Obviously fake. Still funny though.
Are you saying the comment is fake, or the sentiment? This was actually posted to reddit: https://archive.is/U9ntj
Fake in that it’s almost assuredly written and posted by someone who is actively anti-vibe coding and this is a troll on the true believers.
I love the one guy on that thread who is defending vibe coding, and is “about to launch his first application,” and anyone who tells him how dumb he is is only doing so because they feel threatened.
Nah I’m on that guy’s side. His experience lines up with my own, namely that vibe coding is not useful for people who don’t know how to program, but it can be useful for people who do know how to program, and simply aren’t familiar with the specific syntax used in a language they’re not an expert in.
In that case, the queries to the AI model aren’t, “write me a program that can do X”, it’s more like “write me a function in this language that can take A, B, and C as inputs, do operation Y with them, and return Z”, or “what’s the best way to find all of the unique elements in an array and sort it alphabetically in this language”. Then the programmer can take those pieces and build up a proper application with them. The AI isn’t actually writing the program for you, it’s more like a customized Stack Overflow generator, without having to wade through a decade of people arguing back and forth in the comments about inane bullshit.
Does it save a ton of time? No, but it’s still helpful, and can get you up and running in a new language much faster than the alternative.
I’m currently doing this with an angular project that’s a bit of a clusterfuck. So many layers.
I’m still having to break it down into much, much smaller chunks and it’s not able to do much, but it is helpful. Most useful thing was that I started with writing a pure SQL query with several joins and told it “turn this into linq using existing entities”.
I think they’ll completely replace ORMs.
An HtML class ten years ago isn’t anything close to knowing how to program. It’s like saying “I wrote a bullet point lost years ago so I know how to write a novel.”
I really like the description of AI coding as ‘custom stack overflow generator’ because it really sells the flaws as well, to an experienced dev. We go to stack overflow for help with some weird quirk of a language or find an obscure library that solves our specific need.
I think vibe coding is cobbling together a project from a bunch of stack overflow posts – and they only use the question part of the post.
My company is doing a big push for LLM/codegen/“everyday ‘AI’”
Sorry - threw up in my mouth a little bit there
And pretty much the only thing I acquiesce to using is the “better autocomplete” feature. Most of the other stuff it seems to offer is essentially useless on a day-to-day basis for me.
And moreover, it’s actively harmful to the entire practice of engineering, because management and execs see it as this magical oracle/panopticon that can magically make people more productive and churn out 10x more bullshit products that they didn’t consult with engineers on than before. It can’t and it doesn’t. But that doesn’t stop them from thinking it can.
And then they stop hiring junior levels because “codegen can do that”. And then you have a generational gap in the entire fucking discipline of coding as an art, because the entire fucking tech industry is doing this. And we haven’t even touched on the ecological and infrastructural (as in: water and power, not “which cloud or bare metal do we put this on”) implications and how they’re being blatantly ignored and hand-waved away, or the comical license and usage violations that are perfectly fine when large companies do but you’ve been a naughty boy if you torrent a fucking movie. But I digress.
Sure, it can be useful for people who do know how to program, though I find it usually takes more effort to get it to create what I want and make sure it works than it takes to just do it myself.
This guy explicitly says he doesn’t know how to program though. He says he took an HTML (not a programming language, a markdown language) class a decade ago. He probably doesn’t remember shit from it, not that it’d be helpful anyway because writing HTML has nothing to do with writing a program to perform a task.
Does it save a ton of time? No, but it’s still helpful, and can get you up and running in a new language much faster than the alternative.
You obviously aren’t a programmer. You either know how to program or you don’t. The language is just syntax, which is trivial to learn. It doesn’t help you get running in a new language because you still need to learn the syntax to make sure it’s writing something reasonable. That time has to be spent no matter what.
you obviously aren’t a programmer
Don’t be a dick, the example is a perfectly reasonable one, and it’s something ppl would’ve used Rosetta code or learnxiny or stack overflow for in the past.
It’s strange, but I’ve seen lots of comments that are not aware this is fake. The ai hater crowd is using it as their proof, the other side saying he is using it wrong.
Is that what the weird extra width on some letters is, artifacts from some AI generating the post?
No, the phrasing makes it clear someone wrote a fictional account of becoming self aware that the output of vibe coding isn’t maintainable as it scales.
I’m entirely too trusting and would like to know what about the phrasing tips you off that it’s fictional. Back on Reddit I remember so many claims about posts being fake and I was never able to tease out what distinguished the “omg fake! r/thathappened” posts from the ones that weren’t accused of that, and I feel this is a skill I should be able to have on some level. Although taking an amusing post that wasn’t real as real doesn’t always have bad consequences.
But I mostly asked because I’m curious about the weird extra width on letters.
When something is too “on the nose,” for example, it’s written in exactly the way that would induce the most cheering and virality because it appeals so much to one group of people, it’s worth considering it may have been written to provoke exactly that reaction.
Thanks!
I really wish people did not do this. This isn’t something I was ever taught to look for, and I like to think I got a good education. I was taught to make sure my source is credible, to consider biases and spin and what things are facts and what is just opinion, but I wasn’t taught to look for a lot of deception people call out online. But I guess I have to live with this and gain the skill to look for deception. Genuinely, thanks for helping me, since I don’t think I ever would have figured out what raises “fake” flags in most peoples’ heads on my own.
AmidFuror’s description is on point and I see it as a variant of Poe’s Law. Instead of sarcasm being mistaken for a real belief, it is presenting a fictional account of someone being self aware that is mistaken for someone actually becoming self aware.
There are two lines that make me absolutely certain it is written by someone who it not a vibe coder and is leaning into the sarcasm.
- ‘pulling out my wallet for someone that knows what they are doing’ implies the poster knows they don’t know what they are doing
- ‘vibe coding is just roleplaying for guys who want to feel like hackers’ is a joke I’ve seen directed at vibe coders more than once
Keep in mind that not all deception is malicious, but most people see the word deception as having a negative implication. An actor/actress pretending to be someone else is technically deceptive the same way as whoever wrote this hilarious post. They are presenting a fictional account for an audience.
You are right about the thespian thing, but when you watch TV/film/theatre everyone is in on the “joke” and we all know they’re not really falling in love, getting murdered, or whatever dramatic happening. I’m not sure if OOP is just trying to entertain and expects everyone to realize they’re joking, which would stick them on the thespian side, or if they have other motives. But hey, interesting point to bring up!
You are right about the thespian thing, but when you watch TV/film/theatre everyone is in on the “joke” and we all know they’re not really falling in love, getting murdered, or whatever dramatic happening. I’m not sure if OOP is just trying to entertain and expects everyone to realize they’re joking, which would stick them on the thespian side, or if they have other motives. But hey, interesting point to bring up!
r/thatHappened was the worst thing to happen to Reddit and I sincerely hate whoever created that sub
No, the text itself. No vibe coder would write something like that. The artifacts you mentioned are the result of simple horizontal and vertical upscaling. If you zoom in you can see it better.
Thanks!
You should(n’t) watch Quin69. He’s currently “vibe-coding” a game with Claude. Already spent $3000 in tokens, and the game was in such a shit state, that a viewer had to intervene and push an update that dragged it to a “playable” state.
The game is at a level of a “my first godot game”, that someone who’s learning could’ve made over a weekend.
It’s like the nerd version of Synthol body ‘builders’.
Why does this image look like an AI-generated screenshot? The letter spacing and weights are all wrong.
It’s a real post on Reddit. I don’t know what combination of screenshotting/uploading tools leads to this kind of mangling, but I’ve seen it in screenshots from Android, too. The artifacts seem to run down in straight vertical lines, so maybe slight scaling with a nearest-neighbor algorithm (in 2025?!?) plus a couple levels of JPEG compression? It looks really weird.
I’m curious. If anyone knows, please enlighten me!
probably
Its just funny that it ends up costing more time
I don’t really care about vibe coders but as a dev with just under 2 decades in the field:
- Your vibe coding shit will not go to prod until humans fully review it
- You better review it yourself first before offloading that massive mental drain to someone else (which means you still need to have some semblance of programming skills). Don’t open a PR with 250 files in it and then tell someone else to validate it.
- Use more context. Don’t give it vague ass prompts.
- Don’t use auto-accept. That’s just lazy asshole shit.
I can’t stress this enough: if you give me a PR with tons of new files and expect me to review it when you didn’t even review it yourself, I will 100% reject it and make you do it. If it’s all dumped into a single commit, I will whip your computer into the nearest body of water and tell you to go fish it out.
I don’t care what AI tool wrote your code. You’re still responsible for it and I will blame you.
When I see a sloppy PR I remind people “AI didn’t write that. You wrote it. Your name is on the git blame.”
Love it, I have a vibe coding colleague I will use this with.
I like this mentality. I might start telling people the same thing
If it’s all dumped into a single commit, I will whip your computer into the nearest body of water and tell you to go fish it out.
I’m going to steal this for an update to an internal guidance document for my dev team. Thank you.
I have never used an AI to code and don’t care about being able to do it to the point that I have disabled the buttons that Microsoft crammed into VS Code.
That said, I do think a better use of AI might be to prepare PRs in logical and reasonable sizes for submission that have coherent contextualization and scope. That way when some dingbat vibe codes their way into a circle jerk that simultaneously crashes from dual memory access and doxxes the entire user base, finding issues is easier to spread out and easier to educate them on why vibe coding is boneheaded.
I developed for the VFX industry and I see the whole vibe coding thing as akin to storyboards or previs. Those are fast and (often) sloppy representations of the final production which can be used to quickly communicate a concept without massive investment. I see the similarities in this, a vibe code job is sloppy, sometimes incomprehensible, but the finished product could give someone who knew what the fuck they are doing a springboard to write it correctly. So do what the film industry does: keep your previs guys in the basement, feed them occasionally, and tell them to go home when the real work starts. (No shade to previs/SB artists, it is a real craft and vital for the film industry as a whole. I am being flippant about you for commedic effect. Love you guys.)
I think this is great. I like hearing about your experience in the VFX industry since it’s unfamiliar to me as a web dev. The storyboard comparison is spot on. I like that people can drum up a “what if” at such a fast pace, but vibe coders need to be aware that it’s not a final product. You can spin it up, gauge what works and what doesn’t, and now you have feasibility with low overhead. There’s real value to that.
Edit: forgot to touch on your PR comment.
At work, we have an optional GitHub workflow that lets you call Claude in a PR and it will do its own assessment based on the instructions file we wrote for it. We stress that it’s not a final say and will make mistakes, but it’s been good in a pinch. I think if it misses 5 things but uncovers 1 bug, that’s still a win. I’ve definitely had “a-ha” moments with it where my dumb brain failed to properly handle a condition or something. Our company is good about using it responsibly and supplying as much context as we possibly can.
Like trying to write a book just using auto complete
Bruh yer not doing it right. Are you stupid, bruh? You gotta work on yer promps, bruh. You gotta watch some tiktoks on it, bruh. Bruh, go watch @demisets4, bruh. Learn to prompt, bruh. Your not good at it, bruh. Bruh, you should try something else if you can’t figure it out that’s a you problem, bruh.
The next model will fix it all!
So there are multiple people in this thread who state their job is to unfuck what the LLMs are doing. I have a family member who graduated in CS a year ago and is having a hell of a time finding work, how would he go about getting one of these “clean up after the model” jobs?
Answer is probably the same as before AI: build a portfolio on GitHub. These days maybe try to find repos that have vibe code in them and make commits that fix the AI garbage.
My path was working for a consulting firm (Accenture) for a few years, making friends with my clients, and then jumping to freelance work a few years later when I can get paid my contract rate directly rather than letting Accenture take a big chunk of it.
The difficult part is going to be that new engineers are not generally who people think about to unfuck code. Even before the LLMs junior engineers are generally the people that fuck things up.
It’s through fucking lots of stuff up and unfucking that stuff up and learning how not to fuck things up in the first place that you go from being a junior engineer to a more senior engineer. Until you land in a lofty position like staff engineer and your job is mostly to listen to how people want to fuck everything up and go “maybe let’s try this other way that won’t fuck everything up instead”
Tell your family member to network, that’s the best way to get a job. There are discord servers for every programming language and most projects. Contribute to open source projects and get to know the people.
Build things, write code, open source it on GitHub.
Drill on leet code questions, they aren’t super useful, but in any interview at least part of the assessment is going to be how well they can do on those.
There are still plenty of places hiring. AI has just made it so that most senior engineers have access to a junior engineer level programmer that they can give tasks to at all time, the AI. So anything you can do to stand out is an advantage.
Has he tried being a senior developer? He should really try being a senior developer.
Best erotic story ever on !DevsGoneWild@lemmynsfw.com <3
I wish that was a real sub
Somebody make this a sub pls
It is not useless. You should absolutely continue to vibes code. Don’t let a professional get involved at the ground floor. Don’t inhouse a professional staff.
Please continue paying me $200/hr for months on end debugging your Baby’s First Web App tier coding project long after anyone else can salvage it.
And don’t forget to tell your investors how smart you are by Vibes Coding! That’s the most important part. Secure! That! Series! B! Go public! Get yourself a billion dollar valuation on these projects!
Keep me in the good wine and the nice car! I love vibes coding.
No way. Youtube ad told me a different story the other day. Could that be a… lie? (shocked_face.jpg)
But I thought armies of teenagers were starting tech businesses?!
My boss is literally convinced we can now basically make programs that take rockets to mars, and that it’s literally clicks away. For the life of me, it is impossible to convince him that this is, in fact, not the case. Whoever fired developers because ‘AI could do it’ is going to regret it.
Vibe coding is useful for super basic bash scripting and that’s about it. Even that it will mess up but usually in a suler easily fixed way
I don’t think it has much to do with how “complex or not” it is, but rather how common it is.
It can completely fail on very simple things that are just a bit obscure, so it has too little training data.
And it can do very complex things if there’s enough training data on those things.
This is my new slack pfp
Vibe coding tools are very useful when you want to make a tech movie but the
hollywoodcommand just does not cut it.
