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Comment by cmrdporcupine | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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.

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

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.

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