On Sat, Dec 27, 2025 at 11:36 AM John R. Hogerhuis <[email protected]> wrote:
> [...] But in this case George is a programmer by my reckoning and the AI > produced a reasonable (makes sense) change request which resolved a > problem. > > Plus there is the other side to bug fixes inflicted on programmers: bugs > inflicted on users. > Users just want the program to work. If there is a new way they can > contribute a little labor in code generation and testing it seems likely to > help more than hurt. > Particularly users who are actually programmers with enough taste to know > that a change is a waste of time. > I agree that AI could be very helpful when the patch reporter is a programmer with taste. However, wasn't this an experiment in VIBE CODING? Perhaps I misunderstood George's intent, but when he said he was going to be "vibe coding", I took that to mean he was going to try to *not* be a programmer. “Vibe coding” was coined less than a year ago by Andrej Karpathy, founder of OpenAI who tweeted, "There's a new kind of coding I call 'vibe coding', where you fully give in to the vibes, embrace exponentials, and forget that the code even exists". Since then he's gone on to explain it more fully. One useful rubric is, “It's not vibe coding if you look at the code.” There's a good article describing the difference between AI-assisted coding and vibe coding here: https://simonwillison.net/2025/Mar/19/vibe-coding/ . > Looking on the bright side I think these developments may actually finally > help deliver on the open source promise. The idea of everyone being > empowered by having the code and the benefit to all of programmers > contributing changes back. > You may very well be right. I already see LLM-assisted programming opening a door for people. I believe we are in a transition stage similar to when high-level languages like BASIC came out. It certainly gives more people power over their computers and I think it will be especially valuable for people who want to learn to code or understand someone else's code. As for "vibe coding", I'm skeptical it will ever live up to the hype, but I like that non-programmers are feeling empowered and I especially appreciate that, with pure "vibe coding", no human will ever have to read the AI generated code. Finding errors in AI generated code can be a pain since, right or wrong, generative AIs always present statistically plausible output. All this may be moot for simple bugfixes though. As programmers integrate > these tools into their own workflow there will be far fewer easy fixes for > users to contribute because the programmer with his tool chain will already > have found and applied them. > That was precisely what I had been wondering. Will developers actually find vibe-coded patches worthwhile given the effort it takes to understand them and integrate them cleanly into their code? For now, it seems the answer is "yes". —b9 P.S. Brian: I totally understand your reaction. When I saw the long paste from Claude, I was reminded of how so much AI slop is already wasting my time. I'm glad Ken pointed out that he did ask for it.
