Rick Rubin is not a vibe coder
this post was submitted on 12 Jul 2025
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Rick would feel insulted
I could've coded in 20 minutes?
Wrong. They couldn't. That's why they're vibe "coders", not coders.
One of my teammates used AI (our company heavily encourages it) to write code. It did what it was supposed to and the tests passed, but it was the most ugly and unmaintainable shit ever. For one example, I don't want to have to untangle a for i = 0; i++; i <= len(foo) {} that has multiple ifs inside that separately increment and decrement the loop counter i when trying to troubleshoot an issue.
Idk, sounds to me like it did a good job mimicking humans. :P
Why the fuck one uses Rick Rubin’s pic for the vibe coder? He’s a legend and he represents whatever AI is not.
Rubbed me the wrong way too, dude is the exact opposite of AI. He IS clearly vibing in the photo however.
I am so sad that people I know (not you, OP) are using the phrase 'vibe coding' seriously now, like it's some new discipline of coding. It's a facetious term! The joke is that it's not real coding! Stop!!!!!
Google's Instagram keeps seriously advertising "vibe coded projects"
I’ve seen job postings on Upwork that mention “vibe coding” as a skill requirement.
They want vibe coders who can do the work of a team for a fraction of the price. And if the code is buggy they can always dispute.
So it becomes your responsibility to provide a team’s worth of proofed code.
My company sends out emails like "vibe it up" with links to their vibe coding workshops.
I'm getting the impression that people need it explained that "vibe coding" is not supposed to be a complement.
Actually maybe it didn't start like that oh God
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vibe_coding
I think they're serious
I have tried vibe coding on a couple small hobby projects and it did not workout in any of the cases, zero out of 4 or 5 ish attempts. It will get you kind of close, but it takes way way too long and it doesn't work so you are actually just getting started. Are there actually techniques to vibe coding or is this all bullshit? I don't want to spend more time looking into it...
I consider myself a bad hobbyist programmer. I know a decent bit about programming, and I mainly create relatively simple things.
Before LLMs, I would spend weeks or months working on a small program, but with LLMs I can often complete it significantly faster.
Now, I don't suppose I would consider myself to be a "vibe coder", because I don't expect the LLM to create the entire application for me, but I may let it generate a significant portion of code. I am generally coming up with the basic structure of the program and figuring out how it should work, then I might ask it to write individual functions, or pieces of functions. I review the code it gives me and see if it makes sense. It's kind of like having an assistant helping me.
Programming languages are how we communicate with computers to tell them what to do. We have to learn to speak the computer's language. But with an LLM, the computer has learned to speak our language. So now we can program in normal English, but it's like going through a translator. You still have to be very specific about what the program needs to do, or it will just have to guess at what you wanted. And even when you are specific, something might get lost in translation. So I think the best way to avoid these issues is like I said, not expecting it to be able to make an entire program for you, but using it as an assistant to create little parts at a time.
That's cool. It doesn't sound like you are vibe coding because you don't expect a working code, rather using LLM to learn more about coding in general. Is there any technique you learned to make it go faster or work better thru that process?
I would describe myself as close to the person you replied to in terms of skill level, and have been using llm's in a similar fashion to the one they described, and get great results. I think the key thing is to know enough to understand what is happening, and see where the llm's limitations are, and use it as a learning resource to actively improve while using it. Then be as specific as possible when asking questions.
Not only is it great in terms of getting working code, I have found chatgpt to be the best teacher I have ever had! (Because of availability etc). I think they must have trained the llm's I have used on a lot of computer and coding sources.
I think the key is to learn at least the basics of coding first.There are scores of 5 to 25 hour long courses on most major programming languages on sites like udemy. Coding can definitely be hard to get your head around at first, but stick with it and do as many of those as it takes, or a night class or something.
If someone isn't prepared to invest a week or two (in truth I spent a lot longer than that studying coding but I wan't particularly time-efficient in my prior learning), then treat the llm as a learning resource, then good luck! I would guess the llm will be able to come up with any idea they can anyway soon enough!
by "completing it" do you mean having something that seems like it works? Or something that you know works? If it's the former then you've just had the computer do the easy part (creating something) and skipped the actually hard part (making it robust).
Are errors handled properly, is all input being validated? If using https, are you actually verifying certificates? This sort of thing
Well since I just program for a hobby, I am able to complete things to the point that they meet my own requirements. If I need error handling for something, I can just ask the LLM to add error handling, it typically works out quite well.
so no. Before llms came around, lots of people were hobby programmers. We learned. Sorry to be blunt, but being a hobbyist is not an excuse. The best programmers I know are hobbyists
It's always funny how few people consider that AI might actually help you write better code. Instead, the discussion is reduced to “vibe coding” versus fully manual coding.
I think that's one of the dangers of AI: asking AI is a low-cost action (typing out a question), that has a chance to have big returns (saving you hours of work). It usually isn't worth it. But sometimes it is, so people keep doing it.
if you utilize it as a tool it's fine. it can be a good rubber duck or github copilot saves you like 2 seconds to just hit tab to complete something that's correct in the preview. But utilizing it to do anymore than that and you've lost. Claude will constantly make things up or tell you to use libraries that have been orphaned for like 5+ years.
anyone who says "it can help you write better code" are fooling themselves. I've yet to see it.
Generous to think vibe coders could write the feature in 20 minutes.
This slot just used 20 Watts of power for 3 hours || This GPU just used 2kW to write Hello World in sveltekit.
Lol I have been playing with vibe coding on a small project, porting an existing thing. I let it build a lot of stuff without making sure it compiles. So now I'm at the "One more prompt for the bug to go away" stage, on top of that I have to spend a lot of time editing by hand.
I'm happy this is just a POC side project.
It all makes sense now. Another day I'm glad to not be a gambling addict
Things go quite well with high order direction and guidance. Don't have that somewhere? You'll spend an hour learning and gaining that experience, or you can turn off your high order guidance brain and thrash the llm you haven't rate limited to maybe work it out in it's own.