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Why I don’t vibe code

91 points by birdculture

by Aurornis

9 subcomments

I thought this was going to be an article about intelligent use of LLM tools without vibecoding, but it's actually entirely against LLMs altogether. The person who wrote it used a free trial of some tool (most likely not a frontier model) and then gave up forever when the trial ran out.
> I then tried using one of the AI tools to analyze my code in a project and a few other small tasks before it all came to an awkward halt. The system informed me that I had just run out of credits and I would need to provide a credit card to purchase more tokens I wanted to keep going.
> So you must believe me that the idea of paying a service in perpetuity so I could think just seemed so laughably absurd and horrific that I didn’t even bother giving them my card. I closed the laptop. I uninstalled the IDE and went back to using Emacs even.
I wholly support their personal choice. I am tired of articles from people who haven't used LLMs preaching about how it's all vibecoding, though.
Acting like LLM use is (EDIT: I meant is not) a spectrum between doing everything manually or handing control over to the LLM and vibecoding everything is a tired strawman argument.

by extr

10 subcomments

This is like reading an article "I Don't Drive Cars" that goes on like
- They're too expensive
- My buddy's 1995 Accord breaks down a lot
- Walking is healthier, plus you can stop and smell the roses
- I enjoy caring for my horse
- Sometimes you can get stuck in traffic
Fine if that's the way you want and can afford to live your life. But it is an exotic luxury belief. For those of us who are participating in the economy for real, the preference to not drive cars is not realistic.

by TheCleric

3 subcomments

This is so good and almost exactly expresses my own thoughts. There's a narrow window where it's capable and fits a need of tedious work (mostly around automating tasks it would take me a bit to remember all the arguments and commands I'd have to chain together to do it). But a lot of it is the stuff I actually WANT to be doing. And solving the hard problems makes me a better developer just as training in the gym makes your body stronger.

by ge96

1 subcomments

I'm getting tempted to because I have so much work to do for my "startup" and after my 8hr day job I'm burnt. It's not even that I don't know what to do it's a lot of work... swift iPhone app, the api, the web app and gcp. get that feeling of being overwhelmed and also end of day brain just feels like shit, thinking I'll drink more caffeine after gym eg. 6:30 PM will see if I can sleep.

by fito

0 subcomment

So brave to post this in a place filled with weird AI apologists.

by beepbooptheory

2 subcomments

I taught myself linux/coding/servers because there was a long period of time where all I had was a chromebook for school, but I still wanted to explore this thing called "pure data" that i'd heard about, and thought I could make art with it. I distinctly remember being continually amazed at how you could get so many things for free, if you know where to look. And yeah.. once I found emacs it was all over. To this day I am definitely going to always go "the hard way" where I can instead of pay any SaaS even $5 a month. In my head its like: "I am a mechanic, or at least, I can get by as one, why would I take my car to the shop and pay money??"
I know its not rational, but it would be pretty darn terrible in my brain to pay for an IDE. Even more unimaginable to me to pay $100 a month for something...
All to say, "cheapskate"-ness from TFA really resonated with me, I don't see the sentiment around a lot.

by avens19

1 subcomments

I don't agree with the overall conclusion of avoiding AI tooling but this was really wonderfully written

by williamcotton

0 subcomment

> However, the process was far more important than the product (again!). Not every whimsy needs to become a reality.
I mean, I get it, there's different kinds of people out there with different motivations, goals, spare time, etc.
But there's also a process of product design that I think the author is overlooking.
Lately I've been working and iterating on a number of DSLs, projects that might be a total waste of my time because they end up being poorly conceived or not very useful compared to a general purpose language!
I'm also working on a video game that is basically Magic: The Gathering meets StarCraft with Civilization style hex-grid conflict. It could be a total bust and entirely no fun to play (it's hard to tell if it's fun by itself because I enjoy working on the game while testing out the play patterns). It would suck to spend a couple of years on this if it's no good.
I very much enjoy the process of trying to figure out the best syntax and semantics for a new DSL or the process of iterating on gameplay elements when working on a game. The destination is also less important. I don't really expect anyone to use my DSLs or play my video games. I'm ultimately doing it for my own enjoyment.
Saying this, I am interested in the overall architecture and I've definitely learned from my mistakes, especially with creating DSLs. Like, having a TypeScript language server with a Rust runtime has some issues. It's kind of better to build the language server into the runtime so you're not maintaining multiple parsers, and depending on the language features, an additional pseudo-runtime in the language server.

by jma24

0 subcomment

It's a really interesting PoV, and one I'm in polar opposition to.
Context engineering is allowing me to do things I've always wanted to do but don't have the time/energy. I'm writing in C++, assembly, Rust, Go. I'm fucking with boot loaders and all kinds of things.
It's brought me a far greater understanding of how cryptography, GPUs, CUDA, Apple Metal - all topics I have a vague interest in but have no time to work on.
The current raft of LLM models are genius children. It's like that 15 year old at college. But I have 30 years of experience and a genius child is pure power in my hands.
And it's a genius child that never gets tired. For a few hundred bucks a month I can have 3 geniuses working on my ideas through the night. Last night they wrote 20 different research theses on a topic and benchmarked them all. Then combined them into a best of breed algorithm better than anything that has been done before. It's an amazing world we live in.
I don't write this to throw mud at OP - they are entitled to their opinion. Merely to point out the contrast.

by tobadzistsini

2 subcomments

I'm vegan. I only watch PBS and the Criterion Channel. I'm atheist. Now it's "I don't vibe code."

by mattas

0 subcomment

This is what I call trad coding.

by runarberg

1 subcomments

> As someone who grew up in a city on the East Coast
Since this blogsite has a .is domain I must assume they mean Egilsstaðir a lovely city with a population of around 2500 people.

0 subcomment

by retinaros

1 subcomments

To experienced devs. Why are you enjoying vibecoding? It is soulless and the job is really becoming unbearable having to discuss with an agent that alternates between “good at” and totally consensual and low iq.it feels miserable to have a few turns then seeing the tool Became so bad and so low iq that you stuck in doing things garder than if you did it by yourself
I get the conversational aspect and value of it I just dont get people saying “I dont code anymore I manage agents” - besides obviously people selling AI

by analogpixel

1 subcomments

programming is just procrastination that gets in the way of implementing your ideas.