alt Hacker NewsThe preferred definition of "vibe coding" is when you have AI generate code that you use without reviewing it first: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/
Unfortunately a lot of people think it means any time an LLM helps write code, but I think we're winning that semantic battle - I'm seeing more examples of it used correctly than incorrectly these days.
It's likely that the majority of code will be AI assisted in some way in the future, at which point calling all of it "vibe coding" will lose any value at all. That's why I prefer the definition that specifies unreviewed.
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bopbopbop7 • last Thursday at 2:12 AM
I also hope that majority of the code in the future is AI assisted like it is with PostHog because my cyber security firm is going to make so much money.
I share your preference. (I also mourn the loss of the word "vibe" for other contexts.) In this case there were apparently hundreds of commit messages stating "generated by Claude Code". I feel like there's a missing set of descriptors -- something similar to Creative Commons with its now-familiar labels like "CC-BY-SA" -- that could be used to indicate the relative degree of human involvement. Full-on "AI-YOLO-Paperclips" at one extreme could be distinguished from "AI-IDE-TA" for typeahead / fancy autocomplete at the other. Simon, you're in a fantastic position to champion some kind of basic system like this. If you run w/ this idea, please give me a shout-out. :)