These days it more or less explicitly refers to asking an LLM to write your code for you based on prompts.
But on a broader spectrum it is just the idea of (I forget the buzz word) Ticket Driven Development. A manager defines software based on a series of (jira, gitlab, kanban, whatever) tickets/issues and someone below them (in this case, an LLM) implements it.
Done properly? It is incredibly effective as it allows designers and “idea people” to work to their strengths and junior developers to work to theirs. The problem being that, much like when it is a junior dev under them, the person making the tickets likely has no idea what they are doing.
Which is the big problem. Someone who has been writing scripts for decades? Using chatgpt to get the syntax of a function or even to write a utility script is great. They can focus their brainpower on the harder/more fun stuff. Someone who has been writing code for, at most, a year or two? They never learn those foundations and never have a way to do anything the LLM can’t (or verify if the LLM is correct).
I’ve been programming for over half my life now, I actually like vibe coding with Claude these days.
It basically gets me through the hump of “ugh this task is going to be annoying as fuck to do” which is where I personally lose most of my efficiency (I have a lot of difficulty forcing myself to do something I don’t want to).
It’s like when I had interns and I’d give them tasks. Describe the work, scope it, add some guard rails to keep it directionally okay, and send it off to get reviewed later. And that works great with modern agents.
I will say vibe coding is damn good at debugging, way better than I am, so I use it for that a lot now.
These days it more or less explicitly refers to asking an LLM to write your code for you based on prompts.
But on a broader spectrum it is just the idea of (I forget the buzz word) Ticket Driven Development. A manager defines software based on a series of (jira, gitlab, kanban, whatever) tickets/issues and someone below them (in this case, an LLM) implements it.
Done properly? It is incredibly effective as it allows designers and “idea people” to work to their strengths and junior developers to work to theirs. The problem being that, much like when it is a junior dev under them, the person making the tickets likely has no idea what they are doing.
Which is the big problem. Someone who has been writing scripts for decades? Using chatgpt to get the syntax of a function or even to write a utility script is great. They can focus their brainpower on the harder/more fun stuff. Someone who has been writing code for, at most, a year or two? They never learn those foundations and never have a way to do anything the LLM can’t (or verify if the LLM is correct).
I’ve been programming for over half my life now, I actually like vibe coding with Claude these days.
It basically gets me through the hump of “ugh this task is going to be annoying as fuck to do” which is where I personally lose most of my efficiency (I have a lot of difficulty forcing myself to do something I don’t want to).
It’s like when I had interns and I’d give them tasks. Describe the work, scope it, add some guard rails to keep it directionally okay, and send it off to get reviewed later. And that works great with modern agents.
I will say vibe coding is damn good at debugging, way better than I am, so I use it for that a lot now.