vibe coding is the fast fashion industry of software engineering
TL;DR: My take on AI for programming and "vibe coding" is that it will do to software engineering what fast fashion did to the clothing industry: flood the market with cheap, low-quality products and excessive waste.
First, to get this out of the way, I’ll note that I’m a casual user of LLMs for coding. I don’t use agents or AI-powered IDEs, but a couple of times a week, I use LLMs for two things: cheaply testing ideas and debugging. I’ve never found LLM-generated solutions reliable enough to fix issues in my production codebases, but they are sometimes helpful in my thought process. For me, AI has simply replaced the shitty experience of current web-searching for solutions.
LLMs excel at producing low-quality code (more on this later) that kinda works for a given prompt. In my experience, LLM-generated code typically:
Yet, this doesn't change the fact that LLMs do produce code, that the code it produces do solve some basic needs and it is quite accessible. Recently, I asked an LLM to create files for deploying an R Shiny app behind a Caddy web server with basic auth. Within minutes, I had a Docker Compose file with a "Hello World" ready to run. I tested it, confirmed hypotheses, deleted the files, and moved on. The tool’s ability to write code easily is undeniable and it is here to stay.
