[williamstein]

He is trying to use a different phrase “write-only code” to define exactly the same thing Karpathy defined last year as “vibe coding”.

For what it is worth, in my experience one of the most important skills one should strive to get much better at to be good at using coding agents is reading and understanding code.

[resonious]

I think there's some value in pure vibe coding. To your point though, the best way to extract that value is to know intimately at which point the agents tend to break down in quality, which you can only do if you read a lot of their output. But once you reach that level, you can gain a lot by "one-shotting" tasks that you know are within their capacity, and isolating the result from the rest of your project.

[paulryanrogers]

How often do the AIs devolve at some task? Or does switching models make those assumptions inaccurate?

[jopsen]

> good at using coding agents is reading and understanding code.

You can understand the code using an agent; it's much faster than reading the code.

I think the argument the author is making is that: given this magic oracle that make code, how we so contain and control it.

This is about abstractions and invariants and those will remain important.

[YokoZar]

I thought "vibe coding" had come to mean "I used an LLM to generate this code", but didn't really imply we'd given up trying to review and read the output. The author is taking it one-step further by suggesting we not bother with the latter.

[vunderba]

It's true that the meaning of "vibe coding" has been somewhat diluted - but the original definition as set forth by Karpathy was to forget that the code even exists (no review, no reading the commits, nothing).

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang...

[FartyMcFarter]

A lot of people doing vibe coding can barely (or not at all) understand how to read code.

[oxfeed65261]

Sure, but the article is talking about people who can and do read code now but will develop software without reading code in the future. Kind of like you rarely look at the object code that the compiler produces.

[medstrom]

I, too, appreciate the clarification in the term "write-only code".