It’s just that the vibe coded stuff has so many assumptions baked in, that you will be constantly surprised about the behaviors your slopped codebase has. Doesn’t matter for small tools, where you’ll be delighted that clicking that one label copies it to your clipboard - nice one, Claude, that’s delightful!

It’s less nice when your web app launches that other service only when the other Tailscale node is up, because the agent interpreted your prompt as a hard access rule.

It's because no matter how 'good' the AI output is, "vibe coding" is strongly associated with "completely unreviewed and untested". LLMs have brought the skill floor straight through the ground and into the depths of hell, so people are doubly cautious with it because there's a very good chance with any vibe coded app that there's not a single person in the world that truly understands what it actually does just behind the scenes. It could be completely fine, or it could be breaking your system or uploading your sensitive data somewhere because the vibe coder provided flawed instructions or the LLM decided to make an unexpected 'optimization'. Wanna roll the dice and find out which one it is?

I'm reserving "vibe coding" in my head for "the programming style where you just prompt your way around without even looking at the code and only caring if your happy path works".

I have a couple of nice "vibe coded" apps I would never dream of releasing because I'm not interested in the QA, more than anything else. The problem is the other people who are not quite so considerate and think that what they tossed out in 15 minutes is of interest to the rest of the world. The value of a software package release now is more in the QA than the code.

Yeah I'm really impressed by what Opus 5.5 can manage.

I feel like human code is on a wide quality spectrum. The best human code is way better than what Opus 5.5 can do. But the average code, I'm not so sure.

I have only very rarely in my career encountered code worse than what an LLM produces. It happens, but your typical programmer is still quite a bit better than an LLM.

Could definitely be I've had the misfortune of working with below-average programmers (and inheriting their codebases).

I feel bad for your employer

> Human code is slop.

I'm not saying you have to be grateful to the millions of people whose work the AI you use was trained on, but why shit on them...

Opus 5.5 is impressive and I'm happy using it to write a ton of code.

But it also still writes awful code with poor maintainability if you don't keep a very close eye on it.

Trust me I know what it's like. I do a lot of it. Even with Opus you still have to guide it aggressively or your codebase turns to slop.

An experienced dev with Claude is better than either of them alone but you can't just point your agent at a repo and expect good results. And when people talk about vibe coding that's usually what they mean.

> People still talk about "Vibe coding" or implying "vibe coded" stuff is poor quality

Yes they do. Because it is. Anyone who cares about the quality of their product is, at minimum, carefully reviewing the output from an LLM to make sure it didn't sneak in anything crazy. More likely they are writing a lot of code by hand, because that is faster than reviewing and correcting the LLM code. Competent developers do not just hand it off and say "the AI is really good so I can trust what it put out".

Creating slop was already a solved problem before AI. AI just made it much more efficient.

Hand crafted artisanal slop vs dark software factory slop.

human code is slop. tell us all what the LLMs were trained on? slop?