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Comment by marcusb | Hacker News Reader

The definition seems to have pretty rapidly moved to 'used an AI coding assistant in some capacity'.

And I think that *horribly* muddies the definition because programming and getting a bit of AI help here and there (since it's read the docs better than you have, and scanned Stack Overflow for common problems and mistakes more thoroughly than you have) is, imo, a very, very valid way to program; but you're still very much in the driver's seat. It's not creating whole design patterns, etc, for you.

I wonder if maybe some people have been trying to jump on the "I have also tried vibe coding" train without being willing to hop as far as the term initiator defined it.

I definitely still stick to the "Vibe Coding is when you don't read / grok the code" definition.

I agree - I'm not endorsing this broad usage of the term, just noting how I see it used in practice. This seems to be half driven by grifters on social media promoting their AI coding course du jour and half by people who just discovered Cursor, Windsurf, etc., and think any use of those tools counts.)

Another commenter said these people only read half of Karpathy's tweet - I disagree. I don't think they read it at all, have heard the phrase, and are using it with reckless abandon.

More specifically, using AI bots that can write functions, sometimes entire classes, refactor code, etc.

GitHub copilot which is mostly single line completions isn't "vibe coding".

I think vibe coding also entails some "what it did was so simple, I didn't bother to check it".

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