I won't be vibe coding anymore: a noob's perspective

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

What “vibe coding” means

  • Described as letting an AI agent drive: auto-accepting changes, not reading diffs, pasting errors back into the tool, and judging only by whether the app “seems to work”.
  • Others broaden it to “using AI without rigorous review/understanding”; contrasted with using AI as a targeted assistant.
  • Some see it as a continuum: from “make me an Instagram clone” unsupervised to tightly guided generation of small pieces.

Impact on learning and junior developers

  • Many worry vibe coding kills critical thinking and understanding of how computers work, leaving juniors stuck on a “vibe plateau”.
  • Some seniors are consciously scaling back AI tools to force themselves to read docs and think.
  • Counterpoint: people have always been able to copy code (magazines, Stack Overflow); motivated learners will still learn, now with better tools.

Business incentives vs software quality

  • One camp: businesses just want cheap, fast delivery; they’ll happily embrace vibe coding if it boosts velocity even a few percent.
  • Another: outages, bugs, legal/regulatory failures are expensive; long-term maintainability and reliability still matter, so pure vibe coding will hit a wall.

Responsibility, maintainability, and risk

  • Discomfort with being on the hook for code you don’t fully understand; comparison to libraries sparks debate about how much we actually audit dependencies.
  • Concern that AI-generated code increases bloat, redundancy, and “hellscape” codebases, worsening 3am incident response.
  • Several predict a market for experienced engineers to clean up vibe-coded messes.

How people actually use AI today

  • Popular uses: boilerplate, API clients from specs, documentation Q&A, repository “grepping”, UI prototypes, initial tests, refactors.
  • Reports that code quality is mediocre without strong guidance; hallucinated APIs and useless over-mocked tests are common.
  • “Commit often” is cited as a survival strategy when using agents.

Future of the coding profession

  • Some argue coding-as-typing is low-hanging fruit for LLMs; foresee SMEs orchestrating agents, and advise youths not to pursue “coder” roles.
  • Others call this hype: LLMs fail on complex, domain-specific or low-level work and can’t yet run real projects. They expect decades of viable careers, with AI as an accelerator.

Philosophy, terminology, and aesthetics

  • Split between seeing coding as craft/process (like writing, building mental models) vs a mere tool to ship products and earn money.
  • Distinction drawn between “vibe coding” and “agentic coding” (AI as assistant, human reviews every line).
  • Side thread critiques the blog’s font and lowercase style; some found it so unreadable they used AI just to parse it.