The Register is full of nonsense opinion pieces like this but, more importantly, does not correct factual errors in its stories.

Using it as a news source is like getting your news from an AI.

In full statements, Linus says it was only used for a single module, like a plug-in of some sort. He hand coded the rest.

With every enterprise pushing this shit, I tried it myself with a ChatGPT enterprise account through work. Initial results were impressive, recreating a PHP program I had hand-coded myself originally but with some small improvements I asked for.

However, taking it to the next step and adding more new features the entire thing collapsed. Even 600 lines of code is too much for it to handle. I ended up with a support case with OpenAI where they more or less admitted they couldn't do anything about it and just passed my example along to devs.

It's unfortunate if some people hear that Torvalds is vibe coding on his hobby projects, or that Karpathy (who coined the term) is, and their takeaway is that vibe coding at work, not just on their throwaway hobby projects.

For sure, it's amazing that we now live in a world where you can single shot an entire app "write me a BASIC interpreter", and for sure try it and have fun with it if you like. Beyond fun it has utility too for single shot throwaway apps that wouldn't have been worth the effort if you had to to it yourself (e.g give Claude a photo of your credit card bill and ask it for the category totals - it'll write a Python program to do it).

For hobby / throwaway apps you may not care what the code looks like, what the tech stack is, whether it was well designed or not - you just want something that works.

At work you obviously need to be more professional and care about the code you are developing. Using LLMs doesn't change what is expected of you, and vibe coding isn't going to cut it. A better mindset is that you are pair-programming with the LLM, aware of what it is generating, and that you are the lead developer and systems architect.

"Besides, the LLM you used two weeks ago has been replaced with a new version. The exact same prompts that worked then yield different results today. Come to think of it, it's an LLM. The same prompts and the same LLM will give you different results every time you run it. This is asking for disaster."

Yep the same is true when I put Jira tickets in and my engineers grab them.

I'm a professional developer with decades of enterprise experience. Like many of us, I have home projects. A week ago I signed up for $10/month CoPilot, because I wanted to try my hand at mobile development - something I've never done. Fortunately, I'm experienced in React and that is a viable platform for mobile development, but that doesn't address all the environment-specific items that differ between mobile and web development.

I engaged CoPilot to ask for development platform options - it gave me two, along with pluses and minuses. Very helpful. I chose one and started setting up my dev environment (VSCode + tooling). I would still be futzing with that if CoPilot didn't solve a bunch of little problems for me. It also helped me out of a whole raft of other problems. At this point I have 3 app screens working (mostly) and I have only 20 hours invested. I never would have got this far without CoPilot (or equivalent - I don't care). It's like having someone who's read every book and internet article at your left elbow, and you can ask it whatever / whenever.

It also made enough mistakes that I had to make it work on a problem 4 or 5 times before it got it right. At no point would I have taken the 'vibe coding' approach, where I let it build the whole thing. It makes too many mistakes and would implement things in a way I don't understand. I find it much more effective to paint the broad strokes myself, and ask AI to write small functions or help with problems.

If people think they can vibe-code SAP out of business, that is a completely different understanding of the term vibe-coding compared to someone like Torvalds, who probably thinks in C++ by now, letting AI do the grunt-work and provide a basic construct he can then beautify and improve.

If a CEO extrapolates that he can replace an experienced miner with a yound man with a CAT machine, all he will produce is a cave-in.

You want to give the CAT to the experienced miner.

There is a major difference between a professional coder with years of knowledge and experience vibe coding and someone that doesn't that that. A professional coder can look at what AI outputs and easily understand if what is given is any good, and what needs to be fixed. They will also have experience to describe in detail what is required. They will also understand any potential security implications. A non-professional coder is not going to know those kind of things, and will miss things that could be

AI seems to me like that 12year old prodigy child, who reads a lot of everything, and makes precocious remarks everywhere. Sometimes, they are spot on, sometimes, they are a regurgitation of something long debunked, and sometimes, they are just made up. And it can write programs. But while they are fine for a hobbyist project, you would neither use the child's statements in a professional setting, and neither do you want to use their code without refactoring.

... and there is not one perfect approach for every situation. Often, perfection is the enemy of progress and sometimes, getting the answer to a problem quickly is far more important than maintaining some type of ideological perfection. Results are what matter.

Vibe coding is just another RAD solution. There is nothing wrong with RAD, being able to try stuff out with minimal investment is fantastic.

The problem is now as it has always been when the RAD output is judged 'good enough' by someone not really equipped to make that judgement and shoved into some key business process where it does not really meet reliability, scale-ability, security, and other requirements in ways that might not be immediately apparent because the requirements gathering and design valida

I saw a truck company exec spend 7 hours in one day to throw together a working portal that integrated with his TMS, QuickBooks, Slack, Telegram and a system called Border Connect. This portal looks like he wanted, does what he wanted and reduces work load and processing errors in his company. He had no idea what coding is, he had no idea and no interest even to find out what technologies were used, what languages were used to put together the solution. I have to admit it was impressive.

To say that using

Yes, please. Keep using "Vibe Coding" as if it means use of LLM for coding in all circumstances. Those of us who know better will be happy to crush the rest of you.

If you know how to code and use AI as a tool, then this statement becomes the real sore point in modern development: "today's programs are complex and call upon numerous frameworks and resources"