I’m sorry but I’m frustrated by the blatant misuse of AI by my students and colleagues alike. It’s so obvious when they don’t understand what they’ve written.
I would say it’s more accurate to say that vibe coding is to coding what microwaving a ready meal is to being a restaurant chef.
No, “coding” to “cooking” is accurate because an unfortunate minority of people make code that makes the “microwave meal” look appetizing. Vibe coding can look like code and not work, while I’ve seen code that neither looks nor, in fact, is “edible”.
Does anyone here actually cook in their microwave? I don’t mean reheat things or defrost and heat a pizza pop, but like actually cook something with the varying temperatures and all that shit they can do. Like is anyone making raw meatballs, saucing them and cooking them in the microwave?
I remember my parents cooking onions with butter in the microwave to put on subs, but I’ve never done anything like that.
Super quick scrambled eggs.
Steamed broccoli.
Baked potatoes.
Chicken (small strips and 50% power)
Cake in a mug?
You can steam potato from raw in the microwave, just need to put some water in a bowl next to the potatoes plate. Or use a special bowl made for this. It’s quicker than using a steamer, and just as good.
From time to time, just some veggies to go along with air fried chicken.
But that’s because I don’t own a stove, all of my cooking is handled by an air fryer, rice cooker, and the microwave
is vibe coding just using an llm to assist or whatever?
Exactly.
It’s not just using an LLM to assist. It’s more generating the whole source with an LLM, running it once to check if it seems to work (if it “vibes” good) and then publishing it without even trying to read through and understand the code.
I’m only a casual coder (although I hope to get better in the coming years), but this is how I feel in the office when someone farts a half formed, semiliterate speech to text little dingleberry into ChatGPT, and then sends as a professional email the full bodied thing it whips up based on it. I’ve got a colleague who used to be in “LD” classes when they were young and they’ve come a long way to being a near 30-year business professional in this department, and they have always struggled with reading and writing and so tools like Grammarly and now ChatGPT help this person take a fully-formed email and give it the once-over before sending, and I don’t judge that and that isn’t what I’m describing; what I mean is my boss (for example), who can’t string more than five written words together, or read a sentence any longer, and certainly isn’t interested in learning how to, who now uses ChatGPT to send page-long emails or “cook up” long and supposedly philosophical LinkedIn posts about leadership.
I cannot conceive of how a person does that, and sends it with a straight face, totally shameless. Why should I even bother to respond to something like that? Who am I responding to? It certainly isn’t the supposed author. My college program mentor was doing the same thing near the end of my degree program and it was so fucking obvious. He went from never responding to me to suddenly sending these long and enthusiastic emails that recited back to me every point I had made as though they were all worth reiterating (they weren’t), the way one might show one was actively listening (which itself only adds to the irony). And it is such a deep insult to receive one of these emails because it says at once that you both 1) don’t respect me enough to put your own thoughts in writing for me, or to have enough thoughts to write down to begin with and 2) that you think I’m a complete fucking idiot who either won’t notice your ruse, or am also a vapid creature, too vapid to care because “aren’t we all just doing it this way now?”
The philosophical argument against vibe coding seems pretty self evident although the most compelling “argument” I’ve seen against it, I saw on Lemmy, maybe a repost from BlueSky where someone pointed out that it’s the tech bros trying to take this one last manual tool from the hands and minds of users and turn it into a subscription for which our skills (like writing and composition) will inevitably atrophy to the point we cannot do it without the subscription service anymore. Pure evil.
Good analogy as most people don’t understand how a microwave is working either.
That being said, at least microwaving isn’t on fast track to pollute our entire ecosystem so…
So what? Finish your thought.
tbh if this causes the whole school system to be re-evaluated I’ll be happy, school was so utterly streamlined and boring it felt more like a daycare than a genuine place to learn and improve
Cheating found to be rife in British schools and universities
This article is more than 10 years old
Chinese students and their parents fight for the right to cheat
Not cheating, they said, would put them at a disadvantage in a country where student cheating has become standard practice.
https://qz.com/96793/chinese-students-and-their-parents-fight-for-the-right-to-cheat
And it wouldn’t surprise me if it was literally everywhere, the push for schooling isn’t to learn, it’s to pass a test, so the incentive isn’t to learn, it’s to pass the test anyway you can
Maybe there is a lot more interaction in the future between students and teachers, you can have an assignment, study X, upload it on the web portal, and then maybe the next day there will be a 1 on 1 review where the student has to explain parts of it to ensure they understand what they’re doing
With AI I’m spending more of my time reading code than writing these days and I like to understand what I’m reading
You’re getting into a problem with education where there is value in providing ordeals for students to pass, but the cost of grading is significant and something schools are trying to reduce.
How do you create a system that verifies that the test taker knows the material?
Microwaving is cooking. Vibe coding is to microwaving what staring at the food and pretending you have heat-ray vision is to microwaving.
I liken it to ordering from a restaurant where you’ve never eaten the cuisine, and you try to pass off your dish as if you made it completely from scratch.
And the restaurant is basically randomly putting food from other restaurants in the plate instead of cooking.
And because the food was frozen and is thawing because of the ambient heat, people will point and shout: “SEE! It is working! I am actually heating the food with my heat-ray vision!”
More like vibe coding is chucking the wrong ingredients at a fire and hoping the end result is edible.
lol thanks, you made the BOTW cooking jingle play in my head
vibe coding is when you promised your boss a nice steamed ham but you get some burgers from the greatest fast food instead and call it your cooking. and at the end you end up burning your house.
That’s unfair to microwave ovens because they have established uses, even in some fine dining establishments. So-called AI has none of that just yet.
I’m of two minds on this.
On the one hand, I find tools like Copilot integrated into VS Code to be useful for taking some of the drudgery out of coding. Case in point: If I need to create a new schema for an ORM, having Copilot generate it according to my specifications is speedy and helpful. It will be more complete and thorough than the first draft I’d come up with on my own.
On the other, the actual code produced by Copilot is always rife with errors and bloat, it’s never DRY, and if you’re not already a competent developer and try to “vibe” your way to usablility, what you’ll end up with will frankly suck, even if you get it into a state where it technically “works.”
Leaning into the microwave analogy, it’s the difference between being a chef who happens to have a microwave as one of their kitchen tools, and being a “chef” who only knows how to follow microwave instructions on prepackaged meals. “Vibe coders” aren’t coders at all and have no real grasp of what they’re creating or why it’s not as good as what real coders build, even if both make use of the same tools.
your corporate IT department stick you with copilot as well eh? Yours go all the way and force you to use MS Edge, MS Teams, MS Windows, MS Sharepoint and every other Microsoft product as well? It’s included with Office365!!!
The github copilot in vscode is a little less shit than the generic ms copilot (but it still sucks ass compared to just writing anything yourself)
I mean, people also said that of the first generations of rockers who didn’t know shit about solfeggio. Then they said the same about computer assisted music production.
I think we don’t give the new generations enough credit. They might come at skills from a direction we find stupid, but they’re not stupid and they can develop critical skills just like we did.
I don’t think that comparison is apt. Unlike with music, there are objectively inefficient and badly-executed ways for a program to function, and if you’re only “vibing,” you’re not going to know the difference between such code and clean, efficient code.
Case in point: Typescript. Typescript is a language built on top of JavaScript with the intent of bringing strong and static type-checking sanity to it. Using Copilot, it’s possible to create a Typescript application without actually knowing the language. However, what you’ll end up with will almost certainly be full of the
anytype, which turns off type-checking and negates the benefits of using Typescript in the first place. Your code will be much harder to maintain and fix bugs in. And you won’t know that, because you’re not a Typescript developer, you’re a Copilot “developer.”I’m not trying to downplay the benefits of using Copilot. Like I said, it’s something I use myself, and it’s a really helpful tool in the developer toolbox. But it’s not the only tool in the toolbox for anyone but “vibe coders.”
One of my co-workers, maybe oversold his capabilities and experience. That or whoever told me what he was capable of oversold him. Doesn’t matter at this point. Not that long ago, he basically was never submitting any merge requests, and when he did there were a ton of issues. Then one week, everything changed. He was writing code and a style that didn’t match what he had done the week before, there was an excessive amount of documentation where before there was none. It was co-pilot. He had gotten access to copilot, which we all have. But it was obvious that he’s been leaning heavily into it.
And a short-term yeah it looks like he’s doing really well. But I fear he’s not actually learning anything by doing this. Which means if there’s a mistake, for a major change that needs a happen, He’s not going to get there on his own. One time he tried to submit a merge request and I was like, there’s an obvious flaw here because this could be null and you’re not handling that. If the company ever decides that we’re not going to use co-pilot anymore, cuz I think we’re still on a trial run, He’s going to find himself right back where he started. And that’s going to hurt his career in the end.
Vibe coding is to coding what ordering takeout from a shady ghost kitchen is to cooking
That’s unfair to microwaves.
I’m asking for more extensive documentation these days. Helps show the author themselves understand the code they’re asking me to review. The code itself I just skim.
Sounds like a great time for literate programming to make a come back.
OTOH, that’s a strength of OpenAI: writing reasonable-sounding explanations in plain speech.
Close but it’s more extreme vibe coding is putting all ingredients into shit hole mixing them up, drinking all and smiling. Just like advertising.
