Astrophysicist on Vibe Coding

So, vibe coding is a new term. I think it's February of 2025. Um, but it's been hugely popular. Let me read you the quote from the guy who coined this term, fully giving in to the vibes, embracing exponentials, and forgetting the code even exists, which I mean sounds like a bad way to write code. Actually what you do is through text like English language not computer code is ask a chat box to write some code to do something and then you test it just by running it to see if it does what you want it to do and then you kind of iterate again through discussion English words and not code language. Just you do this until it gives you what you want. This is vibe coding. And an important component of vibe coding is that you do not know or want to know or even attempt to understand what the code does. Like you asked for code that does a thing. The only thing you're testing is if it does a thing. You don't go back through the code, read it line by line, and try to understand how it works. That's not vibes. Vibes is just having the chatbot do it until it it does what you want. So I've said that the AI tools are all well and good as long as you are an expert in the field you are using it for and you have the ability and knowledge to verify what is coming out and vibe coding is like the opposite of that. You are responsible for knowing how your code works and vibe coding means that you don't which is bad. I don't think I would want to buy an app from someone who doesn't understand how the app was coded. Do you know what I mean? If you are some inspiring software developer, you are spending all of this time not training for the field you've chosen. You are not learning anything. You are not improving your skills. You're basically doing what anyone could do with an LLM, which seems bad for like your career prospects and how you plan to go through the world. I don't like the idea of vibe coding. I think that's bad.

Angela Collier https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TMoz3gSXBcY acollierastro