Fascinating how HN is torn about vibe coding still. Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases, yet there is a flamewar (I mean, cultured, HN-type one) every time. People seem to be more comfortable in a binary mindset.
Fascinating how HN is torn about vibe coding still. Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases, yet there is a flamewar (I mean, cultured, HN-type one) every time. People seem to be more comfortable in a binary mindset.
It’s just how discussion on the internet works, for basically anything at all worth discussing. It’s exhausting, but I can hardly blame HN specifically.
If you enjoy the flamewar, check out /r/SelfHosted which has been losing it's mind over the last few months. The heavy heavy majority of that community is somehow incredibly anti AI despite the fact that the previous "spammy" posts (before ai assisted projects) were all "what is wrong with my docker compose file"??
I had to unsub from that subreddit when I saw a cool new application and the top comments were just dogging it for the signs of Claude Code (claude.md).
This is a subreddit about selfhosting things others built for free. Honestly, often for piracy purposes. It's insane how entitled people have become.
Absolutely. Really gross to see. Heavy majority of the complaints boil down to “I can’t blindly trust everything posted here now?” - as if they could before?? So entitled.
Also annoys me that all of the suggestions on how to handle filtering AI demonstrate a clear lack of understanding around how agentic coding works. Like if you can’t be bothered to understand why “ban any project that uses AI” is not possible, the entire subreddit is probably above your pay grade…
> Everybody pretty much agrees that it works for some use cases
That isn't true, which is the exact reason why people have a binary mindset. More than once on Hacker News I've had people accuse me of being an AI booster just because I said I had success with agents and they did not.
For my part at least, I get the most riled up against the binary thinkers!
This. A lot of people on HN acts as you can only write code manually (almost, generators and snippets are allowed, because we are used to them) or vibe coding the whole project through a WhatsApp conversation. As if there was nothing in between and the same approach should work for all kinds of projects.
Personally I use coding agents for boring parts (I really don't enjoy putting the same piece of string to 20 different classes just to register a new component) and they work quite well, I'm going to use them for foreseeable future, because they make coding much more enjoyable for me. On the other hand I don't have an OpenClaw box burning billions of tokens weekly for me, because I usually don't have ideas that could be clearly specified.
VIM vs Emacs vs IDE vs..., Tabs vs Spaces, Procedural vs OOP vs Functional.
We love a good holy war for sure.
The nuance is lost, and the conversations we should be having never happen (requirements, hiring/skills, developer experience).