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Comment by satvikpendem | Hacker News Reader

> If that's you, know that you can get a LONG way on the $20/month plans from OpenAI and Anthropic.

> The time to cough up $100 or $200/month is when you've exhausted your $20/month quota and you are frustrated at getting cut off. At that point you should be able to make a responsible decision by yourself.

These are the same people, by and large. What I have seen is users who purely vibe code everything and run into the limits of the $20/m models and pay up for the more expensive ones. Essentially they're trading learning coding (and time, in some cases, it's not always faster to vibe code than do it yourself) for money.

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I've been a software developer for 25 years, and 30ish years in the industry, and have been programming my whole life. I worked at Google for 10 of those years. I work in C++ and Rust. I know how to write code.

I don't pay $100 to "vibe code" and "learn to program" or "avoid learning to program."

I pay $100 so I can get my personal (open source) projects done faster and more completely without having to hire people with money I don't have.

Why would you ever hire someone to help with a personal open source project?

I wouldn't, but I can pay Claude

Depends on if the goal is to solve a problem (by writing code) or the goal is to write code (maybe solving a problem)

because we want to support open source? Even if you're independence maximalist, you still pay other people in your life to do things for you at some point. If you've got the money and the desire but not the time, why does that not seem reasonable to you?

Frankly I almost consider it a duty to use these agents -- which have harvested en masse from open source software (including GPL!) without permission -- to produce open source / free software.

Restoring a bit of balance to things.

I'm talking about the general trend, not the exceptions. How much of the code do you manually write with the 100 dollar subscription? Vibe coding is a descriptive, not a prescriptive, label.

"How much of the code do you manually write"

I review all of it, but hand write little of it. It's bizarre how I've ended up here, but yep.

That said, I wouldn't / don't trust it with something from scratch, I only trust it to do that because I built -- by hand -- a decent foundation for it to start from.

Sure, you're like me, you're not a vibe coder by the actual definition then. Still, the general trend I see is that a lot of actual vibe coders do try to get their product working, code quality be damned. Personally, same as you, I stopped vibe coding and actually started writing a lot of architecture and code myself first then allowing the LLM to fill in the features so to speak.

The issue is that your claim was that if you are using up tokens you are probably vibe coding.

But I’ve not found that to be true at all. My actually engineered processes where I care the most is where I push tokens the hardest. Mostly because I’m using llms in many places in the sdlc.

When I’m vibing it’s just a single agent sort of puttering along. It uses much fewer tokens.

> The issue is that your claim was that if you are using up tokens you are probably vibe coding.

I said "by and large" ie generally speaking. As I mentioned before, the exception does not invalidate the trend. I assume HN is more heavily weighted towards non-vibe-coders using up tokens like me and you but again, that's the exception to what I see online elsewhere.

How much assembly do you manually write?

Programming has always been about levels of abstraction, and the people who see LLM-generated code as “cheating” are the same people who argued that you can’t write good code with a compiler. Luddites, who will time-and-time again be proven wrong by the passage of time.

Came here to write something similar (Of course, other than working in Google) and saw your comments reflecting my views. Yes, Its worth pending $200/month on Claude to get my personal project ideas come to life with better quality and finish.

Well you did hire some(thing)...for $100/month.

If this is the new way code is written then they are arguably learning how to code. Jury is still out though, but I think you are being a bit dismissive.

I wouldn't change definitions like that just because the technology changed, I'm talking about the ability to analyze control flow and logic, not necessarily put code on the screen. What I've seen from most vibe coders is that they don't fully understand what's going on. And I include myself, I tried it for a few months and the code was such garbage after a while that I scrapped it and redid it myself.

Absolutely not. They're not writing code or performing most of the work that programmers do, therefore they're not [working as] programmers. Their work ends up producing code, but they're not coders any more than my manager is.

A "vibecoder" is to a programmer what script kiddie is to a hacker.

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