Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?
joecmarshall.com
joecmarshall.com
And I think that's one important difference: with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step.
Sure you can, why wouldn't you? Good models these days spit out architecture and code fairly indistinguishable from your average developer.
It's always hard to jump into an existing project and understand it all, but it's doable and in 2026 it's no harder to jump into a vibed project than it is to jump into any other project (with exceptions in both directions, of course).
You still have the code and can switch back to "fully human" (or any other point on the spectrum of human-ai) any time you want by just opening the same editor you would use if you cloned any other project.
Emphatically, no. It’s way too complex, every time. Ceinture et bretelles, as we say in French.
I do not know much French but that seems to translate literally into the common English phrase "belt and braces"
Qualitative measurement is always hard, but plenty of studies have come out in the past year that generally find many models' code to be roughly equal to human code in terms of maintainability, complexity, readability, etc.
Good lord no, AI generated code isn't remotely close to something even the most insane human would generate. And if someone did you would seriously have to question what was going through their head. Everything from naming conventions to the flow of logic is twisted and often non-sensical. Plus the commenting and verbosity of code is ridiculous.Claude constantly makes up new terms to describe things that leave you wondering what it's talking about. Yesterday Claude started referring to some sort of logic as "finger-splint".
When it fail, I fix it so it doesn't have multiple patterns that I might not know.
This is absolutely not true.
Using AI as a tool in a broader, already existing engineering process (here’s a detailed spec of the todo app; reference layouts for the UI are encoded in this folder; the data format requirements are in this file; the test suite must verify properties XXX) doesn’t have a catchy name, because it’s just software engineering, where coding is just but one part of the whole.
>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.
Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.
before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.
Are you saying widget makers are sloppy in their craft and only in it for their money?
Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.
I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.
Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.
Having a business brain is the new moat.
[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.
To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
Thinking this is the new reality is part of the problem.
What's the conversion between diarios and samas? Are the same at -40?
Thanks for the laugh, only a human could have written such a hilarious string of words. There may be hope for us after all.
As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.
Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.
Language is fun!
Is the saying commonly the other way around? I swap word orders, structures, etc. all the time (amongst many other mistakes), so I didn't even notice I wrote it like that until you mentioned it lol.
AI has simply been a tool to accelerate that and I've genuinely never been happier about the value I provide to society. I find it hard to take the "respect of the craft" argument at face value - even if I enjoy knitting by hand, I can still support the existence of mechanized looms and machinery that provide affordable clothing in the millions.
My late grandmother knit 1-2 pairs of socks per day and donated them to the homeless center - absolutely amazing thing to, and it kept her motivated and sharp up to 104 years of age.
However, if her ultimate goal is providing socks to the homeless, would it not be better for her to work a library job for $15/hour, then take the $100+ a day and purchase then donate 30 pairs of socks? Even if the socks are a lower quality and wear out twice as fast, she could help 15x the people thanks to the mechanization and efficiency provided by the devision of labour.
I see this divide more and more and truthfully I wish I could understand both sides. I am encountering trouble in the startup I'm working on for exactly this reason: I feel laser focused on the attempt to create value for others, while my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.
Any help in understanding those who "love to make" (as opposed to those who "love to deliver") would be extremely useful.
Some people genuinely enjoy the process of thinking hard about a problem and writing the code that solves it.
Literally the entire "flow" of coding has changed. It's now about parallel agent management and testing, less about any actual writing of code. Even thinking hard about problems has been reduced due to how insanely good AI has gotten.
You need both. You really need both. A salesman to keep the craftsman from getting too bogged down in details to ever finish, and the craftsman to keep the salesman from ever lowering quality too much that customers start seeing the company as money grubbing misers trying to make a quick buck.
It only works with both. Too much of one and you sink.
This can be seen time and again in successful endeavours. (Apple, Microsoft, Google, star wars, honestly so many movies, moon landings, the list could go on)
The craft is about creating a tool that others use not some divine code that programmers stare at and admire.
You are confused that is why you are surprised.
Working with AI tools is like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. You're so removed from the point of contact that you no longer have effective haptic feedback for the problem you're trying to solve. You're not doing the work, you're commissioning and checking someone else's work. It's an entirely different job now.
The only pushback I can think of is that I do feel coding, which is a list of instructions to a computer, differ from music. With LLMs the translation work between English and coding primitives and concepts was reduced significantly. I think that took the challenge and the sense of control/mastery out of the craft.
There is something lost in that transition. I remember my university professor used to equate coding with poetry. But after decades of working on corporate codebases, I personally welcomed the automation. I always wanted to build ambitious and quality software and this was nearly impossible with the level of abstraction we had before. So something was lost but also a lot was gained.
So it's a bit strange to treat composing program code as something that's incidental or ancillary to what software engineers do. A software engineer solves problems through writing code. If you make the writing of code go away, you're no longer building software. You're a product manager or a systems analyst, delegating the building of the software to someone or something else. If that's what you want to do, go nuts. But say what it is.
Is none of this part of the artistic side of the craft? If I tell an LLM, 'Connect to DB X, pull data from Y, and display it in table Z,' is that really less of a craft than manually referencing API docs, wiring up data pipelines, and serializing objects? Is telling an LLM 'Do X, then Y, then Z' truly that different from writing if X do Y or while X do Z? It reminds me of the pushback against Java and other high-level languages when they were first introduced—people panicked over losing low-level control.
I do recognize something is lost by moving to a higher abstraction (e.g. from JS/Java/PHP to English), but to say the entire craft is lost and what we had before was "music" relative to the nothing now, I believe it is a narrow take on what is happening.
That's what Steve Jobs brought to the table. Was Steve Jobs a software or hardware engineer? I would argue no—he was fundamentally doing product design and management. You can argue this is a craft as well, but it's a fundamentally different one from software engineering.
> What about codebase architecture?
LLMs are getting good at this too. Within a few years we may not need humans for this. If you're hoping that "architecture" will be your moat, well, I'm sorry...
> The user experience, and how using the software makes someone feel? What about the narrative and mental models the software offers users? How does it shape the way they think? What about expanding into adjacent, bigger, or deeper products?
Again, these are largely product design concerns. Software engineers can do them, sometimes even well, but they alone do not constitute software engineering.
> Is none of this part of the artistic side of the craft?
You seem to be getting hung up on my music analogy as some sort of "code as art" thing. While I agree that code can be artistic, that's not where I was going with it at all. I mean that in order to compose, a musician usually picks up and plays an instrument, or simply sings in order to play with melodies and harmonies to determine what sounds right. They set up a sort of ear/brain/muscular system feedback loop to shape how a song sounds and feels in real time. If you have them specify what kind of song they want in English, you've cut out that feedback loop. They're not really being a musician anymore, they're commissioning music. They're more of a musical director. It's the same with programmers. Programmers work and think in code. Code becomes a medium of exchange of ideas about procedure between each other, their future selves, and the machine. I learned a lot about this writing Lisp, but even in a stodgy language like Ada, I can get a lot of thinking through of a solution done by writing what types I want to be working with, in Ada. If you take the code away and say "here, specify the program you want in English", you're basically asking the software engineer to stop being a software engineer and start being a product manager or business analyst. Which is fine, you know, maybe we just don't need software engineers anymore.
> I do recognize something is lost by moving to a higher abstraction (e.g. from JS/Java/PHP to English)
No, it's not "just another layer of abstraction". It's fundamentally different. Generally speaking, software abstractions are transparent homomorphisms from the constructs in the language of expression (e.g., Java, PHP) to instructions the computer can execute. How an LLM converts your prompt into code is both opaque and unstable. I get that we're really not supposed to care about that, nor did many people care exactly how the compilers they used work. But with a compiler, if you do care, you can examine it and it'll make sense, or you can write your own. An LLM, not so much really.
Again, you are no longer building the software yourself. You're asking a teammate to. It's just that your teammate exists in silico now. This becomes more true, not less, as LLMs become more capable of the grunt work of, you know, engineering, freeing you for the more important business of stating what you want in vaguer and looser terms. I guess the dream is that we'll all become business founders, with the LLM as our founding engineer, and we can just ask them to build what we think the business needs, and go through them to make refinements and changes.
That's pretty much what I'm doing after 20+ years of writing code.
They do feel like teammates sometimes, though I tend to give them much more explicit instructions. It feels less like complete outsourcing and more like declarative programming in English.
Where we differ is that you seem to see code as this rigorous medium of thought that defines the craft, whereas I don't. I've always viewed code as a translation layer between human intent and machine execution. That layer has simply dissolved. Viewing code this way might feel less romantic and more pragmatic, but I think it’s more accurate. You can think, reason, and make decisions just as rigorously in plain English. The skill of translating English into code was what got automated—the true craft lives way above and beyond that layer.
But I don't think I can convince you on HN if you have such a strong views on coding. And I'm left to wonder, how are you feeling about the craft if what you perceived as the core activity (I thinking coding was at best 20% of the craft) got fully automated? Have you tried to build a really complex software with LLMs over few months? I think that might give you more clear picture of what truly happened.
Much of paid software is written to provide a business outcome. I hand-code at home while relaxing. I use the LLM harness at work to produce value for the business at the expected pace. There are indeed drawbacks to using an LLM to write your software. The job is to mitigate the issues and deliver the business outcome.
There are software use cases that LLMs handle poorly. It makes sense to perform those manually.
yes
You can work that way, or you can get involved. I am extremely hands-on with the LLMs and it feels like I'm pairing with someone who is doing the typing. My partner is brilliant in some ways but incredibly stupid in other ways. It can't replace me; for the most part I could replace it, but the work would take 10X longer.
Definitely feels like "my" code at the end. I find it very satisfying, it takes away much of the tedium of programming (ie the typing).
I used to enjoy it, and after many years of being asked to do nothing other than boring web applications or my work literally being thrown away (which worked perfectly) because management decided that it had to be implemented in <new language>. I worked hard to write something simple and well documented and worked as well as I could, and it was thrown away. I've had other so-called "lead developers" take credit for my ideas and then implement them so poorly; it was clear they misunderstood it entirely. I've had people straight up lie about what I would be doing in a position. I am currently trapped in a job where I was straight up lied to about what I was doing.
These sorts of experiences have left me completely jaded as a result. I know I am not alone.
I seldom have time to work on my own projects. Software is much more complicated than it used to be, and simply getting things working in a framework or scaffolding a project can take a lot of time. With the AI I can prototype software very quickly, while using my existing skills to stop it from going off the rails.
Why asking outside the technical domain? Code is instructions for a machine for it to do a task. All this philosophy around code as art or whatever it's in my opinion just intellectual onanism, looking at the screen and thinking "damn I'm the shit just look at that oneliner oh my gawd, look at those perfectly applied GoF patterns. Pure engineering. Poetry is code".
The craft you say. What's the intent of it? Having code that's nice to look at and/or understand or the product of such code execution? For the later coding "as craft" is irrelevant. I've seen beautiful and mind blowing software with horrendous code, an entire company working as a clock with a 4 millions LOC single php file, the most cringe inducing spaghetti code I've ever seen. Users don't care. The software works as expected, fast, almost no bugs after >10 years of development. It's purpose fulfilled. And I've seen perfect code running slow as fuck.
I've done manual and CNC machining. I forgot the last time I wrote G codes in the thousands LOC. Everything now is CAD CAM. A software wrote the code for me, I just designed the thing. Same with 3D printing. Should I write the code myself to respect the craft? Of course not, that would an incredible waste of time. I want the physical piece in my hand or an application running fast and without crashing. Why would I care for HOW the code is written?
I think folks in the craft need to mature a bit and understand this very well.
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dating apps suck, your UI/UX can groundbreaking but that doesn't make them any less awful to use
This "AI is inevitable" mood that people are in always seem to come from people who don't have to use the things AI is supposedly going to replace, and never consider what the actual consequences of that might be
I live in a city and I still feel like my best bet to meet someone is on the apps because they have taken out a lot of the old ways that people used to meet. How do you even approach a potential date? IDK and it sucks.
Why do you think Claude claims its work on git is co-authored, and now has started putting links to the transcript showing your working. It's about sending a message to the one paying your salary that all your real input in the creation was a few messages and you're replaceable in that equation.
or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?
again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line
I don't think so. We probably gonna have 2 situations: the current one that humans influence AI output and the opposite where art, software, etc evolves based on AI variations and we incorporate them to our taste, expectations, etc.
So lots of personal one-off tools/dashbooards that I never would have made before will probably live forever on my personal git server instead of github or somewhere.
1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)
2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"
Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.
I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.
I don't plan things. I braindump context to the agent let it implement something, and iterate from there (A LOT).
Planning was for an era where implementation was expensive.
Always amazing to see how quickly the norm can become 'very outdated'. What GP described was all unheard of in 2023, brand new in 2024, and became pretty widely accepted in 2025.
I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
I would also argue that group two aren't "software engineers" anymore; what they do is less engineering and more architecture. Perhaps "agentic developer" is more appropriate.
That's exactly the sentiment I'm referring to.
I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc). And they're definitely making stuff (friends with kids are making games that their friends play, sharing homemade videos with each other, making bedtime stories, making websites and apps that others use, etc).
I'd also argue that theory and architecture have always been closer to "software engineering" than coding ever was, but I also acknowledge I've got a bit of a bias belonging to group 2 (otherwise: been coding for ~25 years).
This is a dangerous game people are playing. One where people trick themselves into believing that ideation == creation. Not only are they not the same, framing it as such gives people licensure to crowd out the actual creatives who spent countless hours creating the inputs to these models.
Furthermore, I disagree with the following:
>I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc).
What are these barriers people keep referring to that prevented people from creating music, art, stories pre-2022? If someone owned a phone, laptop, etc. in 2022 they already had access any number of free digital tools to assist in making music, art, stories, home made films. Hell, you can buy a pen and notebook from a store for a handful of dollars.
What you really mean is that pre-2022 nobody could produce a decent looking photo, song, or program without having to spend a lot of time learning about that craft. But that isn't a barrier--someone making a shitty song is still making music.
People just want the ability to generate content which resembles quality without having worked for it. In practice, this kind of behavior is far closer to consumption than craft/art/making/whatever.
I hate reading slop as much as the next person, so I get it, but I don't try to deny it exists.
Aren't you exactly asking every person in the comment section of nearly every post on this site to deny it exists? Let them complain about AI slop.
> If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
It already is, and it's called engineering.
The value is how much steering you can provide. Whether it's in the form of domain knowledge or "hardcore" engineering is beside the point.
Taste is all we have left.
for someone like me who doesn't like to write tests - I could easily have an agent write a test for me.
I could lay the bricks then also have the agent do ornamental design that I'm not good at.
I so miss the days when people were given tools and made the effort to get others to know them.