I’m just curious about your thoughts on vibe coding. Personally, I believe it’s one of the worst things you can do as a developer. I wonder how it’s supposed to work at all for someone who is not a dev. There are so many moving parts you need to understand—databases, storage, security—that the whole idea makes no sense to me.
I watched a video about it, and I honestly don’t see how a non-developer could even begin to wrap their head around everything involved.
When it comes to AI, I mainly just use ChatGPT through prompts. I did try using an agent once, but it was a disaster—code was being updated everywhere, it stopped feeling like my code, and eventually I completely lost track of what was happening.
So personally, I think the whole concept is kind of stupid.
@tibi_diablo - saw the image of the badly cropped image looking guy and didn’t even bother then clicking on the YouTube video to find out about Vibe Coding. Are you sure this is not some sort of “pleasure toy”?
I was just curious about how this works. You get a bunch of code that leaves you scratching your head, trying to understand and work with it. And the way this guy explains it—and not just him, you can see this all over YouTube—it’s like they’re saying that coding is now for anyone, even for people with no clue about it. How exactly does this work? I just don’t get it.
Vibe Coding - you are not writing any code. So who or what is doing it? 7 minutes into the video you will become a Vibe Code Master. Vibe coding has raised concerns about understanding and accountability. Developers may use AI-generated code without fully comprehending its functionality, leading to undetected bugs, errors, or security vulnerabilities. Basically it is something being sold by some guy who worked for Tesla thinking if I make this sound great, I can make a shed load of money from people that don’t understand what I am selling them.
Go on Google Search and look up “vibe coding+bad” and see for yourself.
I’m not sure what this thread is about. Are we about to start screaming at some kids to get off our lawn? (just some friendly banter guys, don’t mind me).
People learn by doing cool stuff first, and THEN learning how it works. You have to start with something cool, that’s what draws you to it in the first place.
My friends used to make fun of me for using PHP and jQuery (“old” languages) while they were doing REACT or TypeScript or whatever new language was popular.
Not to brag but I’ve had more success than all of them, because customers do not care about the technology and language behind it and how smart you sound, they only care about results.
I don’t think someone can currently ‘vibe code’ better software than my software. But if some day they can, and over the long-term customers prefer their software, and their reviews are better than my reviews… what does that mean?
Excellent points and well said. Friendly banter is good! I just in fact shouted at the next door neighbours kids “get off our lawn” so it’s almost as if you were watching our internet cameras
There is no harm in bragging as you put it - it’s very true customers only care about results, knowing that the person looking after them actually cares about their business success. That is why I have been so blessed with my own clients - they know that there is a real person on the other end of an email or phone who will help them.
We appreciate you and your team creating this forum for us and thank you for doing that. Have a nice bank holiday weekend (in the UK it is a bank holiday) LOL
I actually really hate kids around my property - last time I had some wanting to do a bbq and I lied to them that it’s illegal and a fire hazard and they gave up
I can 100% agree with that. And nothing can replace that any time soon.
Thank you for joining the forum!
What I’m trying to understand is: how can you “vibe code” a product better than yours if you have no programming background? How would you even explain it to an AI? That’s what I don’t get, because this is advertised like you can code any app with zero knowledge and sell if for millions of $$ … For me this dose not make any sense…
I mean I have clients these days that are stuck in adding the correct URL for some product settings… and they have some clue about code, they’ve seen it at least.
As for technology or programming language, I honestly don’t care. For me, the lower it is, the better. Right now I’m coding shaders — they don’t even have a console — and I agree, it’s really about what the client wants most.
However, I don’t like React and other similar libraries because you are stuck in their loop a single bug in some weird place and you are screwed…
Yes, I don’t think it’s possible yet. I see it more like a learning tool currently. And certainly, the advertising vs. reality is quite different.
Definitely agree - and I’ve always hated the npm package style coding with a million dependencies. The less you understand, the harder it is to fix when you run into an issue.
The way I see it, this is just a scam to make a s* ton of money for the tool’s creators. To build a premium app — even with perfect AI — you still need a very solid programming background. Just think about your entire journey, starting with all this madness, all those little things that make an app actually work.
I just don’t see this happening, not even with AGI. If this is our future, everything will be broken, and no one will understand anything about anything.
I agree, but I do think it could become possible in the future. I’m thinking 2 things might help:
(1) A good AI ‘software testing’ module, that can code and test in real-time, or go over 1 million testing use cases in a few seconds and confirming the software works well with all (e.g. similar to unit testing I guess).
Right now AI seems to just throw a wall of code at you, which will be deficient in many ways. But what if it could go and add things step by step like a real developer? Half coding and half testing? going in and out until it’s perfect. Just letting it process the app for days and days until all possible tests are successful.
I don’t see why it is impossible.
(2) Approach the program more like a human, not having all code in context memory, but just having a small ‘index’ memory of where everything is and what it is supposed to do and going in and out surgically to add or modify things.
I don’t know anything about how AI works internally, but I feel like there are so many things one could try that someone sooner or later is bound to hit a homerun. @CodeRevolution what do you think?
I don’t think this will be possible — not with the way code works today. An app is much more than just code; the more experience you have, the better the app you can build.
It’s like telling a construction worker to “just build you a plugin.”
I guess we’ll see, but as it stands right now, it just feels stupid. The way it’s advertised is like Envato Elements: it promises everything, but when you actually get it, you feel like you’ve been robbed.
This is an interesting idea, we can build an app for this!
However, I see a problem with the ‘all possible tests are successful’ part. I think it is challenging to find all tests which are very likely to happen in production. If all possible tests need to be found, sounds like a tough job to achieve. But never impossible!
This might work for a WordPress plugin, although I personally don’t see it happening. There will always be something missing from the list,is not just code, is the whole functionality as well. For creative items like the ones I develop, it’s not possible because each product is unique with a different idea. The code might pass tests 100%, but visually it could still be a total disaster.
Either way, this vibe-coding thing is driving people crazy these days. There are channels with video tutorials teaching normal people to use vibe coding with the promise that they’ll make a million dollars… really?"
We’ll see. Personally, I don’t think this will work… but maybe I’m just too old-school. I try to imagine doing chemistry, and I have zero skills in that—this is how it feels, or even more complicated when it comes to development. Not to mention, there are so many programming languages out there that you can’t possibly remember them all.
Let’s focus on what we do best and grow this place into what Envato was in the good days!
I’d go back to approaching it like a human. I think you need:
With a browser, the AI agent accesses the UI of the app
Now it does an image recognition on that UI, e.g.: okay we see 2 buttons here and a background. Read the label of each button. Button 1 says “start game”. Expectations: all clicks on button should start the game, all clicks on background should do nothing. Test.
Run a “think” process “what are the most likely issues here, make a list”. etc
Ultimately I do not see what it is that a human software tester could think of but an AI could not.
I made one a long time ago in Adobe Flash. There were so many parameters to tweak just to get the player’s “feel” right. That’s something AI can’t really do—it’s a human thing, you just have to feel it.
For example, the software has no way of knowing if the player is moving too fast. Only a human can decide, “Okay, this speed feels right.” That’s just one example, but personally, I don’t think AI can handle this—not now, anyway. It would be a cool idea for a plugin, but I wouldn’t know where to start. Definitely not something for me.
(just some friendly banter guys, don’t mind me).
