How Do We Stop Vibe Coding?

I think a big issue is that the companies pushing AI want it to replace people entirely. So the software around it is designed with that mindset.

I'd really like something that works more like pair programming. Where you share an editor session with the AI, and it's much more interactive. eg. It says "I'm thinking about doing X here, what do you think?". Then you give a response and it continues. Or you can see it doing something silly and immediately stop it and correct something either with a prompt or by manually editing yourself, before letting it rip again. Or just ask it "why are you doing it that way?". Maybe with some control over the speed it's going, for when you feel confident about what it's doing.

Claude has made some positive changes over time where it asks you more when there are different approaches it can take. But I feel like I'm not being brought along with my mental model as much as I would like. A lot of the time it spits out a whole pile of code and then I have to go and build up the mental model after the fact, and correct a lot of what it's done.

The current approach is good a lot of the time though, when you're not really changing anything architectural and just want it to bash out code while you do somehthing else.

Disagree with so many assertions put forth here. You don't _have_ to turn you brain off when coding with an LLM. It's not some intelligence dementor. If your brain turned off while you were vibe coding thats honestly just a you problem and I wish everyone would stop boogeymanning an obvious improvement in the ability to better yourself just because a lot of people don't choose the betterment route.

I've never been more informed or understood more about my code, pipelines, and stack than now- and its 100% due to AI reasoning about my projects, and me making an effort to learn.

Man, it's wild how I have no original thoughts. I've been pulling on this thought this morning, complete with checking in on how CodeSpeak and Tessl are doing.

I'll add this link to the pile: https://martinfowler.com/articles/exploring-gen-ai/sdd-3-too...

> spec-kit created a LOT of markdown files for me to review. They were repetitive, both with each other, and with the code that already existed. Some contained code already. Overall they were just very verbose and tedious to review. [...] To be honest, I’d rather review code than all these markdown files.

The hardest part of any of this extraction is that modern code is already an extremely dense representation of how the computer should work. You mostly can't change the code without changing behavior.

I bet Scryer works for his use case, and it's a joy to dogfood. I also bet it fully breaks down the moment a 2nd developer, who cares about different things, joins the team.

This piece is more thoughtful than the title initially led me to believe. However, I feel like it's sort of like advocating for us all being able to read/write binary (using a bit of an extreme to prove a point). While there might certainly be benefits to understanding less abstract layers, I don't think it's necessary or even necessarily helpful. That said, I don't think the answer is "turn your brain off completely" but I think that there should be tools that facilitate thoughtful ways of vibe coding with natural language, which is basically another abstraction layer from writing the code and tests yourself.

>Writing code by hand will always be around for bespoke and novel, complex work.

That sentence is probably the key.

There is zero chance of this stopping overall.

Much like with artists 90% of the commercial stuff - copy/ads with generic guy in suit picture - will be AI that is "good enough".

Less concerned about the code quality and more the labour market dynamics. If this goes anything like translation & creative space did then there is going to be a brutal shakeup where competition for remaining "real" seats gets intense

I enjoyed the article, I think you're right that the tooling to get out of making things too automatic is definitely lacking. AI coding is cool if you have something in a certain valley of simple enough for it to get but not so complex or low level that it will screw it up, but commercial models don't really do the following yet:

1. malware development

2. anything security tooling related

3. reliable assembly

4. reliable and somewhat more obscure programming languages like blockchain programming langs or distributed programming with elixir

I feel that https://maldevacademy.com has been keeping my skills relatively fresh, it's fun in the discord where sometimes we try using models to do this stuff and it just chokes

On the other hand I "vibe coded" (Although I've heard more nuanced distinctions in terminology here about doing it right rather than just letting it rip automatically or without much thought) a fairly large and profitable software project in about a month recently that would have probably taken me over three if I hadn't used claude.

In the end and as you mentioned, these things are just tools and if you're busy complaining about them rather than finding what they can't do yet and having a bit of fun with working within those limits, you might be able to find a good niche to make better use of your time and avoid the skill atrophy

Howabout: just turn off AI.

I scanned the article, never made it to the bottom, didn’t find the point the author was trying to make.

Howabout just learning to code better as a human without using AI. Just like learning a craft. Just refuse to use AI. Not possible because of peer pressure? Well then stop worrying and continue to vibe.

Either stop or stop complaining but don’t make excuses or write long articles that ramble and rant … sorry but I don’t understand what’s so hard about stopping.

While my CONTEXT.md's are a hodgepodge of general ideals and specific do's/dont's, my AGENTS.md are demonstrable.

I can instrument to observe the instructions being executed.

* Delegation

* Execution (better rules than rtk)

* Response

* Logging

When I want to turn off the printf style confirmations, manually editing saves the tokens. Using RFC 2119 (language) doesn't make a substantial difference. I'm in search of something better.

Economics will dictate that working bespoke on coding will simply not be profitable anymore. Great article but there is no stopping this trend at this rate.

We can also go back to the telegraph

Vibe coding is the new way forward. Please adapt or you will lose so much