Item — HN Reader

Insightful:

> the term “vibe-coding” suggests a kind of laissez-faire attitude where you don’t really care about the outcome and you’re just having fun. That’s what the phrase meant when it was coined, but the world has moved on. In many companies professional programmers are using AI in such a way that it’s impossible to imagine that they are also reading the resulting code in detail. This is what modern vibe-coding is. Deferring to the AI, not worrying about the individual lines of code, and keeping an eye on whether the code passes its tests and throws up any problems in production.

This way of working is the only one that justifies the trillion-dollar bet on the AI industry. I agree, this method should be called vibe-coding.

1 comments

It should depend on whether you've taken other steps to constrain the output of the LLM. I've been building some pretty elaborate test harnesses (which I test independently beforehand), to ensure that I get something that does what I ask of it.

I don't care which words we use, but they should separate this sort of empirically-minded work (versus the rationalism of typical development) from just dropping a few sentences into the prompt and crossing your fingers.

> empirically-minded work

Yeah, I understand that this testing-oriented constraint method is what AI coding enthusiasts are pitching. Sure, it's different from pure vibe-coding as originally defined, but nobody is seriously suggesting professionals should do pure vibe-coding anyway. It's a strawman. The word fits.