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Comment by meowface | Hacker News Reader

I am actually going to go out on a limb and guess the opposite of this is true, and that on average vibecoders burn tokens less readily than veteran software engineers. I could list several reasons why I think this would be likely. No idea which of us is empirically right, though.

(With exceptions for what I can only call the "manic vibecoders" with like 10 simultaneous weird slopprojects they're spewing out at once. Generally with each project itself being something related to vibecoding. Steve Yegge being an example of a "manic vibecoder-actual programmer" hybrid.)

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I’d think this matches my hypothesis. I’d say that I spend more tokens rewriting and fixing things, so that contributes more.

Also, I’d imagine the token-maxed user is a programmer that lives in chat. I’ll admit to having asked the LLM to move a method up/down in a file, and watched it burn tokens for a minute thinking and executing a menial task.

Same. I spend tokens on so much more than just the initial implementation of a feature I have an idea for.

This I don't understand. I'm faster at moving the method then at prompting the LLM to do so

Sometimes I don’t have the text editor/IDE open, and I’m just looking at the code in a PR or similar UI.

"Sometimes"? I and I think many other people have been doing exactly this for most of 2026, assuming they look at the diff/PR at all and aren't all-in on dark factories.

Sure, if it's right there in front of you in the editor. But if have to locate the file and the location within the file, it's easier to just type out what I want and have the LLM do it.

I would be faster than Claude or Gemma if I did it.

That's a big if though and the blank page syndrome was already getting worse long before AI.

With age, it becomes easier and easier to get angry at someone or something until they work as expected than it is to actually do it.

I think this is why we've been seeing the genius coders from two generations ago embracing vibe coding even before it was cool or any good.

LLMs are sometimes stupid and get confused when you change the files without them knowing. So asking them to do even simple things keeps the context in sync.

Plus you get a bonus random line "methods are all on the top" in the commit message that makes no sense to anybody.

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