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Discussion (41 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews
>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.
Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.
As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.
Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.
My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking.
You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say!
I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.
To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
Thinking this is the new reality is part of the problem.
Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.
I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.
Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.
Having a business brain is the new moat.
[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it.
Is this really the bar of aspiration we should aspire too? A known degenerate that doesn't care about humans?
before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphical_widget
Are you saying widget makers are sloppy in their craft and only in it for their money?
Using AI as a tool in a broader, already existing engineering process (here’s a detailed spec of the todo app; reference layouts for the UI are encoded in this folder; the data format requirements are in this file; the test suite must verify properties XXX) doesn’t have a catchy name, because it’s just software engineering, where coding is just but one part of the whole.
And I think that's one important difference: with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step.
Why do you think Claude claims its work on git is co-authored, and now has started putting links to the transcript showing your working. It's about sending a message to the one paying your salary that all your real input in the creation was a few messages and you're replaceable in that equation.
dating apps suck, your UI/UX can groundbreaking but that doesn't make them any less awful to use
This "AI is inevitable" mood that people are in always seem to come from people who don't have to use the things AI is supposedly going to replace, and never consider what the actual consequences of that might be
I live in a city and I still feel like my best bet to meet someone is on the apps because they have taken out a lot of the old ways that people used to meet. How do you even approach a potential date? IDK and it sucks.
or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?
again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line
1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)
2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"
Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.
I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.
I don't plan things. I braindump context to the agent let it implement something, and iterate from there (A LOT).
Planning was for an era where implementation was expensive.
I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
I would also argue that group two aren't "software engineers" anymore; what they do is less engineering and more architecture. Perhaps "agentic developer" is more appropriate.
So lots of personal one-off tools/dashbooards that I never would have made before will probably live forever on my personal git server instead of github or somewhere.
I hate reading slop as much as the next person, so I get it, but I don't try to deny it exists.
How about: "Vibe coding is like genital lice"?
This is certainly the case in the field of bioinformatics right now, so I do feel it's a little apt.
(HN is a bit of a bubble - it's about the only place on the internet where you can be cautiously positive about agenting coding and not be abused.)