Two publishers and three authors fail to understand what "vibe coding" means

I hate to break it to you, but the definition has already changed. It now means to build software exclusively using AI&#x2F;LLM.<p>It&#x27;s similar to the whole hacker&#x2F;cracker debate. Words become defined by the one that has the most influence over the community and sometimes evolve on their own through places like social media.

This is the same that happened with blogging. Now it&#x27;s not &quot;to write a blog post&#x2F;entry about that&quot;. Now it&#x27;s &quot;to write a blog about that&quot;.

I can’t imagine tweeting something random at 4am and the next month a whole industry was formed around my tweet’s choice of words.

Can anyone recommend a video that&#x27;s a good representation of &quot;vibe coding&quot;? I&#x27;d like to get a better sense of what the actual moment-to-moment of it looks like.<p>LLMs have been so spectacularly useless the couple of times that I&#x27;ve tried to use them for programming, that I can&#x27;t really wrap my head around what this must be.

We should call what those authors are doing “vibe writing” because they didn’t have any editors who actually cared about the contents of the book.

Are we supposed to believe that a book which teaches people how to be &quot;programmers&quot; without writing any code was actually written by a human author?

&gt; I fear it may be too late for these authors and publishers to fix their embarrassing mistakes: they’ve already designed the cover art!<p>To the publishers it&#x27;s not a mistake, it&#x27;s just clever marketing. Consider which of these two jumps off that glossy cover and into the distracted eye of a Technical Program Manager most readily: <i>AI-Assisted Programming</i>, or <i>Vibe Coding</i><p>Now consider whether either of those parties feels an obligation to help maintain coherence of the software community&#x27;s technical discourse.

Lol, sigh. Author says the term was coined 84 days ago on February 6th 2025. Literally go to Google and search ‘“vibe coding” before:2025-02:01; I see posts from more than a year ago.

I don&#x27;t see how such an ambiguous term as vibe coding can stick - it can&#x27;t. I will go with &quot;agentic AI coding&quot;.<p>---<p>The part we are seriously missing is a text specification of the software. For any AI coded software, the modular text spec must be neatly written and organized in the .&#x2F;docs&#x2F;spec&#x2F; folder. It is the foundation for any new model to regenerate the entire software.

a short story to address explaining what vibe coding is for non developers:<p>Picture this- are tools like Devin &quot;vibe coding&quot;?<p>if we break down the mechanics of what interfaces it&#x27;s looping through:<p>1)Chat 2)IDE 3)CLI 4)Dev console&#x2F;Browser<p>and it&#x27;s effective copy and pasting what it sees while trying to complete an objective it doesn&#x27;t fully comprehend. Blissfully ignoring the ramifications of desired combinations as long as decent version control practices are being applied. iterating &#x2F; adjusting prompts subtlety along the way to debug when getting stuck in a thought loop. changing your prompt from &quot;fix it&quot; to something with more &quot;pizazz&quot; as the key to breaking this cycle.<p>how is it any different than when I do all this manually?<p>Slog through this game of 4 square long enough and you can pretty much vibe anything together.

When I first heard vibe coding, it sounded like a meme, a joke. But people took it seriously. Andrej Karpathy was still in the process of defining it when the phrase took a life of its own. I&#x27;m surprised it&#x27;s making it into a book barely two months after it was coined.<p>If vibe coding somehow becomes the method of programming, then code will become obsolete. Hear me out:<p>Why code when you can just ask the computer to do what you want and get the results. The coding part is abstracted deep in the background where no human needs venture.<p>When vibe coding dominates, It&#x27;s not that people won’t know how to code anymore, it&#x27;s that coding becomes irrelevant. The same way that there are people who still know how to ride horses, but it&#x27;s irrelevant to transportation. When vibe coding reaches its peak, programming languages will evolve into something unrecognizable. Why do we need a human readable programming language when no human needs to read it? I picture a protocol agreed upon by two computers, never released to us humans.

The ship has sailed (originally “is sealed”, voice dictation error) on the original definition. Sorry Simon. But the work that Gene Kim and Steve Yegge are doing talking about chat oriented programming is really interesting, and I recommend people look into it.

Hate the uninformed changing word meanings? Think how the devops feel...

&quot;When I use a word,&quot; Humpty Dumpty said, in rather a scornful tone, &quot;it means just what I choose it to mean—neither more nor less.&quot;

Learned from this post that steveyegge went full AI

&quot;Author fails to understand that there can be multiple definitions for a phrase&quot;

That&#x27;s because it doesn&#x27;t mean a god damned thing.

Anyone else think “vibe coding” is a poor choice of name. Too ambiguous.<p>Friend of mine suggested “apping”.<p>I ‘apped’ this in 2 hours vs I ‘vibe coded’ this in 2 hours.