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