The industry hasn't come up with a simple meme-format term to explain this workflow pattern yet, so people aren't excited about it. But don't worry, we'll surely have a bullshit term for it soon, and managers everywhere will be excited. In the meantime, we can just continue doing work with these new tools.
Don’t do that! On a two-day-old term?!
No wonder we’re called gatekeepers.
It's vibe engineering
Operative word being “some”. The issue is that too many aren’t doing it that way.
> You dont just go “build thing”
Tell that to the overwhelming majority of posters discussing vibe coding, including on HN.
As long as they get paid for it (or have fun, if it's a personal project), they couldn't care less about that. Tomorrow's problems are overrated.
The difference now is they can get much further along.
Thinking people who disagree with you hate you or hate the thing you like is a recipe for disaster. It's much better to not love or hate things like this, and instead just observe and come to useful, outcome-based conclusions.
I have a lot of sympathy for the Luddites after reading about the sudden loss of jobs and lifestyle, the new textile factories running roughshod over all sorts of ethical boundaries in pursuit of profit - like using child labour, and horrendous accident rates and working hours.
It's sad in a way the Luddites weren't more successful than they were, as there were decades of harm inflicted by these newfangled ideas before the kinks were ironed out. But some of the blame for that must be laid at the Luddites' feet - they were focused on preserving the past, choosing to remain in denial about the inevitability of the wave of change crashing down on them. They left the job of ironing out the kinks to the workers in the factories that displaced them.
With LLMs, we look be to taking the same broken path as the textile industry and its Luddites, sadly.
There's a huge distinction between Vibe Coding, and actual software engineers using AI tooling effectively. I vibe code for fun sometimes too, nothing wrong with it, helps me figure out how the model behaves in some instances, and to push the limits of what I understand.
There's other things too though: my ADD and my impostor syndrome don't matter to Claude, Claude just takes it all in, so as I keep brain dumping, it keeps chugging along. I don't have to worry a bout "can I really do this?" it just does it and I can focus on "what can I do to make it better" essentially.
For me it's beyond "porn coding" its basically fulfilling my vision that's been locked away for years but I've had no time to sit down and do it fully. I can tell Claude to do something, my kid comes up and asks me to go draw with them and I can actually just walk away and look at the output and refine.
Yes yes, ironic comment, since I'm bitching about you bitching. Really though, not everybody is looking to spend hours of their life fine tuning their personal coding abilities. Coding is a means to an end, not the end itself, it's a way to solve problems and if vibe coding can get you the solution the fastest then it's foolish to not use it. Doing the job slower with more effort, because in the future you think that effort is somehow going to pay off by boosting your skills, when in the future LLMs will be even more capable vibe coders anyway is very misguided. If coding is the true objective and you aren't doing it to get something else done, then more power to you, but most people code to solve problems, not for the sake of coding.
Who's next?
I absolutely hate how "slop" has lost its meaning.
"AI slop" was supposed to mean poor-quality content that's obviously AI-generated. But the anti-AI crowd has co-opted it to mean any AI-generated content, regardless of quality. EDIT: Or even the quantity of AI. Expedition 33 had a ton of critical acclaim and ended up winning tons of awards, yet once it was discovered that AI was used to generate some placeholder art, of which NONE of it was actually used in the final product, some people started labeling the game as AI slop. It's utterly ridiculous.
So now, we can't have conversations about AI slop without starting off with making sure everyone is on the same page on what the term even means.
EDIT: "Vibe coding" is suffering a similar fate. If I use AI to write some code, and I examine the code to make sure it doesn't have any obvious bugs or security issues, is that still vibe coding?