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Comment by Treegarden | Hacker News Reader

I think by vibe coding he means taking these things at face value instead of rigorously looking if they are up to the standard. When coding you would rigorously look if the code is good / produces any bugs. With vibe coding, you give a prompt and just accept the output, which might be full of errors and blow up (or melt). The analogy is that, yes you can print airplane parts, but they were sloppy and just accepted them at face value instead of rigorously looking if they are up to the required (bug free) standard, ie they wont melt.

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This is more like adding a third party dependency to your project without vetting it.

The original vibe coding.

The problem is we have different terms that all mean doing something without real risk management or analysis in software. Both "cowboy coding" and "vibe coding" mean the same thing, if you remove the agent doing the production.

And since vibe coding is so recently coined, I think a lot of people take it to specifically mean "LLM" and not some generalized "any third-party agent".

Then, a vibe coded engine part sounds like it would need a generative AI producing the CAD file that is then printed. And it might have some bizarre topology like a Klein bottle or some fever dream.

>I think by vibe coding he means taking these things at face value instead of rigorously looking if they are up to the standard.

Yeah, exactly -- which is why it's a stupid phrase for what happened here.

Not every negligence is somehow equatable to an AI pitfall, it's just on parents' mind so it's the only metaphor that gets applied.

A poorly fit hammer in a world of nails.

I say this as an engineer/proprietor with years of additive manufacturing experience, it's insulting. A poorly chosen and wrongly used process conveys nothing about the underlying fundamentals of the process itself -- it conveys everything about the engineer and the business processes that birthed the problem.

Similarly if I came across a poorly vibe-coded project I wouldn't blame Anthropic/oAI directly -- I would blame the programmer who decided to release such garbage made with such powerful tools..

tl;dr : it's not vibe-coding itself that makes vibe-coding a poor fit to rocket science and brain surgery -- it's the braindead engineer that pushes the code to the THERAC-25 without reading.

I think the idea was that 3D printing made doing a thing accessible, previously required solid fundamental knowledge (and very expensive kit). Now you can just take some specs off the internet and press go.

The comparison does not seem as absurd to me as it does to you. vOv

The lesson here is that one should never attempt analogies on HN, because people can't just relax and try to see the point of the analogy. They are compelled to fixate on the fact that an analogy is different from the thing it is being compared to.

I see multiple examples of it in this thread.

I feel like Hacker News commenters love to make analogies more than average people in your average space, though. You can't come across a biology/health topic on here without someone chiming in with "it's like if X was code and it had this bug" or "it's like this body part is the Y of the computer."

Analogies can be useful sometimes, but people also shouldn't feel like they need to see everything through the lens of their primary domain, because it usually results in losing nuances.

On the other hand, if you are communicating with a bunch of people who share that primary domain, it can be a useful way of making a point.

(unless that primary domain tends to attract a lot of people who tend to the hyper-literal /s)

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