First things first, I'll not run this post on ChatGPT. I'll be talking about AI so I thought I need this post to be on my own words.

Also, I haven't tried vibe coding yet and I, personally, only know the things that are written here from basic Google-ing and YouTube. So take these things with a grain of salt.

English is not my first language so bear with me.

Let me know in the comments what I got right and/or wrong but FINISH READING FIRST.

What in the world even is Vibe Coding?

First of all, let's get the most important thing out of the way. What is Vibe coding?

Vibe coding is... literally coding with vibes! YES, it's just vibes.

From the words of Andrej Karpathy written in his X post (which I believe the original creator of the term), "fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists". The keyword here is "forget that code even exist"

If you read more of the post, you'll realize you don't really need to be a dev to vibe code. You ask AI to make stuff, the AI got it wrong, you tell it to fix it. That's how vibe coding seems to be. You don't actually code, you talk. You're more of a client than a dev. You tell the AI what you want, the AI try to give an output and you decide if you want to keep it or throw it away. You don't look at the code, you look at the output.

With that in mind, using AI as something like an assistant coding partner (tab completion style thing and those that are similar), is not vibe coding. It's basically similar to autocomplete or LSP. It's using AI to HELP YOU code. Vibe coding is using AI to give you output of the code.

From a dev's, perspective, you might be asking, what is this even for? How is this even a thing? Does the project which is made from this even maintainable?

We'll TRY to answer those questions here and, hopefully, have a better understanding what vibe coding is for.

Who is it for? should you or should you not vibe code?

Like I said previously, when you vibe code, you're more of a client. And anyone can be a client, dev or not.

With this in mind, that means vibe coding is for everyone!

What matters is the output the AI gave not how it looks on the back side of things.

Imagine prompting "Create a website for high school of the dead season 2". The AI gave you something broken. You peek at the code to see that the broken thing is just a nullable field and the AI forgot to check if it exists before doing the operation. You tried to fix it and now it's working. At this point, you just stopped vibe coding. Why?

When you're vibe coding, you don't fix the broken. You tell the AI that it's broken then it'll try to fix it. You don't look at the code. You look at the output like a real client/customer. What matters most is if it's working or not.

You stop thinking like a dev and start thinking more of a client.

Why is this even a thing? What is it for?

Like the post said, it's all vibes. It's just possible! And with that possibility, it opens it's doors to more people!

Each person can have a specific thing they want to have/do in their computer.

Example, I need to rename a bunch of videos of Masou Gakuen HxH just for file naming convention purposes. If I'm not a dev, I would have to do the renaming of files one by one. With vibe coding, I can just ask the AI to create a script to rename those and retain the episode numbers.

It's a really specific thing that there's probably no software I can use to do this tedious job. But with vibe coding, it unlocks possibilities, mainly for none coders, to simplify tedious but really specific tasks like this!

It's basically for projects that's really specific and like the post said, "throwaway weekend projects". Projects that's small and doesn't really require maintenance.

Should you hire a vibe coder?

NO.

Ok like I said, It's mainly for people with specific thing they need/do. The project for vibe coders is supposed to be small and specific and probably not made to be maintainable.

Basically, if the applicant can do it, you can probably do it better.

Hey HR, if the project requires maintenance and has REAL customers/users, you'll want a real developer. Not a vibe coder. OK?

Is this generally good or bad?

It's both.

Let me cook...

It's probably good in majority of people who knows their way to the computer.

I said this 'cause it's probably not good to people who only use the computer to watch movies, YouTube and TikTok like my dad. They might actually break something without knowing it.

The computer is made to make tedious tasks simpler but with the continuous evolution of computers, new annoying things are also created. With vibe coding (or AI in general) it makes solving these annoying things much more easier and faster.

As a dev, I can simply write a bash script to solve these simple but annoying tasks. But for a regular user, they don't have the knowledge like us devs who knows computers a little bit deeper than them. Which is why I said good 'cause with a highly trained AI model, those annoying things can be solved safely without breaking the computer.

How can it be bad though?

Now I'm not too deep with AI so, again, take this with a grain of salt. This is one that I can think of.

The AI generates code from what it gets fed on right? AI may or may not generate bad code. And with vibe coding, you don't fix bad code even if it's working. And that bad code is being fed to the AI once again.

If you can see what's going on here, bad code is being fed to the AI on a continuous loop.

AI is supposed to be good, and I personally think that bad code won't give you good output.

Conclusion

I think we only have negative impressions of vibe coding because we didn't know what it actually is or what is it for.

I only referenced the twitter post but reading it carefully, it's all about testing the limits of what AI can/can't do. I believe It's not supposed to be something to be used in large projects that you're supposed to maintain for a long periods of time.

We misunderstood the term to something that sounded negative as dev but in reality, it's not even supposed to be a thing. I mean, it's used for a "throwaway weekend projects" originally.

Overall, I think vibe coding is a good tool(?) for all people to actually be able to solve small, specific/non-common problems.

Each person has their own specific tedious task in their computer and vibe coding is just another tool that help them solve that.