Okay, after weeks of hating it, I'm finally getting the appeal of 'vibe coding'.

Vibe Coding & Programmers' Love-Hate Relationship with It

The new trend, if you want to call it that, has the tech community divided. There are those who are completely against it, and say that 'vibe coding' or even using AI to generate code for you will make us think less, learn less and become worse at coding until our skills are disposable. Then there are those who claim (I still find it a myth) that AI-generated code can create a working prototype for a startup fast, create your whole app (what - I'd like to see this in action beyond a to-do list)...

The Background

If you haven't yet heard about the term, vibe coding is all about vibing instead of programming (already sounds ridiculous). OpenAI co-founder and computer scientist invented the term when he tweeted (does Elon Musk want me to say X'ed now? - That's another thing I'll rant about another time) that using AI to generate code on Cursor helps him to "embrace exponentials, and forget the code even exists".

While everyone debated on whether or not this is a good thing, I being in the media industry look at everything skeptically, especially when it involves an influencer (yes, we can call Karpathy that), an emerging brand name and a social media post that compliments something in a big way. Yes, this could be a paid tweet (fine, X) sponsored by Cursor, so that the tech community thinks way more of AI's capabilities than they stand right now.

Is Vibe Coding Even Possible?

Although VS Code + Autopilot is still my go-to, I sometimes use Cursor, and on both IDEs, I've found, as have many other programmers, that the code that AI produces can be wrong or buggy in the best case scenario and dangerous in the worst.

So how could someone as respected in the industry as Andrej Karpathy tweet this? Well, he claimed he was using AI-generated-only code for fun weekend projects. Many YouTubers tried to vibe code games and apps for the sake of videos.

Why Vibe Coding Doesn't Work

ltimately, it's just not ChatGPT or other models' capability to code whole apps as of now. It simply does not understand such long context, like code that runs across many files, all of which needs to be interlinked and most importantly, needs to work together.

One example of why this can't work is that your code needs to be DRY (don't repeat yourself). DRY code is more easily maintainable - if you need to make a change somewhere and the same code is used, or refactored, elsewhere, you only need to make that change once, like all the buttons in a header menu of a website. Since AI can't remember long context, it often produces lines of code that you already have elsewhere and which could've been refactored.

More importantly, as many are already saying, asking AI to generate code for you makes you a worse coder.

Programming is all about thinking and problem-solving, that's the fun part. Writing code is not.

So while AI-generated code is helpful, but overusing it to this extent where you don't think about code can create a habit of not thinking, which not only takes the fun part of programming away, but also will eventually make you not able to think at all (it's too much work).

That's why I have since been very against vibe coding, and have posted thots about it here on Thoxt.

Vibe coded games and apps are like those sloppy articles people want to pay us to publish but we don’t.

Finally, someone said it. I'm tired of people talk about "vibe coding" like a real thing. My only learning from all the hype-talk is to learn even more traditional programming and rely even less on LLMs.

Vibe Coding: The Ultimate PR Stunt or Just Procrastination on Steroids?

Yoga Coding

For anything you couldn't have already hand-written very fast, you ask AI to generate it for you. Then AI produces shitty code that needs to be debugged, or tens of extra lines of code that can be refactored, or improved upon. This makes you understand what each line does and you pick its "brains" until you finally get it and get it to work. What a great way to learn! I guess that's still not the vibe of 'vibe coding', because instead of forgetting that the code exists, I'm actually working out each line. It's the opposite of it. I'm gonna call it 'yoga coding'!

What do you think?

Happy yoga coding, y'all!

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