HACKER Q&A
📣 heymax054

What do you think about "vibe coding"?


Seeing this phrase being used more and more often everywhere. Curious what HNers think about this “movement” (if we could call it that).

For those of you not familiar with what “vibe coding” is: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding


  👤 evil-olive Accepted Answer ✓
> an AI-powered programming practice where a programmer surrenders to the "vibes" and power of the AI, while ignoring the details of the generated code.

if you're working on a personal or hobby project, do whatever you want. let your cat sleep on the keyboard, feed that into DeepSeek, and pipe the output directly into `git commit -am 'lol vibes' && git push --force` if you want.

if you're working professionally, by all means use whatever tools you find useful. the only thing that matters is the finished product.

however, if I'm your coworker, that finished product is a pull request that has your name on it. if I'm reviewing it, I expect you to be able to answer questions about the details of the code. after it's merged, it's getting deployed to production, and I'm in an on-call rotation that can wake me up at 2am if it's broken.

if I ask a question about some detail in your PR and your answer is "I dunno why it's that way, the AI wrote the code based on vibes and I ignored the details" I am going to have to have an uncomfortable chat with you and/or your manager.

details matter. ignore them at your peril. the fanciest tape measure in the world does not relieve a carpenter of the need to "measure twice, cut once". an LLM is likewise just a tool you can use. it does not remove the need to think about the details.


👤 learningstud
Vibe coding will create more jobs to (1) clean up the mess or (2) spread the vibe.

👤 codingdave
Sounds like a quick way to create a large AI bill while developing basic apps that are piles of unmaintainable spaghetti under the hood.

👤 bitbasher
Vibe Coding is a lot like UML charts. UML was all the rage and the future of software engineering and software architecture.


👤 sadboots
Vibe coding is fun until you need vibe debugging

👤 owendarko
There's definitely a negative sentiment around "vibe coding" on HN. I remember a few days ago seeing a story [1] on the home page which immediately got downvoted/flagged.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43231978