The way I understood it: Cobbling a program together by simply prompting AI assistants over and over, blindly using the generated code, and repeating until it barely approaches satisfying the requirements. Not worrying about things like correctness, proper design, code cleanliness, understandability, performance, code size, security, data protection, maintainability, or even bugs unless they catastrophically stop the user from running the program.
I really hope this doesn't actually catch on in "real" engineering, beside as a meme joke.
Yes, that's all true. Even so, vibe coding empowers anyone who can write clear instructions to build software, but the limits of the technology get hit pretty quickly by non-developers and they have little recourse. This blog post https://addyo.substack.com/p/the-70-problem-hard-truths-abou... is a great overview.
The tech will get better and better (I couldn't imagine we'd be doing this a year ago) but to be truly useful it has to reliably produce reasonably well engineered code, and effective debugging is a key piece of that.
I’m sure it will. My pessimistic take is that the worst case is that thousands of bozos create crappy little apps that only cause minimal harm. And people just endure it instead of pushing for better guard rails.
Best case is some high profile shit show caused by software made mostly or entirely by ai that hopefully is bad enough that legislators wake up and realize that in the modern world software is essential enough that you can’t let just anyone sell it or services based on it. Just like you can’t allow anybody design/build bridges or hardware or whatever.
But I’m sure thats wishful thinking. Hacks and buggy software causing consumers harm is just accepted and software industry folk all hope to be billionaires so nobody cares.
An even lazier form of LLM assisted coding where you blindly spam the tab key without even taking the bare minimum amount of time reviewing the garbage that it's busy outputting.
Karpathy "coined" the term and I absolutely hate it. It's up there with "asshat" and "awesome sauce" for profoundly stupid terms.
I find it more akin to prompt engineering; something else that is nothing more than 'typing some shit until it does something useful to someone' and then acting like it's actually a skill.
But we are very good in our profession to make up garbage terms to do anything but describe garbage.
I really hope this doesn't actually catch on in "real" engineering, beside as a meme joke.