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by diggan 374 days ago
> are 2.5x more likely to merge code without reviewing it

What the fuck? Are people taking "vibe coding" as a serious workflow? No wonder people's side projects feel more broken and buggy than before. Don't get me wrong, I "work with" LLMs, but I'd never merge/use any code that I didn't review, none of the models or tooling is mature enough for that.

Really strange how some people took a term that supposed to be a "lol watch this" and started using it for work...

5 comments

> Really strange how some people took a term that supposed to be a "lol watch this" and started using it for work...

don't forget about the insane amount of marketing around AI code companies and how they put "vibe coding" in front of everyone's face all the time.

You tell someone something enough times and they'll belive it

Plus, vibe coding is the surest way for these companies to insert themselves as the ultimate middleman in the entire software development process.

As an aside, I really hate how cynical I feel I've been compelled to become at the arrival of such a genuinely innovative technology. Like, with this very article I can't help but to think there are ulterior motives behind it's production.

This is key. They've found a way to sell extremely-high-brand-stickiness shovels in a gold rush.
> As an aside, I really hate how cynical I feel I've been compelled to become at the arrival of such a genuinely innovative technology

Yeah I'm feeling like this too. This should be so exciting! We're getting close to the Star Trek dream of just telling the computer to do work and it works!

I've been trying to examine why it's not exciting for me, and I'm actually pretty repulsed by it.

I think it's a combination of things

To start, I'm pretty disgusted by the blatant and unapologetic scraping of every single scrap of public data, regardless of license or copyrights.

I'm also really discouraged by how this is turning out to be another tool in the capitalist toolbox to justify layoffs, increase downward pressure on salaries, and once again extract more value per hour worked from employees

I also don't feel like the technology is actually that good or reliable yet. It has transformed my workflow but for the worse. Because my company is very bullish on AI it has resulted in me losing what little control I had to choose the tools that I feel are best for my job, in favor of what they want me to use because of the hype

Ultimately I'm cynical because I don't feel like this is making my life better. It feels like it is enriching other people at my expense and I am very bitter about it

Not for nothing, but I did create an entire game in browser using phaser as the engine.

But I'm also an experienced developer and at this point, an experienced "vibe coder". I use that last term loosely because I have a structured set of rules I have AI follow.

To really understand AI's capability you have to have experienced it in a meaningful way with managed expectations. It's not going to nail what you want right away. This is also why I spend a lot of time up front to design my features before implementing.

> I use that last term loosely because I have a structured set of rules I have AI follow

Right, but what defines if what you're doing is "vibe-coding" or not is if you actually view the code it produces, at any point of the workflow. You're "vibe-coding" if you're merging/pushing without reviewing the code.

I'm also an experienced developer, and used LLMs a lot, but never pushed/merged anything into production that I haven't read and understood myself.

I've done it for "nice to have" features in their own modules that I don't really care about and aren't consumed by anything else (recently an SVG plot generator for a program I wrote.) The LLM one-shotted it and I left it alone for a long time. Stuff like that is great application for literal vibe coding.

I can't imagine doing it for anything serious though.

Yeah, for one-off, never-to-be-touched again I guess that kind of makes sense.

But this survey seems to span much more than just one-off tiny things, and gives the impression people working as professionals in companies are actually doing "vibe-coding" not as a joke, but as a workflow, for putting software into production.

As awful as it is, it is entirely understandable: it follows naturally from the claims that LLMs can replace programmers entirely.

As capable as the models are, what matters more is how competent they are perceived to be, and how that is socialized. The hype machine is at deafening levels currently.

The absolute number who merged without reviewing was only 24% so maybe there is still hope!
1/4 programmers in a survey merging code without reviewing it is terrifying to me. That number should be as close to 0% as possible.