It’s antithetical to everything programming means to me. I don’t even like the word "coding"... Programming is an art of intellectual precision, and I prefer the language used to talk about it to reflect that.
How do you know you’re a top “vibe coder”? You really dislike what I wrote here. You can feel it in your gut. The "vibe" just isn’t right. </rant>
"10x Developer doesn't have time to explain things." "10x Developer doesn't have time for pleasantries."
I thought it was a joke, but people were serious ... 10x Developer label sounded just an excuse for being an asshole... or how processes shouldn't apply to them (a disaster waiting to happen).
Vibe coding just seems to be an excuse for not being careful / thoughtful.
I don't care to police how someone codes on their own time so have fun I say, but if you have to sell me on the fact that you're "vibe coding" it sounds like an excuse ...
Not to say that it has as many negative side effects as vibe coding or that context switching is 0 cost, but it's interesting how similar they feel in my mind even discarding the 'embrace the exponentials' rhetoric.
I personally use agentic programming to refer to a workflow that consists of having an agent (Cline, Claude Coder, etc.) write the majority of the code for you, but unlike "vibe coding" you're still taking a minimal amount of time to sanity check the output.
People constantly defend it by saying that "vibe coding" isn't meant for production (yada yada), but let's not be naive, because it will 100% be used to push actual applications.
However, I've tried it a few times after getting stuck on a bug or approach to implementing a new feature. In all cases it was much faster than me at completely failing to solve the problem. (models: QWQ, Gemini 2.5 Pro, Claude Sonnet 3.7) For now I still find LLMs more useful as a sub-line autocomplete.
One vibe-y thing I have found to be handy is translating between languages. I had a project that needed some functions moved from Python to C and JS and Sonnet did a pretty good job of that. They only needed a few manual tweaks to iron out floating point issues.
It seems like a waste to not read code in your project, even if quickly. What's the harm? And think of the upside.
Clicking "accept all" without checking what the code does is destructive and is not engineering.
I use LLMs otherwise and careful to test (if it is code), validate and generally not take things they say for granted.
I picture ‘vibe coding’ as coding under the influence or not following proper engineering principles. No one is talking about ‘vibe building’ bridges or buildings - yet anyway - and I hope we don’t get there.
I do like @techpineapple's phrasing of "vibe tripping and falling on my face" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43536079), this also matches my experience.
Only for personal projects because of the tripping hazard, but yes.
https://tendayweekcalendar.com/
Vibing in progress...
The closest I've gotten was using ChatGPT to generate the initial code for a kind of toy program. It got stuck in a loop though, and the code was a mess anyhow. I refactored and then finished adding the features I wanted in there myself.
An example would be like when one of our salespeople closes a deal they complete a task in our sales software that triggers a bunch of Asana tasks for the onboarding team and builds the Google Drive folders and documents we'll eventually need for that client.
I used to have to figure out the code for things like that "by hand" and I was occasionally limited by my technical ability.
But what I've found now is that I'm limited by my knowledge of our business. If I can explain it to ChatGPT, I can get working code in minutes for things that used to take hours.
And I'm trying things now that end up taking hours that I wouldn't have even tried before because I saw them as "too hard" for me.
I honestly don't even read the code it generates. I have ChatGPT generate own log files that I feed back into it for debugging or analysis when anything breaks.