Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

Comment by lolinder | Hacker News Reader

The author's description of vibe coding seems to have confused it with getting into a flow state in a vaguely AI-adjacent way. Vibe coding as originally coined by Karpathy [0] can't pay the bills because it would be wildly irresponsible for a professional to do—it's the kind of no-checks minimal-validation AI usage that gets lawyers into trouble for submitting legal documents with hallucinated court cases, just translated to coding instead of law.

What the author is proposing isn't really "vibe" anything, it's just dedicating a small amount of time to fixing tech debt in a way that happens to involve an LLM as an assistant. The LLM in this model is honestly mostly superfluous.

Don't get me wrong, this absolutely is how LLMs should be used in a professional setting, but I just question why we needed a name and a blog post for it. This is just responsible code maintenance as it's always been.

[0] https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383?lang=en

> The author's description of vibe coding

Judging from the style and complete lack of substance I don't think there is an author, unless you count ChatGPT as one.

That didn't stop the submission from rocketing to #1 on here though since it jingles the right set of keys.

The articles getting to top are getting worse rapidly - low effort AI crap with a random headline gets to the top of HN regularly.

I have a feeling a lot of "vibe coders" are joining the community. Could be bot spam too. At this point I'm starting to miss the liberal thought pieces.

It's interesting because this site usually encourages 'curious' discussion, and there was always an impression that the userbase was mature enough to spot these kind of substanceless pieces easily.

Thanks for your comments - but I wasn't using GPT to generate the article, I only used it once for proofreading my own thoughts :)

Also - I was focusing on the REFACTORING part where LLM might be one of 100s of tools to be used while being in a state of flow of goal-less refactoring.

I'm pretty sure this is closer to what Karpathy called "real coding": https://x.com/karpathy/status/1915581920022585597 :)

eh terminology happens. I’d argue we shouldn’t be using “AI”, but here we are. I’d prefer encouraging “vibe coding” to mean this over fighting against the wind

But the moment it means two things.

One is ok, the other is risky

One is YMMV the other is bad.

But what is "this"? It's just refactoring with an LLM along for the ride! That's increasingly the default assumption when we're coding or refactoring, so the extra "vibe" attached at the front is totally meaningless if it doesn't imply that you're going so fast you're not checking the LLM's work.

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