887: Vibe Coding Is a Problem

Welcome to syntax today. We're talking about vibe coding now before you before you shut it off because you're a Sick of the obnoxiousness of vibe coding. Let me give it to you straight about like what we're trying to do We're gonna be talking about like just building random stuff with AI that might be kind of good But you don't necessarily care. We're gonna talk about what it is and whether or not we should be doing this and and Some examples of stuff. We have vibe coded. I don't know people the other words people have been using this is like with like personal software Kind of fits into this. You know where or throw away software. I've been calling it as I've built quite a few things recently where I Just need it very quickly once it's served its purpose. It gets thrown away Yeah, so it's funny that you say that personal and I do think personal software is connected for a lot of people And I think personal software might be more connected for I would say more Responsible developers than it is for other people if that's the best way to say that because yeah What I found with vibe coding is that specifically it's a lot of inexperienced people doing it because they are becoming productive with it But they cannot be that productive without it because they don't have the knowledge base That's an assumption, but that's my experience. What I'm seeing on on socials. So vibe coding what if you've never heard of this term You're not on social media. You haven't seen people talk about it. What the heck is it? It's basically coding entirely using prompts Things like cursor or cloud code these types of systems that are a genic that do a lot for you that are Adding multiple files connecting things running projects And the idea with vibe coding mostly is that you as the developer are not getting really deep into the code You're not really paying attention to the close details You're mostly just running it seeing if it works seeing how it works Prompting again tweaking prompting again prompting again and just on repeat until the thing does what you want it to do It's a form of AI slop and right now you can actually make stuff with it You know believe it or not people might if you're not getting into the stuff you can be surprisingly effective vibe coding but Again, it ends up being being a lot of slop and there's I think there's certain instances and projects and things like that They make more sense for exploring that type of way and sadly, I think the inexperienced developers amongst us might not Understand when and where that that line is totally I find myself when I Want to get into it and I try to correct a problem I find sometimes I'm two or three Prompts in and I just have to scrap it and sort of start it start again from that prompt because It just starts making it worse and worse and it starts adding a whole bunch of stuff But the the whole idea with vibe coding is that you don't necessarily care and as long as it works It works and I'm kind of somewhere in between because It's surprisingly some of the stuff is surprisingly good and it's kind of fun The stuff that you can make with it where you might not have been able to possibly the people are making games Levels I always is building this like whole airplane thing They're just building Whatever they possibly would want and certainly that will make people who are good at this stuff mad But that always happens in every single industry when something comes along and makes it easier It doesn't do away with the need for those people But it certainly makes the intro level sloppy version of something very Very attainable we saw it with with drag-and-drop website builders, right? Yeah us WordPress devs Hated these dream lever drag-and-drop or these square spaces things like that We hated that because it the code that it output it was garbage You know, but the reality is that a lot of people don't necessarily care As long as it works and does what the thing that they're trying to do Yeah, I remember the first Adobe web builder that I had that had a drag-and-drop UI and it's like oh I can get something looking really nice and then it wouldn't work in various instances There's full of bugs or all kinds of weird stuff. I think right now in 2025 You know march 2025 as it is right now. I think vibe coding is good for Demos it's good for personal software, which will touch on that. It's good for proof-of-concept proof-of-concept and It's also good for century at century.io because your code is gonna suck sometimes. It's gonna be terrible It's and you might not know it's terrible, which is man that's like that's that centuries ideal landing spot is like You have some bugs in your code, and you don't know about them and like if you're vibe coding It's a lot of running. Yeah, you don't even know it's not like you don't even know about your bugs You don't even know about your code let alone the bugs, which is gonna be full of them. So So check it out at century.io solve all your problems that way and there is actually an AI tool within century two So maybe at some point century part becomes part of the AI vibe coding flow and you just click fix it for me Oh, there's a bug fix it for me fix it for me and then it just fixes itself So check it out century.io for its iCintech sign up and get two months for free with the coupon code tasty treat all over case all one word This podcast is presented by a century in case you could not tell that but either way I do think that it is a major concern for vibe coding specifically if you are an Advanced developer and you're using these agentic coding solutions as an assistant as like a Junior level programmer that you're watching very carefully and you're approving all of the code line by line and you're reading it and You're really comprehending exactly what's going on for every single thing that's added to your code base One, it's gonna be a lot better at the end of the day But two you might actually get very frustrated and want to do some of it yourself because the AI stuff can do a whole bunch of changes at once And you're like that's not what I would have done and that's a bad idea. Whatever you're doing. It's a bad idea Let me do it myself move. It's mine. You know, but other people I think they just they're just checking to see if that that shit works And that's it, you know, so I mean, it's it's really funny because like when the the AI images stuff first hit I don't know probably three years ago Everybody was posting the most hilarious Images that popped up right and then when the chat stuff popped up everybody was posting the hilarious Chat back and forth and then that sort of died out and now that you can just like you literally make a game or Build some software. We're having that in as well people are making fun software They're building little games and whatnot and I think that will will die down as People go yeah, of course you can you can generate a dog eating a hamburger You know like oh wow, you know like that was that was the most hilarious mind-blowing thing a couple years ago And now you see it like of course like anybody can do that So I think we're sort of in that stage right now for building these types of things But not to say that it's just like it's just garbage as well because like I'm thinking right now my kids want to have met wanted to make a math game For a while, you know, they want to make like a flash card, but like imagine we could build I thought like yeah, we could build that let's set across some time and for me to make a little flash card game from scratch Like that's I don't know I could probably do that in six hours or something like. Yes, totally But I could probably make something with the 3D World where you run around and answer questions I probably make that in like an hour or so and now and that would be So exciting for them and I think like that would be a net win because they're excited Computers are excited about coding and they're gonna be learning math. I know I was thinking about this a lot with like You know my son and I are getting into game development and It takes so long to see any major real change in it especially because I'm not great at it that like He's losing attention and I'm doing my best to be like look we got a guy. He's walking around now He's not pointing in the right direction. He's not doing the right animations But he he moves and my son's is like okay, great. When are we gonna get to like build Mario? Yeah, cuz he'll play Mario maker where you're just dragging and dropping everything onto the screen and it's so nice and You get instant results or whatever and that's what he really wants, you know out of the experience and Yeah, I do think that instant feedback or or visual. What I it's great for being inspired. There's all kinds of things I think a lot of it Falls apart when you try to build longstanding production Code bases Not that you can't use these tools, but you need to treat them more like a an assistant that you're yeah really watching closely Rather than vibe coding it I think about this all the time. I have friends that are like Oh, I made this app that does this whole thing and I just did it with prompts. It was super easy Like I'm gonna turn this into a product and I'm thinking like all right Well, do you know anything about authentication? Do you know anything about databases security? Do you know anything about Anything and just the answers know to all of those things right and without those answers and what the you today probably can't Confidently ship something that is good without those those tools and knowledge and you know they're still that gap there So yeah vibe coding production for now at least right vibe coding your production code is only gonna be I'm gonna say it's not good at all because again vibe coding kind of implies that it's you're not even looking at the code really or you're not getting deep in the code But yeah for throwaway personal software projects demos inspiration. I think it's it's totally valid and works just fine for that stuff Totally, I think I'm going back and thinking about the stuff that I've built in the last little while and quite honestly I don't even remember half the stuff that I vibe code because I just I build it It does this thing and I throw it out But we'll throw a image up on the screen right now is I'm building a a parametric grid That I'm 3D printing and I'm gonna be hanging This grid in our gym and then you can put all these hooks into this grid and hang up all the different attachments for the gym And normally this stuff is you just print off a sheet of it You print off as many as you want and they all click together and you're you're up and running However because I want to put a nice border around it I realize it's much more complicated because I need a Top right bottom left like it's basically the sliding panels of CSS in real life I need the I need the corner pieces. I need the tops the bottoms the left the right and the internal pieces Nine different possible pieces and I was like man. I'm having a hard time Visualizing this so I started like writing it scribbling it down on a piece of paper to try to visualize what I needed It's a 4x6 grid and I was like you know what? I'm just gonna start prompting my way into this so I build a little thing that I said I have a 4x6 grid And I need to define what each of the edges are called right top left top right Edge right edge laugh, etc Internal and then I just I just kept saying good now visualize it good now make me a cut sheet of how many Need to be printed for each piece and like that took me like 15 minutes and I was just like Okay, I I never would have not never but that would have taken me Much longer and I don't have add nearly as nice of a visualization if I were to build this myself I probably would not have built it myself I probably would have made a spreadsheet or a piece of paper or something like that Yeah, and to be clear to people listening It's not because you cannot do that you are very capable of making This interface yes a grid or any of this stuff It the benefit really comes from the speed and effort that it takes that's really where you see the benefit Like for instance, we had my whole MIDI controller thing and like yes Could I have absolutely coded a MIDI piano UI which is the keys or I'll you know They're the way the piano keys are shifted or I can ask cursor to create a piano for me aesthetically in CSS and HTML, but I can guide it. I can say use grid or flexbox for this I can use this or that give it this aesthetic whatever you can guide it with the technology You can tell it the approach to use you can give it hints and stuff like that But I didn't vibe code that entire app, but I vibe coded the keyboard interface because I just flat out Didn't want to take the time to do it and it's again. It's just a oh for fun project, right? So I do I do really find that that to be like a nice little sweet spot It's something that you could do you know how to do it you know what it looks like when it's done right And you can just ask it save me some time here do me a solid mm-hmm I think another area For this sort of vibe coding is you're you're going into Things that you're not necessarily comfortable with so the the roomba I wrote a whole bunch of C++ I think I forgot what language You know Yeah, I think it was C++ and I was debugging serial connections and and sort of going through that and and I built the whole UI to control the the vacuum the roomba thing I have a video on you can go watch it I built that whole whole thing and that was I guess you call that vibe coding because I If you look at it, it's it's not ideal There's a lot of like weird react hooks and and stuff, but but it worked it worked really nice And it was able to get it up up and running really really quickly. So both Languages where you're not really comfortable with or areas of stuff you've never worked in before And then UIs and things that you need to just crank out as as quickly as possible Because because you're just learning and it's not to say that I didn't learn anything. I think I came out of that project Wastemarter then I then I went in right like I know so much more about Microcontrollers and and I feel so much more confident in C++ now not that the robot can write it for me But like I feel like I understand a lot more about it and I don't know that I would have gotten that understanding Reading a book, but yeah, I would vacuum. I would have certainly got there Yeah, it is a it is a whole thing because like I think there is some degree where vibe coding is Stupid if you don't know what you're doing and you don't know what the code is doing and you're not learning anything from it And you're just pushing out more slop into the world. I don't like that. I think that's bad But if if you are using it as a learning opportunity You're using it to excite yourself. You're learning it to make things be productive All of those things I can get behind that and I can see a benefit to that. So oh, yeah, yeah different. Yeah I think I think of like somebody like a kid right now trying to build a game And they hit problems and they're trying to debug it and they're they're typing in and they're reading the replies Ah, it might be because we have a race condition here and I go oh, that's what a race condition in this is and we solve that and they're So many different things you can learn very quickly just building these silly little throwaway applications. So As I know we had a lot of angry people A lot of angry replies about when we do AI stuff on this podcast Yes, but I think I think it's a net win For when you're trying to learn something and you're trying to just you hear they're trying to fix a problem that you have For your own personal stuff or you're trying to learn something new. I think it's a net win with this stuff Yeah, totally all right anything else you want to say about vibe coding or do you just want to I want to vibe off. Yes I don't even know what else to say about it, but that's it. Let us know what you have vibe coded love to hear it It's uh, it's great to see everybody's replies. Yeah, totally love it hate it. What do you think? Peace You