Vibe Coding is the new Internet Dating?
joecmarshall.com35 points by flancrest a day ago
35 points by flancrest a day ago
The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
>In that future world (which for some of us is already here), what meaning does the term “vibecoding” have anymore? If all coding is AI-assisted won’t it just be referred to as… “coding”?
Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see. If AI continues to improve I think it's much more likely that all human-written code in the future will be 100% human written. Vibecoding or any human-in-the-loop approach seems like a very intermediate paradigm.
Then again this post seems to be a few months old, so perhaps it's understandable that they weren't "feeling the AGI" as severely as we have been the past few weeks.
> Apply the same question to music, or drawing, and perhaps the answer to this will be easier to see.
As much as I experience the appreciation of code as art, the vast majority of code is not art -- it is merely functional and entirely ephemeral. Most of code I've ever written in my life is gone and wouldn't be interesting anymore; products of a time that no longer exists.
Just like people still knit sweaters, even knitters still go to the store to buy them. I code for fun and I code for work but character of the code I do for work is changing. If AI can solve a problem better and faster than I can, I no longer have any interest in solving that problem "by hand" for my job. You can call that lack of respect in that I no longer respect good well-written code that an AI can spit out for $30 a month.
100% agree. I understand the argument around the "fun" of programming and learning. But my joy from coding (especially when working 9-5, on a team of 5-500 people) always came from the value creation for other people and for society.
AI has simply been a tool to accelerate that and I've genuinely never been happier about the value I provide to society. I find it hard to take the "respect of the craft" argument at face value - even if I enjoy knitting by hand, I can still support the existence of mechanized looms and machinery that provide affordable clothing in the millions.
My late grandmother knit 1-2 pairs of socks per day and donated them to the homeless center - absolutely amazing thing to, and it kept her motivated and sharp up to 104 years of age.
However, if her ultimate goal is providing socks to the homeless, would it not be better for her to work a library job for $15/hour, then take the $100+ a day and purchase then donate 30 pairs of socks? Even if the socks are a lower quality and wear out twice as fast, she could help 15x the people thanks to the mechanization and efficiency provided by the devision of labour.
I see this divide more and more and truthfully I wish I could understand both sides. I am encountering trouble in the startup I'm working on for exactly this reason: I feel laser focused on the attempt to create value for others, while my mech eng cofounder has this "respect of the craft". From from my perspective this has only caused delays in generating revenue.
Any help in understanding those who "love to make" (as opposed to those who "love to deliver") would be extremely useful.
I resonate with this sentiment. I want AI to be used at my job for 100% of the code so that I may go home and use my mental bandwidth to work on projects I actually find interesting.
If you think other professions aren’t sloppy, you haven’t seen the average practitioner. Blissfully unaware of their own incompetence. At least engineers have metrology.
I am aware that not everyone goes about their work with pride and passion.
My point is that if AI continues to improve perhaps people deriving enjoyment from an activity will be the only ones left engaging with it, and this seems to exclude the vast, vast majority of software developers today.
What did you expect when writing software became a job though?
A friend of a friend quit their job, made woodworking their full time job, and promptly fell out of love with woodworking.
You mean having to do something for your survival starts to suck? You don’t say!
I’ve always been more interested in getting my ideas down. AI is fantastic for this. I can get up to speed in coding projects I want to exist and with careful planning get something decent out and completed in a day.
Can you start naming them? Because most of the life altering ones have certifications, licensures, and continuing education programs when becoming a lawyer/doctor/engineer. Unless you're trying to argue the need to regulate software developers, then I agree completely. For far too long developers have treated products way to poorly and we see what a lack of regulations has brought upon society.
I enjoy writing code, but even more than that I love having good code. I wouldn't vibe code in the pure sense because the code itself is an artefact I value, not just the resulting behaviour, but I'm perfectly willing to use an LLM as a tool to help me sculpt and garden my codebase.
Yea as long as ppl actually read the code they produce its just a tool to generate characters faster than typing them yourself. One of the issues I see is the hype around "just trust it bro". Somehow not looking into the product u produce became a thing.
Yeah i feel like most people (especially those who entered the workforce in the 2000s and later) just dont give a shit about their code. One of 30yo guys i work with (a good generalist) was recently complaining how most of these chucklefucks are just churning out darios of vibeslop docs and code (darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds) that they dont understand.
> churning out darios of vibeslop
Thanks for the laugh, only a human could have written such a hilarious string of words. There may be hope for us after all.
>darios being like courics, but for vibeslop instead of turds
What's the conversion between diarios and samas? Are the same at -40?
Because 99% of people don't care. It's something that gets relegated to a niche audience really fast and it's understandable especially if we take the last 25 years. People just have enough of it it's like modernism in the 80s if you want an art metaphor. I for one I am glad we are at the advent of a real Personal Computing revolution. Seeing my mom use software custom made (I am not writing developed for llm code) is just fascinating. She is 70 and she "gets" it now.
I like to write code and still do, for like, Screeps. With AI I can have it do the mundane stuff, and use my knowledge/skills to guide it in a better product direction than others do (IMO).
Software developers/engineers build software - coding is a mean to an end.
The craft is about creating a tool that others use not some divine code that programmers stare at and admire.
You are confused that is why you are surprised.
For some of us, writing code is a big part of how we think through a problem. It's like playing an instrument—or using a DAW—for a musician; the mundane mechanics, the part you dismiss as a mere means to an end, is the engine that gets us there. If a musician were provided a service by which they didn't have to sit around noodling on the guitar or piano, finding out which melodies or chords sounded good together, but instead just have to tell the service "write me an upbeat pop/rock song, 130 beats per minute, F# major key, emphasis on the drums and electric guitars, and the lyrics should be about a woman named Alice and how the singer longs for her exquisite beauty"—are they really composing? Are they a musician at that point? Or are they a client commissioning music?
Working with AI tools is like trying to eat with silicone rubber chopsticks. You're so removed from the point of contact that you no longer have effective haptic feedback for the problem you're trying to solve. You're not doing the work, you're commissioning and checking someone else's work. It's an entirely different job now.
For tools I want to have I don’t care. For hobby projects I’ll happily code. The want ebbs and flows.
At work I have to deliver and if I don't use AI I'll be an outlier and "managed out".
In my spare time I can choose to tinker with software but it sort of feels pointless now.
To not accept the new reality is to bury one's head in the sand hoping it'll all just go away. Software development has been commoditized and the level of abstraction just slid up one more ring. Like when we went from Assembly to C, then C to high level languages. Now cc is Claude Code not C compiler. It's just what it is today. Adapt or age out, they are the only options now...
>To not accept the new reality
Thinking this is the new reality is part of the problem.
It's the same with every craftsman. Like when was the last time you eat at the restaurant that makes their own soy sauce?
A more optimistic take would be that most people's skills will change/evolve into managing, directing, dictating, knowing what you want, describing it, focusing on the end product and iterating, instead of wrestling with why the fuck is a string a pointer to a pointer to a character
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
Pivoting from programming-brained to business-brained has proven so successful for the likes of Bill Gates, that quite a few other programmers have done likewise (including arguably the esteemed founder of this place, Paul Graham). In addition, the filed has attracted so many people who are indeed business-brained and mainly in it for the money, especially over the past 20 years or so.
I used to gently make fun of colleagues of mine at college, who switched majors from computer science to MIS (Management Information Systems) as they discovered that programming is hard and math is hard. I thought of MIS as "computer science on easy mode", and called the textbooks they used "Richard Scarry books"[0] because they were full of busy-looking illustrations but lacking in depth.
Serves me right for my arrogance, I guess, because the Richard-Scarry-book kids are winning bigly, going from zero to go-to-market in no time flat with LLM agents to do the work they were afraid of in college.
Having a business brain is the new moat.
[0] Richard Scarry was an American children's book author, known for his books whose pages were filled with large colorful illustrations of the animal citizens of Busytown. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Scarry
Bill Gates is a known Epstein associate, had sex with a woman likely against their will while being tracked by Epstein, and had to drug his wife unknowingly to her so she wouldn't get a sexually transmitted disease he caught while having sex with said woman on said island.
This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it.
Is this really the bar of aspiration we should aspire too? A known degenerate that doesn't care about humans?
I don't like the guy, nor do I think of him as a role model, but he's not successful because he palled around with Epstein; he got the opportunity to pal around with Epstein because he was successful. And that success inspired others. The business-oriented side of IT hailed him, and Microsoft, as a success story to be emulated. Those people are going to come out on top when all is said and done in the AI revolution. The old-school programmers who got into it for the sheer joy of it, the hackers, are going to lose, as the abilities that set them apart and let them trade some of the value they bring for enough money to keep hacking become available to anyone on tap for a few bucks per million tokens.
> This isn't even going into his COVID policies where we purposely denied a life saving vaccine because he couldn't profit from it.
Yeah you should provide a source for that claim. I could not find any.
Or maybe stop spreading your conspiracy stories.
I have no problem believing Bill is a scoundrel, however, much of what you reference here is from an “unsent draft” email most likely just made up by Epstein (without a precedent email). At least I'm not aware of any corroborating evidence.
> The lack of respect [widget makers] have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in [factories] actually [makes widgets] because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
before someone cries false analogy they should realise that widget is literally a technical term in SWE for a GUI component.
If someone is doing something as a job... then surely they are, by definition, doing it for money? Otherwise, if they were doing it for fun, as a hobby, then we would call them hobbyists?
I won't cry false analogy but I just have no clue what point you're trying to make.
Are you saying widget makers are sloppy in their craft and only in it for their money?
>Apply the same question to music, or drawing
Why asking outside the technical domain? Code is instructions for a machine for it to do a task. All this philosophy around code as art or whatever it's in my opinion just intellectual onanism, looking at the screen and thinking "damn I'm the shit just look at that oneliner oh my gawd, look at those perfectly applied GoF patterns. Pure engineering. Poetry is code".
The craft you say. What's the intent of it? Having code that's nice to look at and/or understand or the product of such code execution? For the later coding "as craft" is irrelevant. I've seen beautiful and mind blowing software with horrendous code, an entire company working as a clock with a 4 millions LOC single php file, the most cringe inducing spaghetti code I've ever seen. Users don't care. The software works as expected, fast, almost no bugs after >10 years of development. It's purpose fulfilled. And I've seen perfect code running slow as fuck.
I've done manual and CNC machining. I forgot the last time I wrote G codes in the thousands LOC. Everything now is CAD CAM. A software wrote the code for me, I just designed the thing. Same with 3D printing. Should I write the code myself to respect the craft? Of course not, that would an incredible waste of time. I want the physical piece in my hand or an application running fast and without crashing. Why would I care for HOW the code is written?
Exactly, well said.
I think folks in the craft need to mature a bit and understand this very well.
> The lack of respect software developers have for their craft confounds me every day, to the point that I wonder if anyone in software actually writes code because they enjoy it, instead of making money.
I used to enjoy it, and after many years of being asked to do nothing other than boring web applications or my work literally being thrown away (which worked perfectly) because management decided that it had to be implemented in <new language>. I worked hard to write something simple and well documented and worked as well as I could, and it was thrown away. I've had other so-called "lead developers" take credit for my ideas and then implement them so poorly; it was clear they misunderstood it entirely. I've had people straight up lie about what I would be doing in a position. I am currently trapped in a job where I was straight up lied to about what I was doing.
These sorts of experiences have left me completely jaded as a result. I know I am not alone.
I seldom have time to work on my own projects. Software is much more complicated than it used to be, and simply getting things working in a framework or scaffolding a project can take a lot of time. With the AI I can prototype software very quickly, while using my existing skills to stop it from going off the rails.
Well, vibecoding, as the name says, is about the vibes. “Make me a todo app that feels minimalist, with cool animations”. Boom, ship it (and probably forget about it).
Using AI as a tool in a broader, already existing engineering process (here’s a detailed spec of the todo app; reference layouts for the UI are encoded in this folder; the data format requirements are in this file; the test suite must verify properties XXX) doesn’t have a catchy name, because it’s just software engineering, where coding is just but one part of the whole.
What you describe, is what's needed to make a good product whether it's vibe coded or written completely by hand.
People use online dating because they feel like they have to, but most people hate it. So maybe the analogy is even better than stated.
When online dating goes well, it quickly turns into ordinary dating.
And I think that's one important difference: with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step.
> with vibe coding you can't cast aside the AI after you've taken the initial step
Sure you can, why wouldn't you? Good models these days spit out architecture and code fairly indistinguishable from your average developer.
It's always hard to jump into an existing project and understand it all, but it's doable and in 2026 it's no harder to jump into a vibed project than it is to jump into any other project (with exceptions in both directions, of course).
You still have the code and can switch back to "fully human" (or any other point on the spectrum of human-ai) any time you want by just opening the same editor you would use if you cloned any other project.
But you can: you can just: use the thing you’ve built and derive utility from it, casting aside the origin
People dont like any dating, they want to be past it into a long term healthy relationship mostly. If they could blink and get there they would choose it. So yes. The analogy is even better than even better than stated. Nearly everyone cares about the outcome while very few care and enjoy the process
this feels like it was written by someone who has been out of the dating scene for a while now
dating apps suck, your UI/UX can groundbreaking but that doesn't make them any less awful to use
This "AI is inevitable" mood that people are in always seem to come from people who don't have to use the things AI is supposedly going to replace, and never consider what the actual consequences of that might be
I live in a city and I still feel like my best bet to meet someone is on the apps because they have taken out a lot of the old ways that people used to meet. How do you even approach a potential date? IDK and it sucks.
> as a term, is supposed to denote a human-in-the-loop..... But how much longer will that be true?
Why do you think Claude claims its work on git is co-authored, and now has started putting links to the transcript showing your working. It's about sending a message to the one paying your salary that all your real input in the creation was a few messages and you're replaceable in that equation.
Bit of a strange analogy to use since dating companies are in decline right now with difficulties attracting and retaining a gen-z audience.
This isn’t really the way they were using the analogy in the article. It’s more talking about how internet dating used to have a taboo that is gradually lost over time.
And generally online dating is seen a subpar form of dating that fails to deliver meaningful relationships. A very strange analogy indeed....
I think people see dating as a subpar form of activity that fails to deliver meaningful relationships. The fact that the contact is initiated on the apps is somewhat secondary.
i dont know how this works, but i am super interested that if there's this wall where so much software is ai written, that ai becomes the only thing making its future training data, could the 'engine' 'stall'?
or same thing, if the kids stop making art, will the only art be ai art and will that do the same thing?
again - i dont have any credentials to have a worry about this, i'm pretty much just the dude in front of you at the supermarket line
AI assisted coding all the way.
for someone like me who doesn't like to write tests - I could easily have an agent write a test for me.
I could lay the bricks then also have the agent do ornamental design that I'm not good at.
I didn't have the impression anyone felt ashamed of dating online back in the days and I don't have the impression vibe coders feel any shame today.
I don't know about online dating, but I think the vibe coders I've interacted with the past few years break down into two distinct groups:
1. People who let agents drive designs/plans and just let them rip (what I would /actually/ call vibe coding) -- who place value in the final product, and aren't shameful about the tools used to get there as long as the product is "good" (and generally reroll entire apps from a single prompt until they get something that's actually good)
2. People who provide (or collaborate with AI on) designs/plans and use AI to write the code (which I wouldn't call vibe coding, but often gets conflated) -- who place value in the planning, and aren't shameful about the tools used to implement them as long as the architecture is "good"
Either way: I'd say most people who "vibe code" (in either category) are a little annoyed at the term inherently belittling what they make, but generally dismiss the term rather than feel any shame about it.
I'd be surprised to learn anyone in my programming network doesn't use any AI anywhere. It's a very powerful tool that's integrated pretty much everywhere into the 2026 Developer's toolkit, and the question is generally /where/ you use it (or not), not whether you use it at all.
I think this is a very outdated perspective.
I don't plan things. I braindump context to the agent let it implement something, and iterate from there (A LOT).
Planning was for an era where implementation was expensive.
Implementation became cheaper but it’s still not cheap. I’m working on an implementation for a runtime that’s been going on for 4 months of 24/7 constant Sol and now Astra work. When things go wrong it costs my time, which is my most valuable commodity. A week spent going in the wrong direction is still a week. If I can avoid that by planning better I will.
>term inherently belittling what they make
I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
I would also argue that group two aren't "software engineers" anymore; what they do is less engineering and more architecture. Perhaps "agentic developer" is more appropriate.
> I would argue that if you belong to group one you have not actually "made" anything.
That's exactly the sentiment I'm referring to.
I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc). And they're definitely making stuff (friends with kids are making games that their friends play, sharing homemade videos with each other, making bedtime stories, making websites and apps that others use, etc).
I'd also argue that theory and architecture have always been closer to "software engineering" than coding ever was, but I also acknowledge I've got a bit of a bias belonging to group 2 (otherwise: been coding for ~25 years).
>I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc). And they're definitely making stuff (friends with kids are making games that their friends play, sharing homemade videos with each other, making bedtime stories, making websites and apps that others use, etc).
This is a dangerous game people are playing. One where people trick themselves into believing that ideation == creation. Not only are they not the same, framing it as such gives people licensure to crowd out the actual creatives who spent countless hours creating the inputs to these models.
Furthermore, I disagree with the following:
>I'm excited that group one is full of people who couldn't previously "make" anything with code, but now can (in the same way I'm excited that more people can now "make" music, art, stories, movies, etc).
What are these barriers people keep referring to that prevented people from creating music, art, stories pre-2022? If someone owned a phone, laptop, etc. in 2022 they already had access any number of free digital tools to assist in making music, art, stories, home made films. Hell, you can buy a pen and notebook from a store for a handful of dollars.
What you really mean is that pre-2022 nobody could produce a decent looking photo, song, or program without having to spend a lot of time learning about that craft. But that isn't a barrier--someone making a shitty song is still making music.
People just want the ability to generate content which resembles quality without having worked for it. In practice, this kind of behavior is far closer to consumption than craft/art/making/whatever.
I don't know if I would call myself a vibe coder, but I definitely feel shame about putting any llm-generated code online unless I've reviewed it to the point of it being what I would've have written on my own anyway.
So lots of personal one-off tools/dashbooards that I never would have made before will probably live forever on my personal git server instead of github or somewhere.
there was a mild stigma around "i met her on facebook". a negative spin would be like: it's like you're stalking random women, and you must not have much luck or courage to approach women. but facebook wasn't exactly a dating app, so.
Sharing anything that has even a whiff of being machine generated opens you up to huge amounts of scorn and derision. It happens in the comment section of nearly every post on this site. If that's not the community here using shame as a mechanism of control, I don't know what is.
I hate reading slop as much as the next person, so I get it, but I don't try to deny it exists.
All coding will be AI, AI is just a tool. Under a catchy headline.
How about: "Vibe coding is like genital lice"?
I think OP's point was that most people are using agenetic coding, but they're ashamed to admit it. They play down and minimise how much they're doing it, roll their eyes at it when talking with friends, and agree just how much nicer it is to write code the "normal" way (like, at a bar! at the dog park! I was sitting at a cafe, reading Knuth, and this gorgeous code just came up and started chatting to me...)
This is certainly the case in the field of bioinformatics right now, so I do feel it's a little apt.
(HN is a bit of a bubble - it's about the only place on the internet where you can be cautiously positive about agenting coding and not be abused.)
> answered hundreds of questions about their hobbies, interests, and favorite foods
I so miss the days when people were given tools and made the effort to get others to know them.
in 2 years nobody is going to read their code, much less write it. programming will gradually become a lost skill, like cobol or writing assembly. some people will still do it in specialized environments for a while longer, most wont. first it will feel like skill atrophy to the coder, then it will feel obsolete - programming by hand will become a worse way to program. ill advised, like rolling your own encryption or security today.
I half wonder if we wouldn't have this giant compute supply crunch/environmental damage/energy crisis and tech oligopoly situation if someone would've just written better English to Code translation for LLVM instead...