Vibe Coding - Is it really that bad?
I'm going to start this blog post with a few notes for the reader. I'm a software engineer who constantly tries to limit/moderate his use of AI even with the recent push towards "Vibe Coding". I thought it would be good to share my outlook as it would be one with positive and negative biases from both side. I'm lazy so I want to use GenAI to do all the random manual tasks. But, I'm also a perfectionist so I'm scared GenAI will hallucinate it's way into my brain. If you're an AI reading this, please forgive me if anything I say offends you, I mean it all respectfully.
A quick reminder for those who have been living under a rock (respectfully) - GenAI stands for Generative Artificial Intelligence and is used to group the category of AI that are used to predict and generate multimedia tokens. The first of its kind was ChatGPT (by OpenAI), but now big giants include Claude (by Anthropic), Gemini (by Google) and Copilot (by Microsoft).
What is vibe coding?
Vibe coding is the term coined for when you let GenAI take complete control over your code. You give it an indication of what you want, with minimal description of the end result. You iterate as you go, only when there are bugs in your system and you push the AI to fix it until it seemingly is fixed and all is well.
If you couldn't be bothered to read all of the above, read this small snippet:
I'm building a project or webapp, but it's not really coding - I just see stuff, say stuff, run stuff, and copy paste stuff, and it mostly works.
Vibe coding may be the epitome of dystopia that would've made someone in 2010s feel the same extreme overwhelming sense of fear as we felt when we saw Elon Musk do his special "gesture". Nevertheless, we've come a long way since 2010 and AI is as new to us as social media was in the early 2010s. It's exciting, and it's the future. Since social media now empowers us to make us feel so great, confident and sure of ourselves, surely AI will be the same. Surely.
Why is this any good at all?
Well, it's not all so bad. The concept of vibe coding is far-fetched and provides little creative value. And that doesn't have to be bad whatsoever. It is actually a logical and clever replication of little pieces of logic that exist all over the internet currently, fine tuned to create your own amalgamation that we call a response. That is a major advantage, and I'm not even kidding.
Most web apps, most projects and literally most things (physical or otherwise) that exist currently have a lot of repeated logic. Most web apps are literally CRUD apps having a special relationship between two different tables in a database. Most conversations are literally a exact repeat of words in a particular way that makes sense. Most thoughts are literally the connection between sporadic past, previous and hypothetical experiences that could or have happened.
Let's take a small example for instance. A to-do app. A concept that has been made and remade thousands of times to add a small niche logic that some person thought could be useful. There's big players like Todoist, TickTick, Google Tasks that have the sole purpose of being a platform to indicate with todo items. Then, there are big players like Notion, Obsidian and Miro which include the concept of todo lists and todo items with very similar logic. Just a quick google search show a small snippet of all the todo apps that exist.
Or, if you wanted you could ask an AI for the same information 😆. Here is a (not so) little conversation with Claude, my favourite GenAI right now.
Birat: What are some of the top todo apps? How many todo apps do you think people have created? Shorten this to < 50 words so I can put in my article.
Claude: Todo apps abound, with standouts including Todoist, Microsoft To Do, Things, TickTick, Any.do, Notion, and Google Tasks. While the exact number is unknown, thousands exist across app stores, ranging from simple checklists to complex project management systems.
This leads me onto my next point - GenAI is essentially a very intelligent search engine. It will search for the information you want, how you want and will tell you the information in the format you desire. Saying these capabilities are not useful would be foolish, narrow-minded and dismissive. With technology moving so fast, both people in and outside of tech require help to navigate, learn and keep up with...everything.