Suhas Guruprasad

Against vibe coding

This is a curated bunch of recent internets blog-sphere writing against vibe coding. Most of them made it to HN front page at some point and I just collected them in my bookmarks because I simply thought it would be good to collect such articles and no other reason. This post neither means that I'm personally against vibe coding nor does it mean that I am for it.

  1. Roger Goldfinger in his post "Claude Code is a Slot Machine" https://rgoldfinger.com/blog/2025-07-26-claude-code-is-a-slot-machine/

Claude Code keeps me waiting. Here I am pressing return like a crack-addicted rodent in a lab. “Yes, I want to make this edit.” I watch as it works, glassy-eyed and bored as the code scrolls by, and on the edge of my seat because my ideas are about to become reality.

  1. Jason Gorman in his post "Comprehension Debt" https://codemanship.wordpress.com/2025/09/30/comprehension-debt-the-ticking-time-bomb-of-llm-generated-code/

What is new is the scale of the problem being created as lightning-speed code generators spew reams of unread code into millions of projects.

  1. Vincent Quigley in his post "First attempt will be 95% garbage" https://www.sanity.io/blog/first-attempt-will-be-95-garbage

First attempt (95% garbage rate) Claude builds context about your system You identify the actual challenges The code is usually completely wrong

  1. Alex Kondov in his post "I Know When You're Vibe Coding" https://alexkondov.com/i-know-when-youre-vibe-coding/

No one would implement a bunch of utility functions that we already have in a different module. No one would change a global configuration when there’s a mechanism to do it on a module level. No one would write a class when we’re using a functional approach everywhere.

  1. Donado Lab's "Vibe Coding Cleanup As A Service" https://donado.co/en/articles/2025-09-16-vibe-coding-cleanup-as-a-service/

Hamid Siddiqi manages 15-20 cleanup projects simultaneously, charging premium rates to untangle what he calls "AI spaghetti" - inconsistent interfaces, redundant functions, and business logic that makes no sense.

  1. Sean Goedecke in "What is "good taste" in software engineering?" https://www.seangoedecke.com/taste/

Technical taste is different from technical skill. You can be technically strong but have bad taste, or technically weak with good taste. Like taste in general, technical taste sometimes runs ahead of your ability: just like you can tell good food from bad without being able to cook, you can know what kind of software you like before you’ve got the ability to build it. You can develop technical ability by study and repetition, but good taste is developed in a more mysterious way.

  1. Kix Panganiban in "Two things LLM coding agents are still bad at" https://kix.dev/two-things-llm-coding-agents-are-still-bad-at/

LLMs are terrible at asking questions. They just make a bunch of assumptions and brute-force something based on those guesses. Good human developers always pause to ask ...

Vibe engineering is a different job?

The community has largely agreed now that vibe coding doesn't work and have moved on to vibe engineering or context engineering which is a lot more formal and spec-driven.

However, is it the same job as coding?

Simon Willison’s comment in this thread https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45503867:

I think existing software development skills get a whole lot more valuable with the addition of coding agents

has a great counterpoint in the same thread in Colin Fleming's take as to why it is actually a different job:

While this is true, I definitely find that the style of the work changes a lot. It becomes much more managerial, and less technical. I feel much more like a mix of project and people manager, but without the people. I feel like the jury is still out on whether I’m overall more productive, but I do feel like I have less fun.

Do you know of any other good articles?

I'd love to read them! vibe-coding-sucks@suhas.org