| Broadly the critique is valid where it applies; I don’t know if it accurately captures the way most people are using LLMs to code, so I don’t know that it applies in most case. My one concrete pushback to the article is that it states the inevitable end result of vibe coding is a messy unmaintainable codebase. This is empirically not true. At this point I have many vibecoded projects that are quite complex but work perfectly. Most of these are for my private use but two of them serve in a live production context. It goes without saying that not only do these projects work, but they were accomplished 100x faster than I could have done by hand. Do I also have vibecoded projects that went of the rails? Of course. I had to build those to learn where the edges of the model’s capabilities are, and what its failure modes are, so I can compensate. Vibecoding a good codebase is a skill. I know how to vibecode a good, maintainable codebase. Perhaps this violates your definition of vibecoding; my definition is that I almost never need to actually look at the code. I am just serving as a very hands-on manager. (Though I can look at the code if I need to - have 20 years of coding experience. But if I find that I need to look at the code, something has already gone badly wrong.) Relevant anecdote: A couple of years ago I had a friend who was incredibly skilled at getting image models to do things that serious people asserted image models definitely couldn’t do at the time. At that time there were no image models that could get consistent text to appear in the image, but my friend could always get exactly the text you wanted. His prompts were themselves incredible works of art and engineering, directly grabbing hold of the fundamental control knobs of the model that most users are fumbling at. Here’s the thing: any one of us can now make an image that is better than anything he was making at the time. Better compositionality, better understanding of intent, better text accuracy. We do this out of the box and without any attention paid to promoting voodoo at all. The models simply got that much better. In a year or two, my carefully cultivated expertise around vibecoding will be irrelevant. You will get results like mine by just telling the model what you want. I assert this with high confidence. This is not disappointing to me, because I will be taking full advantage of the bleeding edge of capabilities throughout that period of time. Much like my friend, I don’t want to be good at managing AIs, I want to realize my vision. |