Ask HN: Why are modern AIs ignorant or reluctant to talk about "vibe coding"?
2 points
21 hours ago
| 3 comments
| HN
Is it because very little of their training data has the term "vibe coding" in it?
delaminator
21 hours ago
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You're not giving us any evidence of this. You're just asserting it.

Claude will happily talk about vibe coding as much as you want.

One of its active working prompts is "vibing".

It wasn't a popular term until early 2025.

https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

> There's a new kind of coding I call "vibe coding", where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists. It's possible because the LLMs (e.g. Cursor Composer w Sonnet) are getting too good. ...

11:17 pm · 2 Feb 2025 5.2M Views

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uberman
21 hours ago
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I asked Claude to give me the pros and cons of "vibe coding" and it did so without confusion.
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amichail
19 hours ago
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delaminator
19 hours ago
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So it's neither ignorant nor reluctant to tell you about vibe coding.
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amichail
19 hours ago
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It didn't know what it was at the beginning of the conversation.
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delaminator
1 hour ago
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To an LLM all coding it does is vibe coding.

In this case you’re asking it a closed question with a {yes, no, maybe} answer set.

It tries its hardest to give you more than that.

You’re asking a machine to have an opinion. If someone asked you that question, what would your answer be?

Think about your goals and state them more clearly.

“What are the pros and cons of …”

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uberman
15 hours ago
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When you say:

"Should schools have a chess variant class where students invent and vibe code novel chess variants and play each other's variants?"

I don't know what you are saying. Sounds more like your objective is to have students brainstorm new ways to play chess. Why is there any indication that the LLM should assume this is a programming question?

In fact, it has divined that programming might be involved and offered that certain python libraries might be leveraged. You frame your input as a question about schools offering a certain class and the LLM responded by assuming that is what your objective was and started to help build such a curriculum.

Did you expect with your input that the LLM would simply jump into writing some kind of code? Should it have written a multi user chess playground? Should it have written a python chess variant? I personally think it did the reasonable thing and from the context you provided assumed your task was to build such a class pedagogically not produce some python code.

If you are focused on chatGPT lumping other forms of "hacking" or "cowboy coding" into the same bucket as "LLM Assist" and calling it all "Vibe Coding" I personally don't have an issue with that. They all fall into the bucket of fast and loose coding techniques. That is just my take on it though.

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PurpleRamen
20 hours ago
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Vibe Coding is a fresh term, not very well-defined yet. Depending on your phrasing and the model's age, it would be easy for any LLM to trip over it.
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eimrine
21 hours ago
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What did they say?
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amichail
21 hours ago
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If you submit a prompt with "vibe coding" in it, they will reply in a way that seems to imply they have no idea what the term means and are just faking a reply based on surrounding context in the prompt.
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delaminator
21 hours ago
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"they" - which ones ?
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amichail
21 hours ago
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ChatGPT for one.
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tjr
21 hours ago
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I just asked it about vibe coding, and it happily generated numerous paragraphs and bulleted list on the subject.
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uberman
21 hours ago
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That is not my experience, at least when I tried it just now.
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paulcole
15 hours ago
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Share a screenshot of what you're seeing because it seems like everyone else is seeing something radically different.
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