You comparisons are stupidly far off. I get it’s a joke, but it’s important to understand this. LSPs and IDEs are tools. AI CAN be a tool, but people use it as an all in one solution. It’s a nailgun that drives a nail in, after having drawn all the blueprints. I wouldn’t let a nailgun draw my blueprints, and I guess you wouldn’t either
Discussion
To me this sounds like an argument of manual vs automation and automation always wins. Anything that can be automated will eventually be automated. It may not be right now but eventually it will be.
I agree. Using LLMs to automate mundane tasks is a great idea. Using it to create things beyond you personal understanding might not be. You will not be able to sort things out if it breaks. It might contain serious flaws that you wouldn’t even be able to spot.
I know people that are unable to change a tire, install a socket, or fix a weld because these are tasks that are done for them. I feel bad for them
All of the things I’ve vibe coded are beyond my understanding. Yet they exist, I use them and others use them. If they contains major flaws, nobody has reported them to me yet.
I am able to change a tired and do all sorts of stuff around the house, yet I would rather pay someone to do it because my time is better spend doing other things.
Let me ask you this then: would you vibe code “critical” software? Software that NEEDS to work. If you wouldn’t, would you try to hire a senior engineer that knows this particular domain in and out, or would you hire a college grad with AI skills?
For now I would definitely hire a human. Or, at least have a human audit a vibe coded version before relying on it fully. But if I needed something as a quick workaround, I wouldn’t care how it was made as long as there’s time for pro to look under the hood.
I would not vibe code anything that deals with people directly putting their money into it. If it’s an integration with another service that handles the money then fine, but I would not trust any vibe coded solution to handle money.
I am glad you came to that conclusion; I was worried there for a second!
See, I want to be that “pro” and I believe to become such a person, you simply cant embrace the vibe and instead sit down and actually learn how stuff works.
Again, I am not saying that you can’t use AI. It’s a great tool to do research and dig through knowledge. But building projects is a great way to learn software engineering. Letting AI do this for you takes away from the learning experience.
Don't even understand why we would go as far as critical software.
I haven't ever seen any vibe-coded software in production that is more than a hobby project.
The error vibe coders make is thinking that you don't really need human understanding to write code that works in reality. I would stop wasting my time with sweating over learning new programming stuff if that was even just directionally true.
But it's not. Perhaps some day we will get there, with a different technology. But LLMs will never replace the need for human understanding. They are really useful to bounce off and refine ideas, and learn/look things up much faster than googling stuff. That is still far off though, and ppl don't appreciate how amazing human beings are, if they don't realize the huge gap.
No one needs talk big about vibe coding. Just demonstrate your work. Publish your app and we'll see.
It already blueprints better than I do 50% of the time I’d say.