Why Vibe Coding Makes Me Want to Throw Up

Yes, vibe coding is part of the great LLM marketing campaign. I&#x27;m old enough to be skeptical of things that are overhyped.<p>That doesn&#x27;t mean it&#x27;s a fad or generally bad. It&#x27;s a great way to implement ideas and then validate them. A dream for startups. It doesn&#x27;t matter if founders can&#x27;t even write their &quot;hello world&quot; when validating an idea.<p>The downside is as with all AI generated code comes during the lifecycle of the code: Who&#x27;s responsible? Who knows what the code does? Who&#x27;s going to maintain it beyond AI? Is it secure? Reliable? I don&#x27;t care about the next Tic Toc clone being written by AI, but how about software in the nuclear plants that is powering all the AI? Or in transportation, medical devices?

I certainly don&#x27;t hate vibe coding as much as this person, but having tried it a few times, the thing that really worries me is &quot;the slippery slope&quot; he describes at the end and that&#x27;s true with AI assistance in general. I think learning new programming languages probably expands your mind in ways that is somewhat immeasurable, and using AI to work with unknown languages takes away from that, and in general, I wonder what happens if you go from troubleshooting problems like 5 times a week, to once every 3 weeks because most problems fix themselves. And I do wonder if that will have a broader impact on the quality of your thinking as an engineer.

I used ChatGPT to help me write some complex functionality in Rust - which I am relatively new to - and the initial efficiency was amazing. I learnt a lot and I also ran into some cases where ChatGPT wasn’t much help.<p>For me, it is a better search engine - but we still have to do hard work and due diligence - and debugging.<p>Overall, we have to embrace LLMs - and whatever tech comes next - and ensure it is used for betterment of humanity.<p>Tech has also always been used to subjugate others, create deep fakes, wage wars, kill, surveil, discriminate and worse - and AI tech is going to be no different. We have to ensure that guardrails are put and the tech is not abused.