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Comment by darkwater | Hacker News Reader

I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post. The post author is calling out the "Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?" folks for empty accusations. The "accusers" in their post are THE people asking that question, not the AI users.

See this paragraph:

> There are no vibecoded Photoshops because vibecoding does not do what the rhetoric claims it does. The accusation itself is the vibe. The accuser feels that a thing must have been easy because it was made with AI. They post that feeling as if it were a finding. The finding never has to be checked, because nobody else checks it either. The accusation travels because it feels right, not because it is right. Big difference.

> The accusation that someone produced unverified output is itself being produced as unverified output

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It's a strangely/poorly written article. I've read it a couple of times and am still not 100% clear what the author is trying to say.

As best I can tell, the author is saying that it's unrealistic to expect that a vibecoded photoshop would YET exist since just because you can use AI to help doesn't make the task much easier or quicker. If this is the right take, then I guess he's really talking about AI-assisted development (i.e. AI coding used as a tool by a human developer), rather than "vibe coding" in the sense of "here's some specs - write this for me". With AI as a coding tool, then all the hard work is still left to the human - coding it up once you've specced and designed it was never the hard part.

With Karpathy-style vibe coding - just tell the AI what you want it to build - it's either going to succeed fast or fail fast, so "where is the vibecoded Photoshop" is then a reasonable question, albeit a rhetorical one, reflecting that this type of "gimme X" vibecoding isn't able to produce something of that nature, so of course if doesn't exist.

Yeah it has a confusing clickbait title that gives the wrong impression of what the article is about. His point is that the bottleneck to making a complex app like photoshop is architectural rather than just writing basic code… and he argues the LLMs don’t magically make the architectural part easier.

This is the first time in my life I have ever felt the need of an LLM to understand an article. Even after understanding the overall gist of the article (thanks ChatGPT!), I still can't make head or tail of many sentences and find many questionable choices made in the way the article was structured.

e.g.

>And the accusers never want to address that, because addressing it means admitting the accusation doesn't hold up.

This is the first sentence that introduces the "accuse" word in the article without establishing what the accusation is, who the accusers are or why should the accuser be worried about their claim being spectacularly successful (zero counterexamples). The last part is still not clear to me at all.

Then the article makes a bunch of unestablished claims to the point of becoming straight up ad hominem. No, the senior developers of the world are not asking this question because they don't understand that the requirement gathering, architecting and decision making (level 2 and 3 activities in the nomenclature of the article) - but precisely because of it. Senior developers world over are being pressured into unreasonable expectations around delivery speed by CEOs and other management types. The entire point of "Where Are the Vibecoded Photoshops?" is to hopefully be able to communicate to these people that the bottleneck hasn't moved, so to expect 10x increase in delivery is entirely unreasonable.

For others who are confused.

The author is someone in the demoscene who has been accused of "vibe coding" large pieces of work.

His counter is that if such things are possible, where is the vibe coded Photoshop?

He then goes on a tangent that "vibe coding" is a kind of easy accusation mostly levelled at "neurodiverse" developers

Which is why he ends the post:

    So.
    Where are the vibecoded Photoshops?
    WHERE IS THE THREAT YOU MADE UP TO ATTACK ME?

    I'm waiting.
    – gizmo

AH! That brings the whole thing into context. So to charitably paraphrase the argument, it's something like: "If I used AI to produce something technically impressive, my human input was still an important part of the process. Nobody has vibecoded (AI-generated without human guidance) a photoshop, which is evidence that the human input/oversight is still important. Therefore my AI-assisted work is important/impressive/valuable."

Yes, I think so. Although it's a poor argument in my view: just because nobody has vibe coded Product X, doesn't mean his Product Y was praiseworthy

the lady doth protest too much, Methinks

You are right. I was too close to see the gap. You did the work I should have done upfront. I revised the article. Thanks for the feedback.

> I don't think most of the commenter so far are getting the real meaning of this post.

That's the tricky part of blog titles, you have to assume 90% of the future commentators doesn't actually read the body nor conclusion, so if your title is the reverse of the argument you're trying to make, or something "fun" like that, you'll have 90% of the commentators misunderstanding what the basics of the article even is about.

It doesn't help that the article is actually quite poorly written.

At least you know it wasn’t written by AI… maybe it was left in a draft state because the author disliked the idea of being accused of writing it with AI

That makes it better? That's what bugs me about the anti-AI sentiment. I'm supposed to want to read worse, more poorly written work (like said article) because it has a human touch to it? Yes it would be great if everyone had perfect writing skills, but we're all human, so we don't. If someone uses an LLM to help them get their point across so it's easier to understand where they're coming from, why penalize them for it?

> maybe it was left in a draft state because the author disliked the idea of being accused of writing it with AI

Given the general gist and tone of the article, I somehow find that extremely hard to believe.

I think the point is that people who are making the accusation of vibecoding (or just using a prompt to make something) don't understand the work that it takes to make something.

Something similar happened with the invention of the synthesizer. (Specifically, the giant, modular Moog and its contemporaries like the Arp.) People made accusations about the synthesizer doing all the work and playing all the music; when in reality it was often harder (at the time) to play the synthesizer than traditional keyboarded instruments.

You can learn about this if you read about some of the accusations against Keith Emerson.

But the vast majority of people don't hate vibe coding because it is a cheat code to enhance their productivity. They hate it because it isn't a cheat code and it isn't a cheat code because the results are off from what they ideally should be. So now they are forced to make less decisions, care less about the results and outcomes, for the sake of pretending to be more productive when a simpler LLM chat + copy paste + edit flow could have been closer to the desired end result than letting an agent loose without even looking at the code.

A lot of AI writing is bad and you notice it immediately. AI changes the cost calculus towards unnecessary verbosity and exploring paths that lead to nowhere. Writing block is usually because you don't have anything to say. If you had anything to say, the words would just flood out of your fingers. Easily two thousand to four thousand words per day. You wouldn't be able to keep up physically with your own brain.

I don't know or care whether the blog post is written with AI, but it's not a very good article, because it fails to explain what "the accusation" is, who "the accusers" are and who is being "accused". Despite it being the core part of the article and it being in opposition to the title the article endlessly drifts in its own vagueness, where nothing is concrete and everything is unsaid. It's a puzzle where you're supposed to put the pieces together, you're supposed to just get it and know what the author is thinking, without the author ever having to bother explicitly telling you, so that no matter what interpretation you choose, the author can always gotcha you that you didn't get it, when "it" was never conveyed.

The Photoshop and the gate/level paragraphs are easily read as a criticism of vibe coding, but the accusation paragraphs are a defense of vibe coding.

Honestly, this is giving me "heads I win, tails you lose" vibes.

Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made

People are making vibe accusations.

This is what usually happens with LLM assisted writing. Looking at other posts in author blog, they are as well likely written with help and guidance of LLM bot, and also bring feeling of incoherence when read. I'd say this style predates LLM by millenia so it is not really invented by bots. To me it resembles the most the older religious texts and especially oral preaching. Some of attractors in current frontier models are likely coming from religious areas of knowledge, since this apocalyptic incoherence is found in so many texts today.

That probably explains why I needed an LLM to make sense of it at all.

Honestly, would’ve been much better to just let the LLM write the whole thing.

> Frankly I do not understand what argument is being made

The rough argument being made is that a bunch of folks go around lobbing vibe coding accusations at LLM users, because those folks are afraid that LLMs are taking their coding jobs. And that this anger is misdirected, since coding wasn't actually the moat in software development, and LLMs aren't making much of a dent in software architecture or product design.

Is the author saying that people are accusing "handmade" apps of being vibecoded?

I read the post, but I find it incoherent.

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