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Comment by short_sells_poo | Hacker News Reader

I'm going to sound harsh here, but please don't take this as criticism of the effort, it's criticism of how it's being portrayed. The quality might for all intents be great and useful.

> But I built this for myself out of frustration with the official client

But you didn't build it. This is akin to me telling an intern to build me a widget and then claiming it was me who built it. Or a construction manager saying they built a skyscraper.

Yes, the intern and the construction crew needs guidance and management, but I can't then go to the management committee and claim ownership of the effort.

> I also wouldn't call this vibe coded either.

You didn't write any of the code or even the documentation for that matter. You guided a code generator that relied on you to guide high level decisions but then did all the implementation on it's own. That's vibe coding.

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This debate is irrelevant. It doesn't matter. Having the idea and the skills to dictate a stable piece of software are all that matter.

There is no point in taking pride in typing out lines of code by hand. The entire world is moving on.

The problem is not the emittance of code by a statistical black box.

It’s not even knowing how it works or even what it used to achieve the desired result.

You wrote it or not, that’s your code. You are the one responsible. The machine has no brain. Use yours.

That may be, but if I come back to the old project I didn't touch in months, code may as well be written by an alien.

I can return to my 5+ year old code and start hacking in 30 minutes or so. I believe it boils down to documentation and comments.

Of course there's a point in it, don't be a boor.

Any act of making can be treated as product, as craft, or as art. You'll find yourself taking all three stances at different points. Any engineer or artisan or artist can choose to pour their attention and love into any layer of the production process.

I like ceramics. I like wheel throwing. Once upon a time, the pottery wheel was a newfangled technique for rapid and regular production of commodity goods. Same with coil building, same with slip casting, same with standardization of glaze recipes, gas and electric kilns, all of it.

But I know people who choose to quarry and purify their own clay, or to mix their own glazes, or to fire their pieces in a hole in the ground dug by hand with a fire they built by hand. I know people who make dozens of identical copies of just a few forms, after they spend months iterating on carving intricate molds. I know people who will spend a whole season working on a single hand-built bust.

And none of these people have ever, to my knowledge, expressed scorn for any of the others, for focusing on a different step in the process.

The construction manager can’t say they built a skyscraper? In that only for someone who personally laid every brick and ran every wire?

But they know the plans, and knows people where all the wires are, etc.

With vibe coding you know nothing.

No they can't. The construction crew - which includes the manager - can say that they built a skyscraper.

If the construction manager did lay the bricks or did the majority of the work in all aspects, they could claim to have built a building. Otherwise they contributed work, no denying that, but they can't claim credit for building it. Same way that architects can't claim they built the skyscraper, even though they probably spent a lot of effort designing it to specs. To the best of my knowledge, no serious architect claims they "built" the building. They have designed it yes. Same way, the construction manager would claim they have managed the construction.

I admit that the classification is fuzzy, but there's an explosion of vibe coders going about claiming to have built things, whose contribution is basically spending a total of one hour with a prompt and and LLM doing basically all the heavy lifting.

That's not necessarily the case of the author here, but the line has blurred a lot and people very giddily claim credit for much less actual accomplishment than what would've flown in the past.

I think you're being pedantic to the point of losing all credibility. And you're gatekeeping in the worst possible way.

Your argument that using an LLM means you didn't "make" a thing could just as easily be used to say that if you used a framework or a library, you also didn't "make" a thing, because you didn't write all the code yourself and you didn't understand everything.

Would you say the authors of YT-DLP didn't "make" anything because they are a wrapper over FFMPEG and CURL?

If you produce something useful (even just to yourself), you "made" a thing.. It has a purpose, and it's useful. Who cares how you made it or how long it took?

For example I've made plenty of bash scripts over the years that were effectively thin wrappers that combined other tools, but they did something novel and useful that saved me tons of time, and I've shared those as gists or in other ways.

Some of these scripts took me mere minutes to make. I didn't use an LLM to make them, but the "heavy lifting" definitely wasn't in my script. No one ever showed up to berate me and try to tell me that I didn't actually produce anything useful in any of these cases.

So this "in the past" that you imagine where people were held to some bullshit standard for what is accepted as "making" a thing?

That past doesn't really exist, and if does where you are, it sucks.

People do care - lots of people do. Maybe you don’t, and maybe the argument the other poster made wasn’t fair, but you make just as spurious claims when you say „who cares how you made it or how long it took?”

Really? You care about some stranger's work and how they created it?

Pro tip: you shouldn't.

Care about your work if you want, but "caring" about how someone else makes things and how they talk about it is just being a judgemental busybody and again, gatekeeping.

As for my comment, I stand by it.

If I made something genuinely useful, then it should not matter if it took me 5 minutes or 5 days to make it.

You'll never convince me that more time spent making something (all other factors being equal - yes, quality matters) gives it more value or credibility.

Thanks for the tip haha. I am personally divided on it, but it’s more complicated than just quality or output for me.

I will apologize if I came off combative - was in the backseat of a car so may have been a little direct.

I think people care, all for different reasons. You care too - just when it comes to quality as you mentioned (and I’m sure other factors).

In this case many people correctly pointed out that there were clear indications of a lack of direct cognitive effort on behalf of the operator - including code quality, comment / git history, and including copy that he didn’t write. Now that doesn’t necessarily mean the LLM which did most of the work (or not? How can we know without an auditable prompt history) didn’t produce quality work.

When it comes to something that was made in 5 days AI assisted - the idea may be novel, but without a full prompt history it does become difficult to assess quality of cognitive effort on the operator at least.

In any case - it’s hard for me to know what to call the author. And I do think this applies to traditional media as well, so Im definitely not saying it’s all one sided (Bah! AI!)

That's fair, I guess I was really reacting to the narrow gatekeeping-like case the OP was advocating, where time spent/invested - or only doing things a certain way - was correlated to legitimacy and being able to claim you "made" a thing.

OK, clear enough. But that's an unusual definition of "build" that I don't think you should necessarily expect others to share.

The first entry for "build" in the OED is: To construct, put up, erect (a house or other dwelling or building); to construct (a permanent static structure such as a wall, bridge, or architectural feature, a road or railway, etc.). Also: to commission, finance, direct, or oversee the construction of (something of this type).

In the original sense of the word, vibe coding means neither reading nor caring about the code: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/

Some would use the term "Agent Engineering" for what OP did.

There's a trend where people go around claiming they built something and just happen to conveniently omit everywhere that everything was "built" using an LLM and the author doesn't even understand what the code does. That's the crux of my objection.

FWIW I agree with your post and perhaps we need a separate name for people who just instructed an LLM to build something, but then took the trouble to understand how the thing actually works.

It seems to me that this is not the case here. The author used LLM to build the whole thing and left it at that. Which is completely fair, I'd do the same if I just wanted to scratch an itch with the minimal amount of effort, but then I wouldn't go around claiming "I built it".

If I take a photo and then use GIMP to edit it, then did I take a photo or just direct my camera at something and then steer my computer to make changes to it? After all, it's not me drawing each pixel manually. It's vibe-photoed!

No. It's vibe-photoed when you use AI models which are trained on countless hours of actual human work. Otherwise you apply deterministic tools at your will and according to your skill level.

Shit take. You’re trying to play the bs semantics game and can’t even pull it off

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