Hacker News Reader

Comment by websap | Hacker News Reader

Yikes! I've been a software engineer for over a decade, and I've never had more fun in my career. Running an AI assistant on a cloud machine to pair with me, explore my ideas, learn new tricks, and even write code that I would never write due to timelines and deadlines has been fantastic.

Using coding agents to search for patterns, understanding why our abstractions might not be working because of how users integrate, etc etc.

Not everything vibe coded is bad software, not all bad software is vibe coded.

View on HN

To echo another reply in the thread, but with an example: have you seen the stats for OpenClaw on GitHub just for this week?: https://github.com/openclaw/openclaw/pulse

They are trying to avoid that.

Why is that bad?

GitHub seems to be struggling to support agentic and bot-driven software development. OpenClaw is an extreme example, but there are other projects like it that employ the same methods for development. If I were building a source forge in 2026 and wanted to compete with GitHub I would either:

* Not allow these types of projects at all, like sourcehut, or

* Embrace and charge for the capacity/infrastructure it would take to support it, like cursor's play with origin seems to be.

I guess they want to save on storage, so providing the service without really providing it.

What does vibe coding mean to you? I use the term vibe code to mean software produced by conversation with an agent, with minimal or no understanding of the code / project structure by the person.

Your process doesn’t sound like vibe coding to me, though maybe this part is “and even write code that I would never write”. If you’re just generating snippets as black boxes and putting that into a project you’re otherwise maintaining general understanding of, this isn’t what I refer to as vibe coding. (Not that I’d use this process in a community with clearly stated rules against AI use.)

The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.

FWIW, if an LLM is writing significant code, I'd consider it vibe coding regardless of your understanding of the code or expert guidance and almost certainly ban-AI people would too. The scale people seem care about when this comes up is code percentage that's LLM-written to hand-written, not code ignorance to full understanding by the author.

> The people in support of these bans generally aren't interested in "good vibe coded" software. They oppose LLMs altogether on various grounds, not just the output quality.

I think you're very wrong.

I think many of the people who "support these bans" do recognize value in LLM's and use them as tools in the kit applied to their workflows but recognize that rampant abuse and misuse of those same tools threatens to ruin (or already has ruined) many community projects that had previously been healthy and thriving.

And so they find themselves insisting upon unambiguous firewalls as an existential necessity for the communities they have invested years or decades of their lives into.

How do we figure out who's right?

The tab completion feature a lot of people were using before the term ‘vibecoding’ was coined by the AI dude is or isn’t vibecoding in your view?

Yes, relying on auto complete was frowned upon back then.

I’m aware of that. I’m just polling for opinions on the meaning of vibecoding, not whether or not AI is bad.

Are you actually retaining that information though? You're not writing the code, the LLM is. You might not even be reviewing it properly.

It's hard to compare - prior to Opus 4.5 my code was 95% hand-written, with the occassional tab completion.

Now, I would say 80% of my code is written through an LLM, and the last 20% is usually me reviewing adjusting, etc. The part that I find cumbersome is that even when I make manual adjustments, I still need to tell the LLM, otherwise it leads to context drift.

When I compare these 2 times, I think I remember fewer specific details, but I'm getting better at creating more checkpoints.

I think the term vibe coded is unclear. I use agents to do most of my coding work now. Some might call it vibe coded. I use spec driven development of my own design. While the applications are relatively simple, they are reasonably well architected and maintainable.

Some would say I a, vibe coding since I don’t really write the code. I say I’m not because I’m thinking through the features more than vibe coders.

The original definition, as put forth by Karpathy [1], was that you explicitly did not look at the code ever (diffs, errors, etc.). All development, review, etc. is driven entirely through the LLM agent.

But at this point, the term has been diluted down to basically being meaningless.

https://xcancel.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383

Right!!! LLMs are yet another step up the abstraction ladder. Before LLMs I would write code in C or Perl; I didn't care about the machine code it eventually was translated into---the compilers/interpreters evolved to handle that correctly and transparently. Note that this was not always the case; when I started to use computers, we all aspired to master assembly like the apocryphal Mel ( https://users.cs.utah.edu/~elb/folklore/mel.html ) --- we had to pay attention to machine code and assembly language, because the compilers often didn't generate performant code and were occasionally buggy.

People say that LLMs are not like compilers because they are unreliable. I think with time they will get fixed.

I don’t think their concern is “vibecode = bad” but more like they can’t handle the volume.

> I don’t think their concern is “vibecode = bad” but more like they can’t handle the volume.

Then they should not be in the business of hosting repos?

"if you cannot handle a 10x load over the historical standard of generally low quality content you should not be hosting repos"

A ridiculous take

X serves lots of low-quality content at scale and it's running off Elon's laptop from what I can tell. So why can't these guys do the same?

There are other ways to slow the traffic down.

Sure there are other ways to do this same thing, they picked this option. Not particularly noteworthy of a thing

I mean it's good you are having fun, but that way of working will not be accepted in some communities, its inevitable so just find the place that accepts your preferred way of working.

Why would you ever care about looking at code? Code forges aren't really a useful tool going forward. As agents replace people writing code, the features of code forges really aren't that useful. Nobody will be reviewing agent code other than agents, and you don't need a pull request and code review model for that.

Coding is just going to be asking for a result and manually testing it, no real thought about what code has been generated, and no human should ever need to look at or review it. Even some versioned tarball on s3 will do for the storage.

So, really, who cares about what they do when their entire business model (and Github's) is speedrunning becoming obsolete?

Basically, the future of tools like github is a platform for manual testing, where the AI proposes a change and you can experiment with the UI and attach notes for the next iteration. The whole idea of coders carefully reviewing the output of LLMs is insane, it'd be like carefully poring over the output of GCC; we've made lines of code so cheap and skill-free that there's no point in these platforms that treat code like it's important to view.

I find it fulfilling to write and read code. It’s also a powerful technology. That doesn’t just change just because there’s another technology more powerful in certain ways. These are some level 0 reasons to want to read code, but there are lots.

Ok, sure. Hobbyist purposes excluded.

You don’t buy the argument the open source movement has been putting out for decades about code transparency increasing freedom?

The code is so cheap today that you can just ask an LLM to generate it for you, for all but the largest projects. I don't get why you'd care about humans being involved, no.

The code is cheap, but the mistakes in production are very expensive!

You want to be leading the agent, not lagging the produced code.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com