Just to clarify, I google a lot while coding, but one thing I learnt from my engineering degree is that is there is no ‘best’ solution.
Not funny
“Googling a lot while coding” is not even remotely close to vibe coding, please don’t gaslight yourself into that.
When you read up on things, you know what you’re looking for. You read a potential solution (e.g. part of a documentation, an example, someone else’s solution, a solution to a similar problem), you think about it and transfer that to your own problem, with your own code, with your own thoughts.
Using AI support is totally fine too - it’s a smarter code completion, nothing more. It might spit out something wrong, something partial, something good. You might ignore it as with the regular completion. In the end, it’s still you thinking about it, modifying it until it works, and doing your thing.
“Vibe coding” is basically saying tech jesus take the wheel. And it might go well for someone who cannot code, who managed to create their small game or some website. It will go horribly wrong for any project handling user data, sensitive data, or something that needs to be maintained after. We’ve had more than enough examples of that.
I saw that my Jetbrains All Product Pack subscription also includes their AI assistant and in Go it’s really able to write and refactor things in a useful manner. But I think a large part is that I’ve been programming for 30 years and I am able to tell the thing exactly what I want and can mention things I do not want and also spot issues. Right now I don’t see how they can manage a complete codebase, which I understand vibe coding to be. There are just so many things than can (subtly) go wrong and AI at the moment is not able to help with that. But they also keep getting better, so who knows where we’ll be in a year or two.
We will always have the same problem with computers doing what we tell them, but also not doing what we are not smart enough to tell them.
Is “vibe coding” a real thing? I thought it was a meme.
“Coding” vs “programming” is such a great litmus test for whether someone actually knows what they’re doing
I usually use the term coding to avoid the whole “html isn’t a programming langauge” stuff.
By definition, it is a markup language, but I have seen recently that it has a few elements that kinda feel like programming.
Though you do tend to require some JS to complete the logic.
On the other hand, just because someone uses a non-programming language, does not surely make them not a programmer
And a glorified auto-complete might be part of a solution, but it isn’t the solution itself. And definitely not the best one.
Exactly. It’s like vibe coders are not interested in writing the best code possible. They just want to write the code and not understand what goes on when a program is run.
I’d guess most of them aren’t even capable of actually writing functional and good code themselves. And never will be.
I can write bad and unfunctional code all by myself thank you very much.
