Vibe Coding Is the Worst Idea of 2025 [video]

The problem is that the experts have tried it and found that vibe coding doesn't actually work at scale that they need.

Will it ever? Perhaps, but I'd argue a near-AGI level of intelligence would need to be achieved first. When that happens, we have bigger problems (and/or opportunities?) than a few programmers losing their jobs.

The real problem with it is that it doesn't work. It isn't "right way wrong way". It doesn't work.

But this is still largely true.

Step 3 only occurs in a small fraction of cases. Step 4 even smaller fraction.

You say that like subsequent events overtook them. But I see this complaint on HN pretty frequently. I agree with it. Nobody does their work on a phone. The phones go out of their way to make that difficult.

This also is how most people use their smart phone today. They were right. Perhaps they just didn't realize that people wanted a on-the-go impractical toy for media consumption.

The "burden" in this case is correct, secure, as much bug free as possible code that someone can debug.

You oversimplify everything, but this is completely wrong. 320P cameras were useless to pro photographers, but as soon as the capabilities got near to what film could provide, they eagerly switched. Kodak was destroyed, but there wasn't much of a place to pivot to. "Masters of a complex, chemical domain" to "Yet another camera company" isn't a real pivot.

I'm bullish on AI, and think "vibe" coding was/is a cool experiment so don't agree with the premise that it is in the worst idea, but strongly disagree with your simplistic take on how tech is adopted. There are countless ideas that "experts" were right to ignore, ideas sitting in the trash can of history.

Now this, and I also vibe code but I'm not convinced it will change too much for the coding profession. Will probably make it suck a bit more in relation to management and juniors who will make more laziness mistakes quicker.

His insight was that in some cases, there can be a product that's worst in every way than a product a company is currently producing. Every way, except one. And that one way is not interesting to the company's customers, so the company almost categorically can't care about it. But that one improvement ends up being massive, usually because it unlocks a new product category that brings in new customers.

For example, think of the massive computers of the early era (and allow me some small liberties in this story). The only things that mattered were strength/speed and cost. But then much smaller versions of computers became available. Originally for hobbyists. No company that built computers cared about this development, because none of their customers cared! These computers were inferior in every way current customers cared about, and were only better for a tiny group of people who weren't customers and no one cared about.

But obviously, home computing ended up a much bigger deal than anything else, and eventually because it was so massive, improvements there led to improvements for the original customers.

That is the dilemma. Do you ignore existing customers who are perfectly happy with what you're building, to chase an illusive innovative growth in a new segment of the market which you have no idea will materialize or not?

> aren't burdened by the "right way" of doing things.

This is just another way of saying "have no clue what they are doing". There's a reason devs do thing the "right way".

Example: the other day someone was promoting their saas. They proudly advertised that they knew nothing about technology, and that AI created everything.

Yet their saas had a detailed privacy policy describing how your data was used. Of course the problem is, they have no way of knowing that their privacy policy is at all accurate. After all they don’t even know how to read their product’s code.

This undoubtedly exposes them to legal issues. I can imagine software being more tightly regulated as this spirals out of control.

We’ll hit a point soon where there’s so much dangerous and untrustworthy AI slop software on the market, that people will actively seek out and pay a premium for software created by professionals at reputable companies.

people are trying to dance around admitting that the fundamental premise of this entire approach is flawed and will always give inconsistent results.

"They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown."

Considering how many developers still don't write tests, pair program, or do CI and CD (shipping multiple times a day) – all things Dave argues for – I don't think it is fair to dismiss him as the establishment or incumbent.

AI as a tool for software development is here and will continue to gain traction. Everyone recognises this.

But what is touted as "vibe coding" now is hype at best and misguided.

So I would instead argue that this is not the "innovator's dilemma" at all, and in fact AI is making headways everywhere, but instead this a classic hype cycle. Currently "vibe coding" might be peak hype, it will bring disillusionment when reality catches up, and so on as we go down the cycle.

Many "new ways" of doing something die before becoming the norm. Using the examples where it prevailed without looking at all the times it failed is just bad rationale.

"vibe coding" (what a horrid jargon) may be the new digital camera. It also may be the new metaverse (just to use a recent example still fresh in people's minds).

Contrary to digital camera and iphone, "vibe coding" is muddled by an army of people deeply invested in Gen AI adoption (either directly or indirectly) that want it to succeed no matter if it makes sense or not.

I see, so the solution is to adopt something that is worse because it is popular because people will build things 'because they can'.

Maybe we can shift towards vibe-designed finance, science, etc using LLMs 'because we can'.

It's fun having a backend, writing a few lines and after some minutes of waiting you have a fully working and decent looking frontend website available.