vibe-coding

In AI timelines, an article that is nearly a year old is ancient, but Vibe Coding Our Way to Disaster by Jake Nations is still super relevant, mostly because it speaks to ideas that existed well before AI, like the difference between Simple vs Easy, Thinking Deeply and Clojure.

Brendan Humphrey on Vibe Coding, aligns with my own thinking on vibe coding:

…these tools must be carefully supervised by skilled engineers, particularly for production tasks. Engineers need to guide, assess, correct, and ultimately own the output as if they had written every line themselves.

Smashing Create PR with vibe coding output amounts to an attack on the PR process:

Generating vast amounts of code from single prompts effectively DoS attacks reviewers, overwhelming their capacity for meaningful assessment

But there is still some value:

Currently we see one narrow use case where vibe coding is exciting: spikes, proofs of concept, and prototypes. These are always throwaway code. LLM-assisted generation offers enormous value in rapidly testing and validating ideas with implementations we will ultimately discard.