Hacker News Reader

Comment by krisgenre | Hacker News Reader

Okay, but is that a bad thing?

If the author doesn't understand their own code, I probably won't

Vibe coding doesnt mean the author doesnt understand their code. Its likely that they don't want carpal tunnel from typing out trivial code and hence offload that labor to a machine.

"Vibe-coding" means the author deliberately does not understand their code. "AI-assisted engineering" is what you are thinking of.

Well, it is the original poster that used vibe-coding as "AI-assisted engineering".

JNI for io_uring is not trivial code.

Is it bad if the world runs on a quadrillion lines of AI-generated code that no one really understands?

For your pet project? No. For something you're building for others to use? Almost certainly yes.

You do realize that it's possible to ask AI to write code and then read the code yourself to ensure it's valid, right? I usually try to strip the pointless comments, but it's not the end of the world if people leave them in.

The comments aren’t the problem.

> I usually try to strip the pointless comments

You could add your own instead, explaining how things work?

> It's possible to ask AI to write code and then read the code yourself

Sure, but then it would not be vibecoding.

>> It's possible to ask AI to write code and then read the code yourself

> Sure, but then it would not be vibecoding.

Wait, what?

AI assisted coding/engineering becomes "vibe coding" when you decide to abdicate any understanding of what you are building, instead focusing only on the outcome

This feels like a silly semantics argument, but how is the outcome not what you are building?

Vibe-coding as originally defined (by Karpathy?) implied not reading the code at all, just trying it and pasting back any error codes; repeat ad infinitum until it works or you give up.

Now the term has evolved into "using AI in coding" (usually with a hint of non rigor/casualness), but that's not what it originally meant.

Yeah but you're leaving out a crucial part: the code is full of useless comments.

That leaves 2 options:

- they didn't read the code themselves to ensure it's valid

- they did read the code themselves but left the useless comments

No matter which happened it shows they're a bad developer and I don't want to run their code.

IMO reading code is usually harder than writing code.

yes, it is

Reply on news.ycombinator.com