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Comment by axegon_ | Hacker News Reader

I hate how what is effectively a stupid meme phrase became an actual term in a few days.

> "Vibe Coding" might get you 80% the way to a functioning concept. But to produce something reliable, secure, and worth spending money on, you’ll need experienced humans to do the hard work not possible with today’s models.

The problem is that 80% of the job is a proof of concept at best. 80% is effectively a QA walking into a bar[1].

[1] https://barrypopik.com/blog/a_software_tester_walks

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And that's not even getting into the class of testers which try to order ';--drop table beers;-- beers, <script>alert(1)</script> beers or <![ENTITY q1 "&q0;"><![ENTITY q2 "&q1;&q1;&q1;">&q2; style beers

Makes me wonder how organic or astroturfed the name is. That a bunch of influencers all started using it at the same time makes me think someone is pushing it, perhaps because a focus group (or LLM) decided 'vibe' was a warm and fuzzy way of pushing the latest iteration of 'move fast and break things'.

80% mark means you just finished the happy flow and written 30% of the code bases. Now you need to handle the unhappy parts and need to write extra test code for covering all those edge cases.

Precisely, now you need to finish off the remaining 70%, which is where most of the work that is required truly lies, with or without all the AI bollocks. Whether it takes 2 or 8 days of work to get those 30% done, it's not much of a difference if you need several months(or in some cases years) to get a project to a tolerable "production" state. I'd much rather spend 8, as opposed to an AI-generated codebase which will shoot itself in the head because someone scrolled over it and thought "lgtm".

The alternative to using AI to generate 80% of the project (30% of the code) isn't much better: coding the initial 30%, which is also a challenge (from 0 to 1).

So there is still a productivity gain for senior developers.

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