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> Always: > > Thoroughly review and understand the generated code

Rules it out for me; I haven’t felt I thoroughly understood any code after working with C++ and reading the entries in code obfuscation contests.

It’s a bit of a catch-22 to say “anyone can code with AI” and then make such statements.

3 comments

> It’s a bit of a catch-22 to say “anyone can code with AI” and then make such statements.

Also makes it very much not "vibe" coding. The term keeps expanding into "any coding activity with AI assistance" but the whole idea of "vibe" coding is that you don't actually understand the generated code, and likely don't know how to program at all, you're just prompting AI to do everything.

Once you step into reviewing & understanding, you're no longer vibe coding you're just...coding.

I've expressed this to others as much as is reasonable - but the phrase "vibe coding" shouldn't be used in any serious discourse about agentic tools. We can't control the lens under which a given person first heard the term, but that moment (combined with the mountains of memes they've consumed since) is going to color a lot of folk's personal definition of vibe coding. It's not realistic to expect everyone to have a shared definition of it, despite the inventor of the phrase immediately giving it definition.

You are, I think reviewing and understanding the code and the app are very important, but the moment you go in and code yourself you're not vibe coding anymore. I think you break vibe coding when you touch the code yourself and have to manually make edits not when understanding and making sure the llm did what you asked it.

The first self-announced vibe coder was a founder of OpenAI. So he had the knowledge.

He started to trust the code written by the models to a point where he didn't always read the code. This happens when you you have learned the exact limits of your models.

It's like a senior coder who knows the projects the interns can handle without close supervision, and those they can't.

I just call it vybrid coding :)

> I haven’t felt I thoroughly understood any code after working with C++ and reading the entries in code obfuscation contests.

Seems to me the result should be that if you aren't sure, your feedback when reviewing the code is that it needs to be more readable. Send it back to the LLM and demand they make it easier to understand.

> Always: > > Thoroughly review and understand the generated code

I think this is good advice actually. We do allow LLM agents where I work, but you still need to understand every line of code that you write or generate. That’s probably why we still do physical interviews as well.

It's great advice for anything AI-generated in a professional production environment. I think the question is whether it's vibe coding with that requirement in place. Or, rather, if the requirement is appropriate for how vibe coding is often used and promoted today (by non-coders).

Basically all of the suggestions on that page were good practice, and not just for code. Documenting your changes, reviewing the output of an AI (or junior person), writing meaningful commits ... all of these apply equally to code, contracts, whatever. I read this post as "If you want vibe coding to be coding you still have to do a lot of hard work and not treat it as a magic app engine." Which is true but absolutely not what a lot of vibe code-embracing middle managers want to hear.

I agree. Personally, I barely use any LLM tools professionally as a developer, and I don't use it at all in my free time. I do however have some coworkers that use it more heavily. Having a culture of proper code reviews and requirements that you need to know what the code in your PR does ensures that we have create proper solutions.

I don't think I could enjoy working at a place where people didn't know the content of the commits they made. I remember the early talks of vibe coding being that you're not even supposed to look at the code, and have been very happy that I haven't met anyone professionally that codes like that.