alt Hacker News1. "Vibe coding" is a spectrum of how much human supervision (and/or scaffolding in the form of human-written tests and/or specs) is involved.
2. The problem with "bad code" has nothing to do with the short-term success of the product but with the ability to evolve it successfully over time. In other words, it's about long-term success, not short-term success.
3. Perhaps most importantly, Claude Code is a fairly simple product at its core, and almost all its value comes from the model, not from its own code (and the same is true on the cost side). Claude Code is relatively a low stakes product. This means that the problems caused by bad code matter less in this instance, and they're managed further by Claude Code not being at the extreme "vibey" end of the spectrum.
So AI aside, Claude Code is proof that if you pour years and many billions into a product, it can be a success even if the code in the narrow and small UI layer isn't great.
Replies
1 is definitely false right now. I gave specs, tests, full datasets, reference code to translate to an llm and still produce garbage code/fall flat on it's face. I just spent one week translating a codebase from go to cpp and i had to throw the whole thing out because it put in some horrible bugs that it could not fix even burning 500$ worth of tokens and me babysitting it. As i said it had everything at it's disposal: tests, reference impl, lots of data to work with. I finally got my lazy ass to inplement it and lo and behold i did it in 2 days with no bugs (that i know of) and the code quality is miles better than that undigested vomit. The codebase was a protocol library for decoding network traffic that used a lot of bit twiddling, flow control, huffman table compression, mildly complicated stuff. So no - if you want working non-trivial code that you can rely on then definitely don't use a llm to do it. Use it for autocomplete, small bits of code but never let the damn thing do the thinking for you.
The very definition of "vibe coding" is using AI to write software and not even look at the code it produces.