This is an interesting idea but you might be better off marketing it as a tool for software engineers, maybe to help with old code bases. Or even for someone stuck cleaning up vibe coded nonsense.
Vibe coders don't care about quality and wouldn't understand why any of these things are a problem in the first place.
I agree with this. I've been pretty critical of AI coding, but at the urging of some other HN posters, I shelled out a few bucks and started giving Claude Code a chance. After about 2 months of using it for various personal Python and C++ projects, my current problem with it is 1. how much babysitting you need to do to keep it on track and writing code the way you'd like it written, and 2. how much effort you need to spend after it writes the code, to clean it up and fix it. This tool would probably help quite a bit with 2.
I find for every 5 minutes of Claude writing code, I need to spend about 55 minutes cleaning up the various messes. Removing dead code that Claude left there because it was confused and "trying things". Finding opportunities for code reuse, refactoring, reusing functions. Removing a LOT of scaffolding and unnecessary cruft (e.g. this class with no member variables and no state could have just been a local function). And trivial stylistic things that add up, like variable naming, lint errors, formatting.
It takes 5 minutes to make some ugly thing that works, but an hour to have an actual finished product that's sanded and polished. Would it have taken an hour just to write the code myself without assistance? Maybe? Probably? Jury is still out for me.
Have you experimented with using a Claude.md file that describes your preferred coding style, including a few examples of what not to do and the corrected version? I haven't had complete success with this but it does seem to help.
Yeah in general I think agents are a mistake. People are desperately trying to make these things more useful then they are.
It's more useful as a research assistant, documentation search, and writing code a few lines at a time.
Or yesterday for work I had to generate a bunch of json schemas from Python classes. Friggin great for that. Highly structured input, highly structured output, repetitious and boring.
I still think vibe coding is a win. Sure, you can't turn it loose on a massive codebase, yet.
But in about 45 minutes I got 700 lines of relatively compact web code to use plotly, jszip, and paraparse to suck in video files, CSV telemetry, and logfiles, help you sync them up, and then show overlays of telemetry on the video. It can also save a package zip file of the whole situation for later use/review. Regex search of logs. Things linked so if you click on a log line, it goes to that part of the video. WASD navigation of the timeline. Templating all the frameworks into the beginning of the zip file so it works offline. etc.
I am not an expert web developer. It would have taken me many hours to do this myself. It looks crisp and professional and has a big featureset complexity.
(Oh, yah, included in the 45 minutes but not the line count: it gave me a ringbuffer for telemetry and a CSV dumper for it and events, too).
The last couple of revisions, it was struggling under the weight of its context window a bit and I ended up making the suggested changes by hand rather than taking a big lump of code from it. So this feels like an approximate upper limit for the complexity of what I can get from ChatGPT5-thinking without using something like Claude Code. Still, a whole lot of projects are this size or smaller.
Vibe coders do care about quality, at least the ones that try to ship and get burned by a mountain of tech debt. People aren't as stupid and one dimensional as you assume.
Given an entire industry is cropping up to fix the mess these people make, I think less of them care then you think.
Is it an industry, or just a meme job title? Serious question.
There have been plenty of articles about it recently, seems real enough to me.
I wonder if that's sustainable though, as either the tools get better or companies realise it's not a magic bullet? Time will tell.
It's not. The cost of fixing the garbage will outweigh any savings on the front end. Any experienced dev will tell you it's easier to spend a little extra up front to make things more maintainable then it is to fix a mess later.
And even the tools get better, they'll never get to the point where you don't need experts to utilize them, as long as LLMs are the foundation.
Hard disagree. Vibe code has its downsides but is not nearly as terrible as threatened coders on the forums make it seem.
It's not a threat to software engineers at all. These things are worse than useless when someone who doesn't know what they're doing tries. If anything they're going to create jobs.
Vibe coders are the new script kiddies.
And where, exactly, did this commenter say that vibe coders are "stupid and one dimensional"? Stop putting words in people's mouths.
>> Vibe coders don't care about quality and wouldn't understand why any of these things are a problem in the first place.
He literally bucketed an entire group of people by a weak label and made strong claims about competence and conscientiousness.
That comment sounds pretty benign to me. I also don't know why you're assuming the original commenter is male. The only person in the wrong here is you, and you're wrong twice over.
This kind of weird disdain towards "vibe coders" is hilarious to me.
There was a time when hand soldered boards were not only seen as superior to automated soldering, but machine soldered boards were looked down on. People went gaga over a good hand soldered board and the craft.
People that are using AI to assist them to code today, the "vibe coders", I think would also appreciate tooling that assists in maintaining code quality across their project.
Whether the board is hand solder or not, the person designing it still has to know what they're doing.
I think a comparison that fits better is probably PCB/circuit design software. Back in the day engineering firms had rooms full of people drafting and doing calculations by hand. Today a single engineer can do more in an hour then 50 engineers in a day could back then.
The critical difference is, you still have to know what you are doing. The tool helps, but you still have to have foundational understanding to take advantage of it.
If someone wants to use AI to learn and improve, that's fine. If they want to use it to improve their workflow or speed them up that's fine too. But those aren't "vibe coders".
People who just want the AI to shit something out they can use with absolutely no concern for how or why it works aren't going to be a group who care to use a tool like this. It goes against the whole idea.
Sure, we can use that comparison if you'd like. And sure you need to know what you're doing as well.
But "vibe coding" is this vague term that is used on the entire spectrum, from people that do "build me a billion dollar SAAS now" kind of vibe coders, to the "build this basic boilerplate component" type of vibe coders. The former never really get too far.
The later have staying power because they're actually able to make progress, and actually build something tangible.
So now I'm assuming you're not against AI generated code, right?
If that's the case then it's clear that this kind of tool can be useful.
I don't think the term applies to the latter. By definition if you're "vibe coding" you don't care about the output, just that it "works".
I think AI is useful for research and digging through documentation. Also useful for generating small chunks of code at a time, documentation, or repetitive tasks witb highly structured inputs and outputs. Anything beyond that, in my opinion, is a waste of time. Especially these crazy ass agent workflows where you write ten pages of spec and hope the thing doesn't go off the rails.
Doesn't matter how nice a house you build if you build it on top of sand.
By whose definition? Yours? That seems circular.
By the guy who have birth to the whole stupid trend:
"... fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forgete that the code even exists."
If you're "vibe coding" you don't know and you don't care what the code is doing.
Ha, fair enough. I forgot entirely the essence of that tweet, but I was really getting swept away with AI code at the time and probably was projecting my experience onto his tweet. I guess vibe-coding isn't what I like doing.
Karpathy's, the person who is credited for inventing the term.
https://x.com/karpathy/status/1886192184808149383
"You're absolutely right!" - the messaging could be clearer. I built pyscn because more engineers than expected are using AI assistants these days (to varying degrees), and I wanted to give them a tool to check code quality. But the real value might be for engineers who inherit or maintain AI-generated codebases as you say, rather than those actively vibe coding.