexibility with custom encoding and makes it less intuitive for an attacker to analyze your tech stack and infer how it operates.
—surely over simplifying a few things and missing out on some production grade concepts but just grasping that the same thing that’s viewed as creating security gaps could also be used as a mechanism to close some if used efficiently and strategically.
-— it’s not competition to a dev, use it so you can learn more and do better
I'd be concerned purchasing a book from a "programmer" who claims to teach people how to code without code. Kinda sounds like an "author" who publishes books without writing books.
> I fear it may be too late for these authors and publishers to fix their embarrassing mistakes: they’ve already designed the cover art!
To the publishers it's not a mistake, it's just clever marketing. Consider which of these two jumps off that glossy cover and into the distracted eye of a Technical Program Manager most readily: AI-Assisted Programming, or Vibe Coding
Now consider whether either of those parties feels an obligation to help maintain coherence of the software community's technical discourse.
Lol, sigh. Author says the term was coined 84 days ago on February 6th 2025. Literally go to Google and search ‘“vibe coding” before:2025-02:01; I see posts from more than a year ago.
But that tweet is dated 2nd February 2025. The Vercel-hosted site is lying about the date.
I don't think Google's "before" filter actually works. It looks to me like blog spammers have figured this out and now habitually back-date their posts to a date well before they were written.
a short story to address explaining what vibe coding is for non developers:
Picture this- are tools like Devin "vibe coding"?
if we break down the mechanics of what interfaces it's looping through:
1)Chat
2)IDE
3)CLI
4)Dev console/Browser
and it's effective copy and pasting what it sees while trying to complete an objective it doesn't fully comprehend. Blissfully ignoring the ramifications of desired combinations as long as decent version control practices are being applied. iterating / adjusting prompts subtlety along the way to debug when getting stuck in a thought loop. changing your prompt from "fix it" to something with more "pizazz" as the key to breaking this cycle.
how is it any different than when I do all this manually?
Slog through this game of 4 square long enough and you can pretty much vibe anything together.
The ship has sailed (originally “is sealed”, voice dictation error) on the original definition. Sorry Simon. But the work that Gene Kim and Steve Yegge are doing talking about chat oriented programming is really interesting, and I recommend people look into it.
To make it waterproof. First ship builders would use caulking mallets and caulking irons to fill the gaps between wood planks with oakum, then cover the whole hull with hot pitch to create a (mostly) waterproof seal.
I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed. It now means to build software exclusively using AI/LLM.
It's similar to the whole hacker/cracker debate. Words become defined by the one that has the most influence over the community and sometimes evolve on their own through places like social media.
Self-defacing hack-o-tron is self aware!
Ideas, ideas are much sturdier.
If you change the meaning of something too radically, it has a tendency to snap back.
Given that this conversation is happening on the website called "Hacker News" I was hoping somebody would bring up the hacker/cracker thing!
I give myself credit for ending this argument, here and everywhere else, for all time, for us and our children and our children's children.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1865063
It used to be a painfully repetitive flamewar topic but now it feels quaint
Alright so now I'm good, I will just refer to some of the code I've seen recently as having been produced with "Slopcoding". Totally works kthxbye
> I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed.
The article acknowledges this.
Indeed, this is not how language evolves. You can't dictate the meaning of words.
Another unfortunate example is the increasingly negative connotation assigned to the word "algorithm".
at this point, those that use algorithm deserve the negative connotation. just like those that use synergy deserved to be mocked. when words are used just for the sake of using the word in word salad text, they quickly lose meaningful intent as the listeners hear them as shibboleths that the speaker is talking out of their arse.
bet
Similarly, “hacker” used to be positive, until the public at large got ahold of it.
They did. But that was back in the 2000s, when nobody really understood the nuance. Today, calling someone a “hacker” to mean “computer criminal” almost feels like a boomer move. We’ve got way better language now: white hat, black hat, script kiddie, scammer (and all its lovely subgenres—pig butchering, refund scammers), phisher, etc. Not to mention whatever we’re calling the folks running dark net markets these days.
And while the general public might not know the fine distinctions between these, I think society does get that there’s a whole spectrum of actors now. That wasn’t true in 2000—the landscape of online crime (and white hat work) hadn’t evolved yet.
Honestly, I’m just glad the debate’s over. “Cracker” always sounded goofy, and RMS pushing it felt like peak pedantry… par for course.
That said, this whole “vibe coding” thing feels like we’re at the beginning of a similar arc. It’s a broad, fuzzy label right now, and the LLM landscape hasn’t had time to split and specialize yet. Eventually I predict we’ll get more precise terms for all the ways people build software with LLM’s. Not just describing the process but the people behind the scenes too.
I mean, perhaps the term “script kiddie” will get a second life?
Isn't that what it originally meant?
No. Just read the original tweet from Karpathy.
Words mean whatever the speaker (or author, in this case) defines them as.
Quiddity lamp verdant, sempiternal. Dog pulchritudinous chair velleity? Mountain? Scrimshanker butter, petrichor.
Verily.
Agreed
This is the same as saying that words have no meaning! Under this mental framework why would it be wrong to say that every living human can speak fluent french?
How would you even know which language anyone is speaking?
Counterproposal: words are a tool for communication and meaning is something we gather from the communication. In this words are no different than hand gestures, facial expressions, and body language.
The parties to a communication can only communicate effectively if they agree enough on the meaning of words/gestures/expressions/actions (which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know)
> which is why we cannot speak a language we do not know
You can, however, speak a language you do know even when the listener doesn't know said language. Thus proving that the words spoken are defined by the speaker. It must be that way, fundamentally – as you suggest, you can only speak the language you know. If that tells that words have no meaning, sure. That assertion means nothing anyway.
Words are defined by consensus of the community using them. That's the primary source of semantic meaning.
Next one down is dictionary definition (or claim to authority, for example a tweet where the term was first used). But community meaning takes precedence.
Authors are free to use a nonstandard meaning but should provide readers with their definition if they want to be understood.
> Words are defined by consensus of the community using them.
No. That would make it impossible for someone new to a community to communicate with a community, all while at the same time a community isn't going to accept someone new who isn't communicating. Yet clearly people do join communities.
What happens in reality is that everyone accepts that the speaker's definition reigns supreme, and if there is suspicion – absent of a definition – that there is a discrepancy between the speaker's definition and own's own definition, the speaker will be asked to clarify.
A speaker may eventually adopt a community's definition, but that doesn't always happen either. Look at the Rust users here. They hang desperately onto words like enum that do not match the community definition. But it doesn't really matter, does it? We remember that when they say enums they really mean sum types and move on with life.
> Yet clearly people do join communities.
"Communities" here also have a hierarchy:
1. All speakers of a language 2. Speakers in a region (dialect) 3. Subgroups like teenagers, engineers, gamers, redditors 4. Sub-sub groups like teenagers from a specific school, engineers of a specific discipline, gamers of a certain game
x. Personal dialect (idiolect), which is a sub group that exists separately to all of these and is most closely related to family and the friend group you had as a child and teenager.
We are all members of many different groups which intermesh, and we seemlessly switch meaning and pronunciation as we do that (code switching).
When joining a community, people start at the top (learn French) then move through subgroups. Dictionaries and textbooks are designed to match as closely as possible to the top level community's consensus of word meaning, which, being large, is also the most static. But any language learner will know that textbooks can only get you so far in learning how language is actually spoken day to day. You have to join the community to learn that.
The same applies as you go down to dialects and other sub groups. You can learn a bit before you join, but becoming a part of the community, linguistically, can only happen after joining.
Isn't it the converse(?)? Words mean whatever the audience understands them as.
No. A speaker can only speak with words as he understands them. It is impossible to know what other people are thinking.
A good speaker will define the words as he speaks (still relying on some baseline shared understanding of the most common words, of course; there is only so much time in the day...) so there is no room for confusion, but in absence of that it is expected that the listener will question any words that show an apparent disconnect in meaning, allowing the speaker to clear up what was meant, to ensure both parties can land on the same page.
In theory, but in practice the audience understanding is important, and communication doesn't always end up with both sides on the same page.
Even more so when it's an author/reader relationship. The reader is free to interpret the book/article/etc. how they want, and if enough agree, it becomes the consensus.
> but in practice the audience understanding is important
Where audience understanding is important than you will definitely go out of your way to ensure that definitions are made abundantly clear and that the audience agrees that they understand.
But, in actual practice, most of the time the audience understanding really doesn't matter. Most people speak for the sake of themselves and themselves alone. If the audience doesn't get it, that's their problem. Like here, it means nothing to me if you can't understand what I'm writing.
In that case the author is their own audience
That is always the case. It may turn out that others opt to also become the audience after something is written, but that can only be determined in hindsight. Even when someone says "Oh yeah, I'll totally read what you have to write if you write it for me. Promise!", there is no guarantee they will actually follow through. More often than not they don't.
While the work is being written, the author is the only known audience. In practice, if an author cannot find enough motivation to write something for himself, it simply won't get written. Anyone else who happens to become the audience is gravy, but the work cannot be written for them as they only become known as an audience later.
how did the speaker understand the words if he couldnt guess what the other person was thinking or feeling?
Probably from listening to another speaker who defined it, adopting their definition. Possibly from making it up on the spot. After all, someone has to create the first definition! Words weren't handed down to us by some magical deity.
But that doesn't mean the audience came from the same place. It is very possible, and often happens, that they heard/created an entirely different definition for the same word. The speaker cannot possibly use their definition before even knowing of it.
This is a PR truism not a philosophical/linguistic one.
If you are trying to tell something to someone you should say it so that they someone understand what you want them to understand.
It does not mean that the audience can on the fly redefine your words, it just means than you cannot expect them to magically read your mind
I live by this rule: The meaning of a message is what has been understood. To each their own, right?
I live by the rule: If something seems a little off, question the speaker about what they mean. It is likely they are using a different definition than you are familiar with. Accept what they tell you. Their definition is what matters.
I know the tech crowd in particular loves to make up their own pet definitions for words and then double down on refusing to acknowledge that any other definition is possible, thereby continually talking past each other because there is no shared lexicon to hilarious effect, but that's not the norm, thankfully.
To each their own. However, we're all in this together.
Absolutely agree with you on this. I've lost count of the number of times a conversation has been put back on track by realizing that the participants hate working from subtly (or wildly) different definitions of some key term without realizing it.
The parent said that words mean what the speaker wants them to mean, you are saying that words mean what the listener understand them to mean.
I can’t imagine tweeting something random at 4am and the next month a whole industry was formed around my tweet’s choice of words.
It's kind of been a rude awaking realizing that so many "founders" just choose their business direction based on the latest blog post they read.
https://img.devrant.com/devrant/rant/r_636522_RqpS7.jpg
In my first engineering job, we had one lead that always seemed to repeat things the engineers said. As a team, we started to make up some words and use them only when he was around just to see if he'd start using them. We succeeded.
Hah! This is fantastic.
Why is this bad? Is the idea bad?
Do you enjoy working for a manager whose opinions change every time they read something? Do they sound like an effective manager? Have you ever had a boss that needed to think the ideas were theirs before they'd sign off, even normal, everyday process stuff? It heavily implies they don't know anything at all about what they're doing or talking about.
No, but there's also something about being stubborn
Ask Nokia, BlackBerry and Kodak.
Can’t wait for the obligatory hn post about the documentary twitter thread on how their tweet blew up /s
When I first heard vibe coding, it sounded like a meme, a joke. But people took it seriously. Andrej Karpathy was still in the process of defining it when the phrase took a life of its own. I'm surprised it's making it into a book barely two months after it was coined.
If vibe coding somehow becomes the method of programming, then code will become obsolete. Hear me out:
Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results. The coding part is abstracted deep in the background where no human needs venture.
When vibe coding dominates, It's not that people won’t know how to code anymore, it's that coding becomes irrelevant. The same way that there are people who still know how to ride horses, but it's irrelevant to transportation. When vibe coding reaches its peak, programming languages will evolve into something unrecognizable. Why do we need a human readable programming language when no human needs to read it? I picture a protocol agreed upon by two computers, never released to us humans.
> Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results.
Because then you won't know the design of the code or how it even works.
The hard part of coding isn't writing the code itself. It's the design of the code that takes skill, and if you leave that part completely up to AI, you are taking your life in your hands. Bad idea.
Not saying it's a good idea. In fact, I watched someone on twitter debugging code. When the application errored out, he regenerated the code, including the issue in the prompt. Something else failed, the prompt was updated, and code regenerated. Now that of course was for visible errors.
When the person building the application doesn't know or care, the application will still be deployed.
I recently had the pleasure of reviewing AI-generated Ruby code at work. It was so nonsensical and couldn't manage to get basic map and reduce right. I didn't initially know it was AI generated, and I was at a loss of words regarding what I should write as feedback.
Something needs to be done. It should be uncontroversial to require solid understanding of fundamentals from software professionals, yet here we are discrediting knowledge by calling such things "gatekeeping." It's reckless behavior as the industry is hellbent on hoarding as much personal information as it possibly can. Information that any responsible professional should be working to keep secure at the very least.
> When the person building the application doesn't know or care, the application will still be deployed.
Resistance is futile.
We will adapt.
This is especially true when you start vibe coding critical systems that human life depends on.
Emergency services, hospital infrastructure, financial systems (like Social Security, where a missed check may actually mean people starve) are all places where you don't want to fail because of a weird edge case. It also feeds into fixing those edge cases requiring some understanding of design in general and also the design implemented.
Then there's the question of liability when something goes wrong. LLMs are still computers right now: they do exactly, and only what you tell them to do.
I can imagine a world where backend APIs are secured, hardened, protected against DOS attacks, etc.
Then any end users with the proper credentials can vibe code UIs (web apps, iOS and Android apps) that call those APIs to their heart's content.
We may also need operating systems and web browsers hardened in new ways to survive vibe coded apps.
SaS products that support custom code are already basically like that. Salesforce has multiple shockingly large documents on all the limits they enforce: https://developer.salesforce.com/docs/atlas.en-us.apexcode.m...
That does mean it's hard to break the app, but it also means people quite frequently run into those limits.
> Because then you won't know the design of the code or how it even works.
I would argue that this is already true for people who practice vibe coding, because otherwise they'd spend less time just banging it out themselves instead of twisting prompts to get something that mostly works and needs hours of debugging.
> Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results. The coding part is abstracted deep in the background where no human needs venture.
Even Star Trek has engineers with programming experience who can dig in when the voice-controlled computer goes awry.
That's why I'm keen on keeping vibe coding to it's original definition as a fun way to prototype some ideas if you don't care at all if the code is robust, secure, maintainable etc.
If you're writing code for production, even if you get an LLM to put together bits of it for you, that's programming. It's pretty much copy-and-paste-for-stackoverflow if StackOverflow had a massively larger library of snippets that almost always included the thing you needed at that exact moment.
Professional programmers still need to take responsibility for making sure the code they are producing actually works!
Now imagine it's not professional programmers writing this code. The same way it's not professional film makers making Mr Beast videos. The quality is not even part of the equation.
To spell out the obvious, the most subscribed channel on Youtube belongs to an 'amateur' -- that's what people are choosing. People don't care. But that's because that's what Youtube incentivizes; Mr.Beast just optimized his content for the medium.
Of course, what you're describing is just machine language, but at a different level of abstraction. How many C++ coders these days can read x86 or ARM assembly? Not many, because they almost never need to.
It's well past time for traditional "high level" programming languages to meet the same fate.
Formal language to formal language provides a level of determinism. I know what kind of code gcc will generate for a loop, generally. But if I care about vectorization or whatever, I will need to inspect the assembly to ensure it is generating it correctly (or write it myself).
Natural language to formal language does not provide that. How the hell would I debug or operate a system by just looking at a prompt? I can't intuit which way the LLM generated anything. I will always have to be able to read the output.
AFAICT, the only people who say you can remove code are people who don't code. I never hear this from actual devs, even if they are bullish on AI.
Yeeeeah, determinism... going to have to leave that behind, I'm afraid. Otherwise you will be outcompeted by people who do. If you thought test-driven development was important before, you ain't seen nothin' yet.
SIMD optimization is already handled well by the current generation of models [1]. There will be no point in doing that by hand before too long. An exercise for antiquarians, like building radios from vacuum tubes.
I never hear this from actual devs, even if they are bullish on AI.
You're hearing it from one now. Five years from now the practice of programming will look quite different. In ten to fifteen years it will be unrecognizable.
1: https://github.com/ggml-org/llama.cpp/pull/11453
You said:
> How many C++ coders these days can read x86 or ARM assembly? Not many, because they almost never need to. It's well past time for traditional "high level" programming languages to meet the same fate.
There is a misunderstanding, let me rephrase. How will I operate and maintain that software without a high level language to understand it? Or do you think we will all just be debugging asm? The same language you just said people don't bother to learn? Or am I supposed to debug the prompt, which will nondeterministically change the asm, which I can't verify because I can't read it?
Doesn't matter how it evolves, some easy to read for humans high level language that deterministically generates instructions will always be needed. To try and replace that is kind of counter productive, imo. LLMs are good at generating high level language. Leave the compilers to do what they are good at.
I hear what you're saying, understand it perfectly well, and sympathize to some extent... but it's not going to play out like that.
Your instincts are correct about it being a meme.
Can anyone recommend a video that's a good representation of "vibe coding"? I'd like to get a better sense of what the actual moment-to-moment of it looks like.
LLMs have been so spectacularly useless the couple of times that I've tried to use them for programming, that I can't really wrap my head around what this must be.
Which version of vibe coding do you mean? Using AI to help you write code or using LLMs to build apps without caring about the code at all?
The not-caring version, especially.
This video from Gene Kim and Steve Yegge, authors of one of the books in the original post, and the description of what’s happening in it, is a good presentation: https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/lessons-learned-during-my-two...
I'm really struggling to understand it as well. I mean, sure if what you're doing is a website, then maybe you can get something that functions out of an LLM. I don't really do web development, so maybe they're better for that specific niche.
However, for most cases I've tried, I get wildly incorrect and completely non-functional results. When they do "function", the code uses dangerously incorrect techniques and gives the wrong answer in ways you wouldn't notice unless you were familiar with the problem.
Maybe it's because I work in scientific computing, and there just aren't as many examples of our typical day to day problems out there, but I'm struggling to see how this is possible today...
This actually shows a lot of good stuff: https://youtu.be/opB25teOxYQ
This is absolutely FASCINATING to me. This man is learning so much about "coding" implicitly without learning any Python syntax. How to iterate in smaller steps when a big step fails. What's an API? How to massage data from one source into a format usable by the next stage in the pipeline. Adding things you forgot on the first iteration. How to use the command line (type "python3" instead of python, using the up arrow to run the same thing over again).
My favorite comment so far (I haven't gotten to the end) paraphrased:
"I don't know what Swagger is, but let's just paste it in here."
Somehow he figured out that Swagger docs tell Cursor enough to figure out how to talk to this API. Which is exactly what Swagger is for!
Seems like the odd, formal syntax of programming languages is the major block for many people from doing software development. Because he is doing every other step a professional developer does when building an application.
Yep, I enjoyed all the aspects you mentioned from the video as well. It was quite satisfying and fun to watch. And he's also obviously a very smart and competent guy who seems to know how to just pick things up quickly and "figure stuff out," and those qualities definitely don't hurt in a vibe coding scenario.
“I'm trying to free your mind, Neo. But I can only show you the door. You're the one that has to walk through it. You have to let it all go.“
Not a dev but been “vibe coding” since chatgpt came out. The llms can write a book… if you try to accomplish it with a single prompt it’s trash. If you construct the book chapter by chapter it’s a lot better and more cohesive.
You don’t build the app with a single prompt - you build a function or file at a time in a modular, expandable format.
Hackers are comfortable working in the dark— navigate with a flashlight (some background knowledge, understanding on syntax, data structures, secure coding practices etc) and you can get where your going a lot quicker and can try out a lot of different routes you may not have seen or had an opportunity to explore otherwise- maybe stumble upon an Easter egg along the way.
You don’t necessarily need to spend hours reading the documentation on an unfamiliar library if you know how to get the AI to understand it, reinforce it with some examples and and use it- maybe in that process it expands your perspective or gives you an idea to incorporate into your production grade environment.
With how quickly things advance- it seems rapid prototyping would allow you to qualify what’s worth investing time in vs what’s not.
If you know about DAST, SAST and containers you can probably create a non total trash workflow for prototype qualifications and then pass to a more technically savvy specialized team member if warranted?
Exploratory data analysis doesn’t seem wholly dissimilar in value- never know when you’ll stumble across a good nugget to feature engineer if you aren’t actively mining and exploring.
“Vibe coding”==you’re getting the model to do what YOU want. Craft some nefarious things to understand how to hold the reins on the beast and that’s a decent starting point.
If the LLM is useless- learn up on NLP, word embeddings and BERT and fine tune one to your specific use case. Don’t use the same chat session to make every file- manage the memory and tokens strategically and use few-multi shot reinforcement learning to specialize the sessions knowledge.
Maybe things become a lot more bespoke and require less dependencies- less susceptible to supply chain attack. More variety could make your system less susceptible to automated attacks and make the pyramid of pain stronger.
If everyone reverse engineers the dependencies and builds most things in house with their own twist, maybe that enables more flexibility with custom encoding and makes it less intuitive for an attacker to analyze your tech stack and infer how it operates.
—surely over simplifying a few things and missing out on some production grade concepts but just grasping that the same thing that’s viewed as creating security gaps could also be used as a mechanism to close some if used efficiently and strategically. -— it’s not competition to a dev, use it so you can learn more and do better
We should call what those authors are doing “vibe writing” because they didn’t have any editors who actually cared about the contents of the book.
This.
I'd be concerned purchasing a book from a "programmer" who claims to teach people how to code without code. Kinda sounds like an "author" who publishes books without writing books.
Are we supposed to believe that a book which teaches people how to be "programmers" without writing any code was actually written by a human author?
> I fear it may be too late for these authors and publishers to fix their embarrassing mistakes: they’ve already designed the cover art!
To the publishers it's not a mistake, it's just clever marketing. Consider which of these two jumps off that glossy cover and into the distracted eye of a Technical Program Manager most readily: AI-Assisted Programming, or Vibe Coding
Now consider whether either of those parties feels an obligation to help maintain coherence of the software community's technical discourse.
Lol, sigh. Author says the term was coined 84 days ago on February 6th 2025. Literally go to Google and search ‘“vibe coding” before:2025-02:01; I see posts from more than a year ago.
Are you sure? Any results that was shown on the first page are from this year.
It's funny, I tried to search that exact keywords and this exact comment is on the top page
Can you provide some links? I tried that search and couldn't see what you were seeing.
I don’t think it was the right date syntax for the before search operator.
Below worked for me
intext:"vibe coding" before:2025/02/01
Here's that Google search: https://www.google.com/search?q=intext%3A%22vibe+coding%22+b...
The first result I got was this one https://vibecoding.vercel.app/ - which is shown as being from 2023... but that's fake.
Read the page and it starts by saying:
> On November 30, 2023, Andrej Karpathy coined the term "vibecoding"
And then includes a screenshot of Andrej's tweet - this one: https://twitter.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
But that tweet is dated 2nd February 2025. The Vercel-hosted site is lying about the date.
I don't think Google's "before" filter actually works. It looks to me like blog spammers have figured this out and now habitually back-date their posts to a date well before they were written.
a short story to address explaining what vibe coding is for non developers:
Picture this- are tools like Devin "vibe coding"?
if we break down the mechanics of what interfaces it's looping through:
1)Chat 2)IDE 3)CLI 4)Dev console/Browser
and it's effective copy and pasting what it sees while trying to complete an objective it doesn't fully comprehend. Blissfully ignoring the ramifications of desired combinations as long as decent version control practices are being applied. iterating / adjusting prompts subtlety along the way to debug when getting stuck in a thought loop. changing your prompt from "fix it" to something with more "pizazz" as the key to breaking this cycle.
how is it any different than when I do all this manually?
Slog through this game of 4 square long enough and you can pretty much vibe anything together.
The ship has sailed (originally “is sealed”, voice dictation error) on the original definition. Sorry Simon. But the work that Gene Kim and Steve Yegge are doing talking about chat oriented programming is really interesting, and I recommend people look into it.
What would it mean to "seal" a ship?
To make it waterproof. First ship builders would use caulking mallets and caulking irons to fill the gaps between wood planks with oakum, then cover the whole hull with hot pitch to create a (mostly) waterproof seal.
>The ship is sealed on the original definition.
And apparently the original cliché as well.
"When I use a word," Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, "it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less."
Learned from this post that steveyegge went full AI
Hate the uninformed changing word meanings? Think how the devops feel...
"Author fails to understand that there can be multiple definitions for a phrase"
That's because it doesn't mean a god damned thing.
Anyone else think “vibe coding” is a poor choice of name. Too ambiguous.
Friend of mine suggested “apping”.
I ‘apped’ this in 2 hours vs I ‘vibe coded’ this in 2 hours.
“Orchestrated” or “spliced” AOCS - ai orchestrated code splicing. Pronounced awks
I AOCSed that shit together in 2 hours.
Doubles as a play on the awk bash command for text manipulation.
And "apping" isn't even more ambiguous?