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by ajs1998 245 days ago
I don't think there's a clear distinction between vibecoding and AI assisted coding because there's black boxes EVERYWHERE no matter how knowledgeable you are. Compilers assist me to not have to think about machine code. Web libraries and frameworks assist me to not care about networking details. AI, vibe coding or not, is all just another thing to assist the user by reducing distractions.

I think it's valuable for developers to understand more of their code rather than less, but who cares to precisely label how much they understand? If they're happy with the passing tests, comfortable making it public, and others want to contribute, then that's what matters.

1 comments

The distinction is that in vibe coding you don't even look at the code.

Although I don't endorse it for most use cases, I like the distinction. There are some things I vibe code that are useful in the moment but I always throw out

I would go even further, in true vibe coding you have no idea what you’re doing, don’t even have software engineering knowledge, but whatever your prompting is working so you just keep going. It’s basically user-driven development.
I disagree. There are some cases where I want to bang out an experiment and iterate on it. While I have the ability to understand what's going on, the iteration loop makes more sense to go through the model than trying to understand what it did. This feels like vibe coding in those cases, even though I have the skills. Many talented developers I know are doing this as well to address pieces of a larger problem with expanded scope relative to what they could do without vibe coding. I work in research though, where the code is expected to be fairly exploratory (although high quality).
but the point is, you don't know what's going on. It's not that you could understand it's that you actively choose not to know... that's the essence of vibe coding.
Yes, that’s the point I was making in my response.