Vibe coding is a hobby. Let me explain | Hacker News Reader

Vibe coding is a hobby. Let me explain

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9 pointsdham12 comments

>Managing agents, crafting skills, building docs, designing workflows

You're describing the modern edition of people obsessed with their "development" environments. The ones who treated their system (usually Linux) and text editor (usually Vim or Emacs) like a canvas, perfecting their configuration the way an artist refines a masterwork. Choosing packages and themes like a painter choosing brushes. Younger people of this mindset are now obsessed with multiple LLMs, multi-agent workflows, MCPs, and similar.

In contrast, there's the modern version of the people who used to just open an IDE and copy-paste snippets until they got the result they wanted. Now, those same people simply open Claude Code and prompt: "make me this app", "modify this", "do this more like that", and so on. Those are vibe coders. The only thing that's changed is a lower barrier, less effort, and faster development; yet somehow higher quality since SOTA LLMs output better code than most juniors used to.

And last there's the midway. People who set up their environment, without it becoming the main focus.

That's an interesting point. One, I wish I made haha. This article is for people who are "into" this stuff (tech). Who live and breathe it. Who've been doing it as a kid and just getting into agentic coding.

https://x.com/rough__sea/status/2013280952370573666?s=46&t=U... this lands the same day the creator of NodeJS says "the era of humans writing code is over".

You didn't read the article. The TLDR is: treat it like learning anything else (Like learning a language). Go into it full force with good faith, and you'll have a better outcome.

I use llms to handle the minutia that I don't want to do. The part I enjoy is figuring out the problem. Once I know how it should be done, I like to task the llm to do the rote parts. "It's in my head, I just need to get it on paper." So doing a shorter prompt in English and providing exact instructions gets me 75% of the way there, at which point I can audit and tweak as necessary. It has me doing hobby side projects more often. Once it gets prohibitively expensive, I'll go back to the Old Fashioned Way (tm) and pine for the days of subsidized code completion.

Pure vibe coding is sort of like kids using lego building something actually useful, it takes thought and a lot of work.

Nah. I'm using it daily for work and producing clean, fully controlled PRs. I don't get this denial, as the value is there, development is visibly faster, and without impact on quality (I'm controlling the agent, not vice versa).

I did not RTFA. Just came to reply to the clickbaity title: coding is a hobby (and a job) for me. Using AI is just a tool in that.

That's the article lol

I have gotten to the point where people selling the idea of running 20 agents at the time and delivering something useful are firmly planted on the left of the Dunning-Kruger curve and are unable to have a critical take on the code being produced.

I review every single AI edit with the same cognitive load as if I was programming myself (Claude Code Opus 4.5) and I'm always having to adjust and fix things on a constant basis.

I keep doing it because having the LLM output is basically like a giant auto complete I can tweak, I can't compete with the speed of a proposed patch of me hand writing everything even if I'm considered 'fast' at a 90 WPM and using vim keybindings.

There has never been once a single session or non-trivial task where I would have to NOT intervene in the implementation and I consider myself a quite strong power user, (Master's in AI) using it for a long time, strong linting, and demanding test coverage.

It boggles me and I stand in disbelief with people saying they just let it run by itself and works (fulfilling all edge cases needed for production code NOT the happy path in a PoC) , has not been my experience at all.

I predict the following 3 things:

1.) The people using autonomous agents don't deploy any of the vibe coded mess in a high stakes production environment where bugs and crashes and unintended behaviours will make you lose money and reputation.

2) The people churning 20 agents non stop don't have the skill to realize the slop and mishaps of the code they are pushing.

3) These people have far better prompting skills and stronger setups than me and they can achieve better and more reliable results.

I don't know what it is, probably the third, but it has not matched my reality at all.

Similar experience here.

To me the limiting factor is, for lack of a better expression, the speed of taking responsibility for the agents' output.

I can't sign off a 1000 LoC change in 5 minutes, it's just not possible.

For this reason I don't believe people saying they've experienced a 20x speedup. No one who makes a living in this business is this much slower at writing than reading code that they don't hit a wall with the latter when the former is done by AI.

Don't disagree at all. But many devs are not working with a "high stakes production environment where bugs and crashes and unintended behaviours will make you lose money and reputation." There is the class of software where getting it done ASAP and hitting all the "happy path" requirements is the way to make money. Edge cases, bugs, and maintenence nightmares are all problems for the next contract.

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