alt Hacker NewsAaargh, I hate it when useful terms get diffused to meaninglessness. No, there’s one kind of vibe coding. The definition of vibe coding is letting the LLM write the code and not looking at it. That’s what the word “vibe” is there for.
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Yeah. I agree the distinction is important, but it’s already been lost. Maybe, we need a new phrase to describe “a product you absolutely cannot trust because I blindly followed a non-deterministic word generator.”
Maybe, “dingus coding”?
It needs a short concise name. Vibe-cod-ing is catchy. Ell-Ell-Em-Cod-ing isn't.
At this point I think it is no longer a binary yes/no but rather a nebulous percentage. For example, this codebase was 90% vibe coded, leaving 10% that was edited manually or reviewed.
I have no idea why an experienced developer who uses LLM's to make them more productive would want to degrade their workflow by calling it "vibe coding".
In that case, "blind" would be more accurate.
I'm ngl, when I first heard "vibe coding" I immediately imagined programming from memory.
> Aaargh, I hate it when useful terms get diffused to meaninglessness.
I think that when you say this, you have an obligation to explain how the term "vibe coding" is useful, and is only useful by the definition that you've become attached to.
I think that the author is accepting that there's no such thing as the vibe coding that you've defined (except for very short and very simple scripts), and that in all other cases of "vibe coding" there will be a back and forth between you and the machine where you decide whether what it has done has satisfied your requirements. Then they arbitrarily distinguish between two levels of doing that: one where you never let the LLM out of the yard, and the other where you let the LLM run around the neighborhood until it gets tired and comes back.
I think that's a useful distinction, and I think that the blog makes a good case for it being a useful distinction. I don't find your comment useful, or the strictness of definition that it demands. It's unrealistic. Nobody is asking an LLM to do something, and shipping whatever it brings back without any follow-up. If nobody is doing that, a term restricted to only that is useless.
you're still allowed to alternate between letting it do and consolidating, no?
I agree with you that there is one original definition, but I feel like we've lost this one and the current accepted definition of vibe coding is any code is majority or exclusively produced by an LLM.
I think I've seen people use the "vibe engineering" to differentiate whether the human has viewed/comprehended/approved the code, but I am not sure if that's taken off.